Anyone thought about doing a buyout of 1st edition PSA 10 Charizard ?
There are 120 PSA 10 copies. At $40k a piece that would be $4.8MM.
While that is a lot of money, it’s not from an investment standpoint. (Rare Ferrari’s go for $15MM; art at $50MM+; one apartment complex costs more than $5MM)
It would be interesting since the market cap is still small enough to be able to do something like that.
Just something I was chatting with people about the other day. 
I swear some people are already trying
‘Admire’ the idea and wish I was in a position to do it myself!
If there are 120 PSA 10 copies, whilst I think you could locate and buy maybe a quarter of them (at most) for 50k each, the remaining percentage are collectors who are in it for the long run. Most of the people who have this card wouldn’t give it up even if you offered above market value making a buyout near impossible.
is this a memethread?
Buyouts aren’t really a thing in Pokemon. The genuinely rare items are very difficult to build positions. Use your example of psa 10 zard. You don’t have access to all 119, and never will. So you will pick up the 1-2 copies that occasionally appear. This process will take years.
People like to cherry pick Gary’s position with Charizards, or mine with trophies, and miss the biggest factor: they aren’t replicable. This is true for all hobbies. I do some vintage mtg on the side for fun, but I can never build a position like Rudy, Open boosters, etc.
Basically “buyouts” are a buzzword. Sure there is strategy in removing availability from markets, maybe for mid-tier items, but even when done “successfully” its not a guarantee. Very few items exist in the inherent catch 22 that is required for buyouts: enough supply available to buyout, but somehow rare enough to not risk saturation.
I’ve seen a guy on eBay who’s selling a huge Psa10 and even bgs 10 1st Ed Zard collection for 1.7mil or something. This could be a great investment haha
Are there Charizard owners out there right now who wouldn’t sell theirs for $150k if it was offered? I think a buyout could be possible but not at $40k current fmv
It’s rumoured that if you say his name 3 times, he’ll appear on this forum.
I think a surprising amount of people would turn down 150k under the provision that they couldn’t purchase another for less than 150k in the future. That’s THE chase card for most collectors. Guys spend YEARS trying to gain enough capital to own one and I’m sure that card is borderline priceless to them.
I think one is still listed on eBay for 50k and I think it’s been up for a while.
@pokecollectoramy, Not everyone would sell at that price. Also a lot of the owners aren’t accessible. Even if you put a 1M bounty for certain cards, it won’t matter.
In fact I have already done this. The Illustrator went viral years ago, and only a couple appeared. I put up the 2001 Tropical Wind to see if any would appear, and a whopping total of 1 appeared…
Basically there are people who don’t need money and/or impossible to reach.
tl;dr buying every copy of a card is impossible. I’ve already tried 
Haha I gotcha, and makes sense…I’d like to think that all the Charizard owners are here on this forum though 
I have no evidence to base this on, but if $100k was offered as a buy price, I would think a lot of the current owners would sell.
Why do I think this ? The price jump up to $40k has been recent. That means a lot of buyers would have purchased at lower price points. And $100k is more money to someone that spends $5-10k on a card/investment vs someone who spends $40k on a card.
Also, anyone who is an “investor” would get a good return.
Maybe you get 25% of the cards. That would be a sizeable position.
Just fun to think about !
@admiral77, What you are hypothesizing has already occurred, multiple times.
When the card doubled in price from 5-10k, most-all copies never appeared. When it doubled from 10-20, 20-40k, most-all copies never appeared. There is no universal magic number that will make most-all copies appear. Forget 100k, just say 1M. You still won’t get all the copies.
If anything the higher the buy price the less people will need to sell. People who can comfortably spend 100k on an item probably don’t need to sell. Where 5-10k bracket has more variety. Basically there are people who don’t need or want the money, they want the card or collectible. Hence why people pay millions for an item. When dealing with the rarest, most valuable/historic pieces its all about acquisition, not money. You don’t buyout a picasso painting, you hope to acquire it.
If you buy out all “available” copies (because other copies are locked away in collections where they’ll never sell) then you do essentially own the market, because you own all “available” copies of a card. Even if you owned 80 out of 120 PSA 10 Charizards, that would be enough IMO to say you own the market because those 40 other copies will probably stay locked in collections, or the sales will be so rare the sale prices aren’t enough to dictate the market value, whereas you with your 80 copies can constantly dangle one on eBay and dictate the asking price.
Someone made bulk cash offers ?? I didn’t know that.
I’m surprised there weren’t more takers. I understand that increasing market values don’t always draw out sellers, but my experience in other purchases is that unsolicited cash offers get pretty good results even if the person originally wasn’t thinking about selling. It makes the sale easy for the seller.
But I agree with you, if it didn’t work then, it won’t now.
I think it’s because you may be thinking of this only via money, and perhaps the other items you’re thinking about are not as rare and are easily obtainable.
For example, if someone offered double for my base unlimited commons, I would probably just go with it and not care because after all, I can always get it back.
On the other hand, rarer, more expensive cards like PSA 10 1st Charizard or trophy cards are rare and niche enough that it’s more or less an understanding that once you part with that card, the chances of you getting it back for the same price or lower is almost zero. Furthermore, the value of your card may be worth more than just the money it represents…some collectors are in it for the joy of collecting a historical piece and not really in it for the money. I’ve been collecting for pokemon for a few years now and I haven’t sold a single card, regardless of how I saw the market changed.
Great point. Rudy made a recent video about this. My takeaway was that items with a high buy price are usually bought by people who can hold the item. This allows prices to remain stable and incrementally grow. PSA 10 Charizard and trophy cards fit this bill.
Look at the buyer pool for an item and you can gain insight into its future value.
Anyone have a spare 5 mil to test this?
I can see both side to some extent. I feel like it is impossible to do a true 100% buyout due to the factors explained above. But you could effectively buyout all available copies on the market and then buyout all zards in the hands of those who would accept offers. It would cost you far more than 40k a card doing this, if they do agree to sell. For some it may take some convincing that they would be able to acquire it again so the purchase price at the very list may be double of current market value. Some one doing this would be as much of a buyout as we could see though. The price would for sure be manipulated higher, but far less people would be interested as the price becomes higher. So eventually the price comes back down if there is such a market. Unless all of us collectors become multi millionaires then to Mars we go!