You hear buy low and sell high all the time. What you rarely hear is the five Ws: Why, when, what, who and where. Let me get the most important points across first. If you want to do something successful long-term, you got to think about sustainability and scalability. What this entails is that you will need to build the infrastructure required to succeed from logistics, networking, intelligence to financing, transactional costs and mindset and everything in between. When you are at big box stores, small retail stores, local card shops, garbage sales, online market places or wherever that sell cards, you don’t always know what will be available for sale but you have to know what range of products you are in the market for even if you don’t know the specific product. Being a disciplined collector/investor is one of the first steps to being successful in this game in the long-run. You likely don’t have the resources to buy everything and not everything will yield the highest possible returns hence being a disciplined professional in this field and probably in most fields is important if you actually want to be good at what you do. This becomes critical for success because the success of the initial collection built-up is basically half of the battle. If your initial built-up is sustainable for the long-run, you will probably be successful in the long-run as it will afford you the time to work out all the kinks.
In my opinion, buying online is extremely risky due to many reasons but mainly because most people do not have the expertise to recognize scams such as counterfeit raw cards, lower condition than what is listed, modification to cards, resealed packs, counterfeit boxes, graded cards that have alert(s) etc. I typically avoid buying online because I want to quarantine my collection from possible counterfeits. Therefore I rely mostly from offline sources for cards transactions. As I don’t believe in owning a large number of graded cards for reasons I mentioned in my previous post, buying offline from credible sources become critical for my long-term success in the hobby. One thing that most people do not realize and I believe that set the professionals from the amateurs apart is total transaction costs. The pros will look at gains and losses in total tangible and intangible terms including opportunity cost, imputed interest cost and time value of money among other criterions. Basically if I didn’t invest in this, what is my comparable returns if I had theoretically invested into something else. I can tell you as someone who has been in this hobby for decades that the best long-term returns are almost never in one-offs.
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Sports cards, Pokemon and TCG professional buying and selling strategies.
The capital intensive investments are typically not good fits for non-monopolistic players. Without having to go deep on this concept, I will just say you as someone who is not a billionaire will likely not going to be able to corner the market or influence substantially to get a big pay out from that. What smaller players succeed in is being nimble through extensive smart, non-capital intensive investments with some diversification. Whether you like it or not, if you plan to invest, you will likely have to take risks, at least calculated risks. The collectible cards industry is already a double-digit, billion m-dollar industry and growing rapidly likely reaching 100 billion in a decade or so. What this means is the market is big enough and growing fast enough for all kinds of collectors and investors to make money from. However, it takes resources to get more resources. Hence it is important to compare against alternative return rates from other potential investments that could have been made instead. With decades of experience, I can confidently say large cash outflows to acquire a few, high-end items are frequently not efficient for a newish cards collector/investor versus investing the same amount into larger asset pools of much smaller value. Remember, the operative word here is long-term. That means you may have to hold on something for years. From a liquidity standpoint, that’s likely much easier to do if you can transact portions of your investments if required at a high liquidity rate versus potentially transacting a few high value that may be less liquid possibly also incurring large transaction cost. Frequently, it’s the less expensive, desirable items that have the highest average return rates within a given range. I discussed this extensively in my previous posts regarding certain Pikachu versus Charizard cards.
In my experience, many successful cards collectors and investors transact with only a small number of counterparties to maximum leverage, minimize transaction cost and decrease risk premium. I personally find many of my best investments are large lots of good value rookie chase cards and vintage Pokemon cards I found in the dollarish boxes. The biggest driver of value is not so much the acquisition cost or current price, it is typically the demand and supply for the said item driven by scarcity. Not every single purchase from the dollarish boxes will be a winner, however, this is a probability game. You really have to know what you are doing and be right most of the time, not necessarily all the time, to win in this game. This hobby is growing so it has its own growing pains. One of the main issues I have with the state of the hobby are the social demographics of its constituting members. This field is still dominated by non-institutional investors and not extensively regulated even though many now consider cards as alternative assets. As such, it is important to safeguard your identity if possible if you are planning to be in this hobby in the long-run not just for security reasons but possibly for mental health reasons as there may be too much low grade BSes for the average global Top Ten-ers or any working professionals to deal with.