How do you decide what to sell and what to keep (and when)?

General
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Hey all, new member here.
Historically have been a store for a long time, and back in 2015 I decided I would start putting aside some sealed product from every set to keep around and kind of “invest” in. 6 years later and I decided to update my spreadsheet to reflect current market prices and am shocked to see that I’ve got enough to buy a house at this rate (not in San Francisco or anything but maybe in Texas lol). I also have a few binders full of Ultra Rares (gold stars, crystals, primes, LV X, ex, EX, other secret rares) and foils going back to '98 that I haven’t appraised that yet but it should be pretty significant as I haven’t touched it in a while and they’re all in decent condition.

A part of me really wants to part with some of these but since ~March 2020 it seems like every time I decide to sell something, the price goes up a month or two later. Regardless of the rising price issue, I know that big collectors like Scott and Rudy in MTG are always buying collections and such but are also always selling *something* on ebay or in private sales. My question here is for those of you who both buy up cards and collections and also sell - how do you decide what products to keep and sell? Is there a minimum number that you’ve decided you’ll keep of a card or a sealed product and anything above that that you acquire you decide to sell? Do you use any other method?

I really want to keep a part of my collection but a part of me also wants to hedge my bets (in case of market collapse, or a fire, or theft - you never know) but I have no idea how to make these decisions and think it would be interesting to hear from all of you on how you decide these things for yourself.

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Sell when you need the money.

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Get your raw valuable cards graded first.

Sell some of your least favorite items to get your initial cost (or a part of it) back. If something went up tremendously, it could be a good time to sell. No one here can tell you what exactly you should be selling or buying, we don´t have a glass ball unfortunately.

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For me it’s time that decides what to keep and what to sell (aside from the cards which I only buy with the intention of selling anyway). Of the cards in the collection category, all are appealing initially, but over time, some lose their spark. Others I look at a year later and am still in awe. Those are the keepers.

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I would start with deciding which parts of the collection you love the most and aren’t willing to sell and separate those things from your selling inventory.

Before you sell anything, though, you should think about what dollar amount (after fees/costs) would make you happy after everything is gone. At least then you have a floor price, and you can then evaluate the best way to reach that price. You could probably get more selling on your own (Grading yourself, etc.), but the benefit of a Scott/Rudy is that they are taking on the risk for you, and you get risk free money.

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Personally, I don’t sell. I’ve only ever sold one card and that was to a collector I know to help their collection. I only buy what I want to keep

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I don’t think blanket statements like this are necessarily helpful so I’d try to avoid them. Not trying to oust you specifically, but it’s just a common phrase that I see sometimes here and on reddit and think it doesn’t really do much for the conversation.

That being said, I’m no LGS or high-end collector so I can’t say how you should or should invest, but my opinion mirrors @bowleous ’ statement - determine what you love and know you’ll appreciate for a life time. Sit with your collection if you need to and try to look back on what it means for you.

Everything else, though, can be bargained with and put up for sale. No one will truly know how the market will look in the next few years, but some of us believe it’s safe to say that hoarding some good for the next 10-20 years won’t hurt you, especially for vintage product in the 90’s and early 2000’s. So maybe focus on keeping your market value up by selling modern and then sell your vintage items slowly and one by one to get more bang for your buck.

I’ve learned the hard way to not sell anything from your personal collection and have tried to caution people to mind that same advice.

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I only sell to fund other collection goals. For example, I’d sell a PSA 8 to help fund towards a PSA 9.

Rarely do I ever sell for money to use outside of the hobby, however sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I needed $2,000 to avoid a car loan, so I just made a sale and bought the car outright.

It’s really a case by case decision, it’s incredibly hard to answer this question since we’re all different people with different situations.

I wonder this question when I look at my stock market portfolio, “hmmm this is getting high, should I sell it before it dips or hold?”

Ultimately it’s all a gamble. Yes there are better times to buy/sell than others. But,if I knew when the best time to sell/buy Pokémon cards is, I’d quit my job and do this for a living. This hobby is all speculation, people who sold their PSA 10 1st edition Charizard’s in 2016 for $10,000 probably wouldn’t have sold them if a fortune teller told them that they’d approach $400,000 in a mere 5 years. That kind of return is unheard of and something people could literally retire on had they invested in numerous shares of PSA 10 1st edition Charizards before these booms.

One of the most experienced collectors of this hobby, smpratte, admits to selling his PSA 9 1st edition Charizard for $10,000 in early 2020. Surely, if he knew they would climb to the $60,000 peak in the latter end of 2020, he likely would have waited (or at least, many others would have), but not one person on this planet knew that such a spike would happen.

Ultimately, I would conclude it’s totally up to you. Everybody speculates differently. Some people think it’s worth the wait and their speculation will come true, others just buy and sell when the money is needed.

Personally, I’m the latter of the two. I buy cards to collect them. Most of my buys for non-PSA 10 cards were purchased because of my inability to afford a PSA 10 at that time. If there comes a time where I’m craving an upgrade to my collection (ex. a 9 → 10 or 8 → 9), I just sell then and there and upgrade to meet my new collection goals. If I sell a card to replace a card, I don’t feel too bad about it.

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Tricky question. With the sudden boom in prices a lot of folks around here seem to imply that this gravy train won’t ever run out of well, gravy. However, that may only be true for certain parts of the market; high end most likely. I recommend selling your least valuable/most common items while the prices are up, as they will be the first to experience a crash if we are in a bubble.

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Exactly the same for me. I only sell duplicated items from my collections. I think in my entire life I’ve only sold three times from my actual collections. Two times to help another collector out (once with an unlimited edition Japanese card I happened to have, and also with some Polish cards to a guy who wanted to surprise his Polish girlfriend), and once from my twisty puzzles collection (I plan on selling some more puzzles soon, since I kinda stopped collecting them, but I’ll probably sell less than halve of them at max).

I did debate to sell some higher value cards from my actual collections recently, like the Shiny Pokémon I picked up for my national index collections last year (Gold Stars, Neo Destiny shiny cards, etc.), but I won’t. At least, not anytime soon. I still have over 9k+ of duplicated Pokémon cards and 2k+ duplicated Yu-Gi-Oh cards to go through and sell, so I will start with those and the puzzles. They may be lower values, but I intend to sell them anyway, so it’s in my best interest to start with those. And now that I’m only focusing on my Pikachu and FA Supporter collections; have stopped my National Index, Yu-Gi-Oh rarity, and twisty puzzle collections; and completed my Seviper and Moltres (except for one sealed variation) collections, I see my savings account going up again instead of down, haha. Which I’m happy to see, especially considering I just bought 9 out of 11 Pikachu V/Vmax quartets including the Hyper Rare in the available languages, which weren’t exactly cheap… :unamused:

Anyway, my personal situations aside, I would sell when you are just happy selling something for the current market price, regardless of what it might do in the future. To give an example: I’ve sold a PSA-10 1st ed. Red Cheeks Base Set Pikachu for 7.5k in August when it doubled in price twice in a matter of two weeks (from 2k to 4k to 8k). Considering I had bought it for ~400 USD in March 2019, I was very happy with that price. Sure, I could have gotten more, since it kept rising all the way up to 12k iirc. But two months ago it was down to ~6.5k again after some of the prices dropped. Does it matter though? No. I’m very happy to have increased my 400 USD to 7.5k USD in little over a year time, and since I still have a raw copy left I considered it a duplicate in my collection anyway.

I’ve also once bought a card for 950 USD which is now worth 150-200 USD and still dropping (I’ve seen some sell for 100-120 USD) despite today’s market. Could I have saved a lot of money waiting a bit before making my purchase? Absolutely. Am I still happy with the purchase? Without a doubt. What if I hadn’t bought it back then, and it turned out to be the last available copy for years to come?

We can’t predict the future, nor change the past. We can only learn from the past, live in the present, and grow towards our futures.

I tend to not look back too much about what could have been. Do I regret some of the decision I’ve made in the past? Sure. But do I think I made a bad decision at the time given what I knew back then? Nine out of ten times the answer would be a no for me. We can all say we wished we would have bought hundreds of 1st edition Base Set booster boxes in 1999 so we’d be rich now, but we can’t (I can already imagine the look on my parents faces if I would have suggested to import those boxes from the US when I was 8 years old in 1999 before I was even getting an allowance, haha :laughing: ). Just buy for prices you are happy with; sell for prices you are happy with; and well… just be happy without thinking too much about what could have been.

Having said all that, it’s still a good formulated question, and I’m indeed curious how people that buy and sell all the time (like @smpratte @thecharizardauthorty etc.) make decisions on WHAT to buy/sell and when. Then again, it’s basically just second nature for them at this point. They’ve been in this market selling/buying for so long that they know the ins and outs through their experiences. There isn’t a single answer to give for a question like this, except maybe: “it comes with experience over the years”. And even then, no one could have predicted the market we’re in today if we asked them a year ago.

Another related question I am curious about though: how did you guys (directed to Scott and Rusty) started way back? What were some of the first (Pokémon-related) products you’ve bought/sold/invested in? What made you decide to make this your full-time business over the years? What did you do for work before buying/selling Pokémon products for a living (or are you still working besides buying/selling Pokémon)? (If you still remember and want to share any of these things of course. :blush: )

Greetz,
Quuador

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One thing you need to keep in mind is that it is essentially impossible to sell at the perfect time every single time. Sure; sometimes, you’ll catch lightning in a bottle and sell at the peak of the market for a respective card, but there will be plenty of other times where you will miss that opportunity. Don’t let it consume you.

Try to think of it this way: would you feel comfortable selling a certain item for its respective return in the current market? If so, then you shouldn’t feel bad about selling. If the price goes up within another month or two, then so be it.

And as far as selling items from your collection, think of it this way: are you okay with knowing that you may potentially never get that item back? If yes, then sell. If not, then hold.

There really is no “perfect time” to sell, so none of us can give you some type of magic bullet advice. You really just have to learn through experience. Scott and Rudy themselves would tell you that they have sold some items too soon. It is what it is.

It might sound cliche, but just go with your gut. If I ever feel uneasy about selling a certain item for whatever reason, whether that be my personal attachment to it or my hunch that it has a lot more room to grow, I don’t do it.

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Keep EVERYTHING, never have regret of selling a card you miss :wink:

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All true. Because tiredcollector is on a site like this, I assume he likes pokemon a lot. And in past experience, I have sold things I wish I wouldn’t have just because I saw a rise in price. When looking back I probably didn’t need that extra $200, and would much rather have that card right now.

If you want a house, you should go buy a house. Those markets crash though too, so I would talk to a financial advisor if you are just looking to diversify your investments.

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Yeah pretty much doing this right now. I am getting rid of my gen 1 cards - even though they are my first Pokemon cards, I am not attached to them as much as my nostalgia for gen2. Selling them all to fund Neo 1st Edition sets. I also think financially Neo will be better in the future.

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There’s a thread around here somewhere that talks about diversifying your net worth to be proportioned less in Pokémon and more in other assets. A lot of people saw Pokémon cards go from 5% of their net worth to 50% in a few years due to the growth and they decided to sell and transfer some of the value into less speculative assets. That’s a personal choice and there’s no right or wrong answer. Maybe diversify is a safer answer, but not necessarily the most lucrative.

When I sell, I sell the lowest grades/conditions of the least valuable and least rare items first. I.e. I’ll sell my sub-PSA 8 unlimited holos before I sell my PSA 9 and 10 1st edition holos. It takes longer to generate whatever specific amount of money you need, but obviously the highest tier items have the best growth, generally, so are worth holding onto.

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Did (and continue to do) exactly the same, except selling Gens 1 and 2 for Gen 3. I came to the realization that I can’t collect everything, so I should focus on collecting the cards that I really love.

To answer OP’s question: I sell whatever I’m not attached to that I feel is currently appropriately valued (or overvalued). I don’t sell items that are part of my core collection, regardless of what they’re worth. And I also don’t sell cards that aren’t part of my core collection that happen to feel undervalued. For example, I recently acquired a couple of Expedition holo PSA 10s with some store credit. But I don’t intend to sell them unless they increase significantly in value. At the current amounts they’re worth, I’d rather just keep them. They aren’t part of my core collection, so I may sell them in the future, but I do also like them a lot so I don’t have an issue keeping them forever if it turns out they never increase in value (or even if they decrease in value).

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At the end of the day. If you can have more financial freedom, and it makes sense to sell, sell.

If you enjoy collecting, keep the stuff that was nostalgic. If the cards were purely investment. Sell every last one of them, at the end of the day, you can’t time the market, and the return on those is literally once in a lifetime. Can’t be a sore winner if they go up, but you don’t have to worry about them coming down and regretting either.

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I dont ever take a deal im not happy with. If i take the deal im happy, if down the road i see i would have made more money holding i just remind myself that i was happy with the deal and if i can learn anything from the price rising i try to, but i dont let it effect me because i was happy with the deal.

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Yeah, I like to think if I’ve paid price ‘x’ for a purchase, someone else out there would pay the same. Obviously its more nuanced than that but it helps me sleep :grin:

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I try to categorize things in a couple different ways. Things I’ll never sell (barring some major life issue obviously), and things I buy because I feel like they’re a good value to hold on to for a while.

For the first category, I have no desire to get rid of these things so selling isn’t even something on my mind. If I had an unforeseeable life issue come up that money could solve, then I would let it go.

For the second category, as others have said, you’ll never time it perfectly. Let it go when you think it’s gained enough value that it’s worth it for you to sell it. Trying to time the top and the bottom perfectly will drive you insane. It’s easy to look back on any asset and wish you bought more of it or held it longer, but that line of thinking just leads to regret for no reason in my opinion. Hindsight makes it really easy to know the decision you “should” have made.

One thing I’ve heard a few people say that I think makes a lot of sense is it’s easier to sell if you are actually putting that money towards something in your life that has value to you. For example if you really wanted to redo the kitchen in your house, selling your collection to fund that might make you feel more ok with letting the cards go. You’re trading the cards for tangible value in a different area of your life. Selling cards just to have money instead, with no real purpose for that money, makes people more likely to regret selling eventually.

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