I’ve been watching some of smpratte videos and he talks about buying, and holding long term (aka not being a flipper) which I get. The question is how do you support a hobby if the idea is buy and hold forever?
How do you know what and when to sell?
Its like… if you go to some of these high end ebay stores, are they just selecting Pokemon cards to sell which they’ll make a large profit on (that they’ve held for a long time), and go ahead and invest/collect more Pokemon cards with that money?
I’m just trying to get momentum. I’ve reduced a lot of my overhead costs and lifestyle to collect more Pokemon cards because its what I enjoy doing. I just want to optimize and be efficient I suppose.
Buy, Grade, Sell. Or Buy, Hold, Grade, Sell. Or buy Graded already, Hold, Sell. The longer you hold the greater the possible reward. Nothing is a given in life but this is probably best strategy. Or Booster boxes. I’d recommend buying extras or cards you don’t want so your not selling out of your actual collection.
I think it all relies on your knowledge of the market. Every single card will be different, and will have a sweet spot.
Did you buy for under market, so are prepared to sell at market rates?
Did you buy at market rate, and anticipate appreciation so hold until it reaches x price point?
Is it a modern card that you expect will peak and retrace once it gets re-printed or is no longer playable?
Or often somewhere in the middle, items you can consistently acquire and sell with the proper value add (grading) and exposure in a different market (Japanese to Western eBay for example).
There are a lot of listings that are significantly undervalued if you do regular scouting. My strategy is to buy things that I could immediately sell for 2-3 times what I paid, but then hold it as long as possible to hopefully get 5+ times what I paid. You have to monitor listings pretty regularly and be fast, but those sorts of deals show up pretty regularly.
I haven’t bought Pokemon cards specifically to resell in a few years but when I did my favourite thing to do was to buy bundles/collections on eBay, and then resell the most valuable of the lots as singles (again on eBay).
I never made a massive amount of money but I made profit on pretty much every single card I resold. It was very time-consuming however and I wouldn’t go down this route again, just because I have better ways of making money for myself nowadays.
I think it’s difficult to make a lot of money from Pokemon cards just by flipping. It can be done but personally I think the time spent doing so outweighs the return, unless you’re super lucky and happen to consistently stumble upon cheap cards that you can resell for much higher, and quickly.
You can definitely make money by buying, holding, and selling - but of course that takes time and you won’t be generating any cash for yourself in that interim.
I have an average salary job (12th grade government/economics teacher, $80k/year), but I’ve been fortunate in that I started buying stocks (and Pokemon cards) shortly after the economy bottomed out in 2008. I also invested heavily in tech rather than just putting all my money in mutual funds.
I’ve never had to sell Pokemon cards. I’ve been almost exclusively buying since 2009. (As a result, Pokemon is now a decent chunk of my portfolio.)
Also, I’ve said this before, but the PSA 10 1st ed Base Charizard I purchased back in 2009 (when I was a junior in college) was purchased with poker winnings. I was actually a damn good poker player, could have kept up with it but spending so much time with sleazy people wasn’t particularly appealing to me.
I think it’s more fun to buy bulk type lots and sell off what I don’t need t keep the cards I want. It can help sustain your hobby if your budget is a little tighter at the moment. Nothing wrong with it in my opinion.
If you are a casual collector looking to finance your collection through selling extras, buying bundles and keeping the cards you want while selling the others is the way to go. You won’t get rich and selling the extra cards will require some work on your part so I would recommend this option if you have enough free time on your hands and believe you will enjoy the selling aspects of it.
If you are a serious collector looking to acquire graded mid-high end non modern items, research those pop reports and prioritize the items that have the lowest pop count in the grade you collect. Let’s say you want 2 (different) cards which are selling on ebay for $1000 at PSA 9 each. Check the pop report, and if one of them has 50 PSA 9 copies in existence and the other has 20, buy the later first as it will probably become harder to obtain in the future. Obviously don’t apply this to modern product that is in print i.e. hidden fates, let the pop report settle before swooping in.
If you want to spice things up and add a bit of ‘gambler’s luck’ to your collecting game, target cards you think will rise in price and speculate on them, get your investor hat on, sit on them and enjoy the adrenaline of seeing individual prices in you ‘portfolio’ rise and fall. Risks will be higher and it will be more of a boom and bust kind of thing, but there will be less hard work and more Wall Street investor fun if that’s something you enjoy.
If you want to own a large ebay store, register yourself as a business find decent suppliers or avenues to obtain regular stock at below market value and be read to bust your ass off working on it 7 days a week dealing with orders, negotiating with suppliers, customer queries, psa submissions, lots and lots of research, admin work, etc. It will basically be a full time job and then some for years until you can get to that level.
People tend to romanticize people like @smpratte in Pokemon, as someone who made the right purchases years ago and is now reaping the rewards, but there is much more to it than this. He is a business man who worked hard and consistently for years to get to where he is at today, he didn’t simply chose some cards that he thought would go up in value and sit on them for years.
I’m a full-time student, so I fund this hobby almost exclusively through selling on eBay. I was lucky enough to be very into collecting MTG for ~12 years, which left me with a substantial amount to sell and then reallocate into Pokemon. I also was lucky having had several leftover sealed Pokemon booster boxes that I had purchased back in ~2013 (which I purchased prompted by the nostalgia of finding my childhood collection). I sold all of those late last year, and also put that money (all said and done close to $20k – of course, it would be about $40k now haha) into my Pokemon card collection. I also got a bit of a windfall collection purchase earlier this year, and piecing that out (which I’m still doing) has funded a ton of collection purchases as well.
Ultimately, everything happens through eBay for me – if you have a large collection, it’s a fantastic source of income. It’s enabled me to build up a personal collection (that I have zero intention of ever selling, and which has grown well into the lower six-figures – nothing compared to the veterans of this forum, but still significant for me) as well as a smaller, but still substantial, inventory that I continue to sell from. So, basically, I’ve just been a beneficiary of the meteoric increases in value that MTG cards and Pokemon booster boxes experienced over the course of the past decade, and have used the proceeds of those to make substantial progress into completing my personal collection goal: putting together complete NM master sets of every English EX-series and WotC set ever released.
This^. It’s not INCREDIBLY sustainable, however, it can be very fun. I picked up a lot of 2500+ (EX to current) cards this past Friday for $100. So far I am up 13% on the purchase, with 16 or so lots left to sell. That’s not counting what I should get from a bulk submission of commons/uncommons. Just have to be quick when lots like that pop up.
This sounds like fun to me, but my experience is that pokemon cards don’t fluctuate that much to create that adrenaline. Or maybe I am just looking at the wrong cards (mostly WOTC)
That profile pic is not done full justice until you have an OnlyFans link in your signature.
@two, nobody will reveal their full buying & selling secrets but there are a few components of the recipe to follow if your aim is to build a collection while capitalising on the hobby to make money (which may then be to further spend on the hobby or just to enjoy).
Know the market and know what you want to buy and sell. Use resources, websites like bulbapedia and pokeguardian. Don’t underestimate your gut feelings either. I’m sure you’re already pretty knowledgeable but if you want to take this whole online merchanting thing further, you’ll need to invest a lot of time into recognising trends, obscure cards/products, and critically: don’t be quick to dismiss things you might not be personally interested in. There’s a market for everything in Pokemon, you just need to put the work in to feel confident in the areas you want to sink your teeth into.
Volume! A lot of us don’t have a huge amount of capital to start out with. If you’re just trying to get momentum, you might want to play it safe with some of the modern products to get a flavour for what sells and how long it takes. The margins will be lower, but that’s where volume comes in. As you build more capital, think about spending that on more product. The more items you have up for sale on eBay is positively correlated with how quickly they tend to sell. (There’ll be some buyer-psychology behind it involving tendency to look through your other items etc etc), but the point is, it works. This involves a lot of work because listing things on eBay is boring and a pain in the ass. The more you put in, the more you get out.
There are no guarantees. Be aware that this is a risky endeavor and make an informed decision on how much capital and time you want to commit, then adjust your expectations of what you want to get out of it accordingly. Expect the occasional dick to INAD scam you as well, factor potential losses into your expectations.
Engage politely and thoroughly with your customers, pack your items thoughtfully, and generally don’t be an asshole. People will feel more confident buying items from you again in the future, and when you become a l33t Pr0 Pokeymans hustl3r they’ll feel confident in buying those 4 and 5-figure items from you.
Be mindful that this pursuit isn’t for everyone. If you want to make something worthwhile out of it, it’s hard work, you can’t escape it.
The person who bought the $10k black label Shiny Charizard probably gets a bit of an adrenaline rush when he sees what they are selling for at the moment, but surely in a long enough timeframe that price will be realised and even surpassed, so yeah… investor hats.
