TLDR: It seems like it’s easier than ever to sell/trade PSA slabs. If they continue to integrate with big companies like eBay and Gamestop, what would be the implications to the market?
I’m someone who comes back to the hobby every couple years, not buying much but find the market movements interesting.
In the last couple months I’ve been binge watching vendor POV videos like BulbaStore’s. In investing there is this idea of liquidity- that is, the higher the sales volume, the closer the Bid price will be to the Ask price, and the easier it will be to get a “fair” price. Liquidity also depends on demand, in that your asset is not liquid if nobody wants to buy it.
In these vendor videos, you can see liquidity demonstrated when a vendor is able to easily find a fair price only. Usually this involved a common metric such as a recent last sale or eyeballing the average of the last few sales. These metrics are harder to calculate on the fly for raw cards because of condition and vintage slabs because of fewer recent sales.
Recently, Gamestop started offering store credit for PSA 8,9, and 10 slabs under $500. Obviously their prices aren’t competitive, but this move gives the feeling that it has never been easier to sell PSA slabs. eBay’s PSA vault also appears to make buying/selling slabs easier, and they seem like the easiest thing to flip at conventions, which appear to be exploding in popularity.
These enhancements remind me of how the internet revolutionized the stock market- the internet made stocks easier to buy/sell, which helped stocks explode in popularity (and price) over the last 20 years. Similarly, StockX provided the liquidity to help the sneaker market explode in my opinion.
Couple discussions to be had:
How do you think future enhancements to selling cards will affect the general Pokemon card market?
Do you think these deals will keep PSA established as the card grading king, or will smaller grading companies catch up?
If you believe that card liquidity and sales volume will increase in the future, what types of product would you pick up now?
Sure, it could be that slabs will be more integrated in the mainstream market, and therefore with better liquidity / less hassle to sell.
But it could also be that there is a huge mass of illiquid slabs that people are willing to forfeit to Gamestop, Ebay, Pwcc even for cheap or store credit.
These companies could in theory use their economy of scale to make a profit even with thin margins. Maybe for the casual consumer is better to buy a couple of unlimited holos for Christmas in a well known store, making sense to cut away the myriads of IG, ebay sellers.
So, taking for example shares of some index funds: in times of illiquid market (if nobody is ready to buy your stocks) the same market makers are the ones to buy and destroy those shares, allowing you to have your money.
To be honest this is how it feels to me.
Very true, I could see the Gamestop program being a place where people offload junk slabs. In contrast, I have heard vendors in youtube videos say that they would rather not buy slabs that won’t move fast.
I wonder what Gamestop will do with slabs that sit in their inventory for months. If they discount, it could possibly become a place where you can hunt for deals on niche slabs.
Can confirm that Gamestop can be used to offload junk slabs, I just sold a few that haven’t sold on ebay to them yesterday. The offers they made for most were pitifully low (like 10-30%), but a few were about 70% of my asking price on Ebay, and one was even over market rate!
For those that are more active in buying/selling slabs than I am, do you see these new business models like Gamestop and eBay PSA Vault as something that will increase popularity of slab collecting in the future, or will it ultimately come down to personal taste?
Watching these vendor videos, I feel like many of the buyers in the videos are people whose true hobby is the trading aspect, like with sneakers. If slabs were flying off the shelves then vendors could possibly even offer more for trade credit like 90% instead of 80%, which would make slab trading even more attractive.
People with more experience than me will correct me if I’m wrong,but I feel like slabs have already become too popular and now are in their downward trend.To make them even more popular thanks to gamestop it will take at least another market cycle,and even at that point it’s just an if
I pretty much agree. For anything modern it makes so much more sense just to buy the card you want and grade it. More and more people hopefully wise up that they’re wasting their money buying slabs. Vintage is likely different, I’m only familiar with modern
It is a pretty funny reality check with modern cards that a pack fresh cards will almost always be at least an 8, and the difference in quality between a 9 and 10 is arguably very little. Not to mention the textures make them much harder to fake than vintage, I assume, so the authenticity aspect of a slab is less important.
I do think that the registry aspect of PSA slabs could be valuable to some collecters/traders. It is pretty cool to be able to look up your card in a database by scanning a QR code on the slab. But is it really worth it to have these features, if you’re paying $100+ over a raw card for a PSA 10? I guess it depends on the person, but I think it’s fair to assume slabs are overvalued in this sense.
for vintage pretty much the only way to get some 10s is to buy them, like basically anything with sub 20 pop which is a lot. also, it will almost always be the most cost effective way because you have vintage psa 10 holos selling for less than the heavy vintage pack they come from, which is more likely to grade an 8 than a 10 straight out of the pack
then you have cards which psa basically refuses to give a 10 on nowadays such as 1st edition charizard which hasnt had a new 10 in like 5 years even with all the youtubers opening up 1st ed base like crazy