THWC 464: I Am Selling It All!

0:00What is up everybody? I'm with Kage episode 464. 464 brought to you by Arena Club. Buy card lantern. Use code Kage and save yourself a couple bucks. Everybody likes that. I'm gonna pause here for a second. Because it is that time of year. It's that time of year. I don't like when the summer ends here in the northeast and the cold starts. For the last couple of years, it's almost as if we've had no fall. We just go from summer to winter. You wake up one morning and it's just cold. I don't like it. I've got to close my pool. I couldn't go in it. If I tried right now, it would be like the polar bear plunge. Really cold. That's closing up in the next couple of days. It's cold. It's just one of these. Give me the full-on winter or give me summer. This whole half-assing it. Pretend winter but it's cold. I don't like it. But there is one positive note about this.

1:01And you guys have already seen it. Wanted me to it in. I get to bust out the hobby sweatshirt. A card-lider sweatshirt. If you don't have one, you've got to get one. It's comfortable. It's got a little h on it. Because it makes you happy. H for happy. Happy to be in a little card-lider sweatshirt. So that's it. It's that time of year. It is, you know, we're heading into the middle of October. And that's gonna come up big in this episode. As we talk about why I am selling it all. So the remaining business at hand. Brought to you by the Philly Show. Brought to you by the realist. Check out the O'Tani auction. Big night tonight. I mean, we'll see what happens. You know, it's a big pivotal game three. Atlanta stole. They stole the, you know, home field advantage from the Dodgers in game two. Can the Dodgers steal it right back tonight? Little Yamamoto vs. sale hell of the pitching battle. And, you know, we can talk about, you know, the Yankees and their debacle with five errors. Or it's actually more like seven errors in the field yesterday and their lack of offense outside of Ben Rice.

2:06Yeah, let's jump into it. So today's episode 464. I'm selling it all. That's your title. So that's why you clicked. Let's talk about it. Let's, let's, this is less click baity than usual. Because this morning somebody messaged me. Hey, you got time. You got a couple of minutes. And it's somebody I spent some time with at the national. A new hobby friend. I get new hobby friends from time to time. So that's fun. And there, you know, they had 10 minutes. I said, I'll call you. You know, when I, when I get clear of some work, I'll call you. And I, you know, it's why I'm recording this a little bit later today on October 6th. I, you know, I had a nice, nice phone call, but it is the same conversation I've probably had. Maybe a half dozen times this week already. So might as well make an episode out of it. And it goes a little something like this. Hey, Cage, I'm thinking about selling everything because, you know, there are cards that I watch that are indicators. There are cards that I watch that indicate to me what the hobby is like. And I've noticed that they kind of stop going up.

3:09Oh, really? All right. Well, tell me what cards they are. Let's talk about the data points. Let's talk about, you know, what you're seeing. And I will never tell you not to sell. You know, I don't know what your personal financial situation is. I don't know how much you have in cards. I don't know whether you're in a profit or loss. I don't know what you have, you know, other financial obligations. If you like me and you got a kid going to college soon, you know, I was at a financial aid seminar last night at my daughter's high school. Learning about all the financial aid that I will not qualify for, which is fantastic. I mean, just, I mean, you know, you got to love it, right? Knowing that if I want to get a loan for college, I'll probably be a private loan between 12 and 17%. I might as well just have, you know, acquire pay for it and, you know, pay them less. You want to fund college instead of funding a card? I'll send you some cards to pay for it, you know? Anyway, point being, I don't know anybody's financial situation.

4:10So I will never tell you not to sell if that's the decision you get into. But we can have a conversation about what's leading you towards that thought process. Why you think the market is time to sell now? And let's go over just today's conversation. I noticed a couple of Jordan cards, Kate. I noticed a couple of Brady cards. You know, cards that I've been watching for the last six months, cards that, you know, are rare enough that they're not like, you know, going to be seen in every single auction. They're not going to be on eBay, you know, selling five times a day. But they are liquid enough that you do see sales of them every now and again. And these are cards that, you know, for the last six months, they've, they've gone up. They've gone up each time. They've gone up. And in the last auction, they were down a little, you know, they went from 16 to 15,000 from 17 to 16,000 per card. And so I said, all right. And yeah, same thing with some Jordan cards and the same thing with this. Now, if you listen to me, if you watch me, you know, I've been talking about this already, all right.

5:13But let me tell you the two things that I said to this individual this morning, but I've said over text and over DM and a couple of little voice memos as well to some folks, all right. You're going to have to make your own decision. But here is the decision that I'm making these if you my own cards, because I see the same stuff. But we have two things converging on us right now in this space that you need to keep in the back of your mind if you're going to start making decisions about, you know, about your cards and what you're doing with them. Based on the data you're seeing. Number one, we had a monumental and historic run leading up to national in the goats. You should take a look at card ladder. Don't just look at the last six months where you see high, high, high, high prices. Now we'll pull back. Look at what those cards and this is what we did. Look at what those cards that you think are 16, 17,000, but they sold for 15 or 16. What they were in January. You know what they were? 8, 9, maybe 10.

6:16So if you, we've talked about this, you widened that picture a little bit. What you see is this year they've gone from 8, 9, 10 to 15, 16, 17. Sure, they went from 8, 9, 10 to 17, 18, 19 and now they've come down a little bit. But if you think about that, we had this meteoric rise in some of these cards, right? Sure, the Tom Brady Bowman Chrome is down in the last couple of months. But it is not up, it is not down, excuse me, from the beginning of the year. It's significantly up, right? The one month chart might not look so great, put the 10 month, year to date chart looks pretty darn good. And that is one of those things right where if you bought a Michael Jordan metal, the 97 metal base card. You know the one where he's flying across the sky with the, you know, the PMG red picture, but just the base card in PSA 8.

7:19If you bought that two months ago, you might have been paying 1200, maybe 1300 dollars, well let's just call it 1200, 1250, something like that. The last couple sales in 950. That's a significant drop. If you bought it at 1200 dollars because you just saw the sale before. That was 11, then it was 1050, it was 10, it was 950. Now, if you were holding that card from the beginning of the year where it was, you know, five or six hundred bucks, it being 950, sounds fantastic. Now if you bought it at 1200 or 1250 and it's 950, it's not so fantastic. But you have to understand the full picture. Sure, that Jordan card seems to have been coming down a little bit recently. But what's it going to do? It's a kind of like triple for no reason. I mean, Jordan didn't want to championship this year, you know, the market has been extremely hot.

8:19It has been. So you have to factor that in your equation. You can't just say, hey, you know what? I'm seeing some real bad price action. The mountains and cobes and Lebron's, oh my, are all down. Yeah. I'm not going to argue with you. They are. If you look at the price at its peak last month, two months ago, it's down now. But things that fly as high as these things have, they have to take a breather, right? Now, you have to decide, is this a breather? Is this a reversal? Are we now going to ride this roller coaster back down to $500? You have any indication of that? You know, do you have any reason to think that? And here's the second piece that I threw in there, which players on top of this. There is a seasonality to this market. Let's think about where we are in the year, okay?

9:19Baseball just ended, which means 99% of the players that people buy are out of the equation. The ones that people do buy, right? Judge injured, not in the playoffs. And the team looks like they're probably going to be eliminated. Otani injured, not playing at full strength. Playing, and his team is on the brink. But that's just Otani. Bobby Witt, not playing. Julio Rodriguez, not playing. I mean, you name your player who you want to invest in, not playing. Are there opportunities? Does Jackson Churio cards potentially take a little bit of a pull-up shore? You know, do junior Kamenero's cards maybe move up a little bit? Sure. You know, there will be a playoff hero that comes out of nowhere. But 99% of baseball cards, you know, stuff that people were buying for the last six months, eight months, they're not buying right now. Later on top of that football. Where are we in the football season? We have had that historic, you know, seasonal football push that pump.

10:24Less than other years before it. But people get interested in football before the season starts. Now we're going to have this midseason, week four to week 12, where it's kind of dead. Will there be some purchasing of cards? Sure. Bryce Young, Trevor Lawrence, wearing your bargain bins, they're playing pretty good right now. So you could see their cards potentially move up, right? Just because they've been beaten down so much. My homes coming back, playing at a really high level earlier than a lot of people thought. And looking like they are, you know, the chiefs of old maybe make another run at this. His cards, you know, the floor is in on those, you know, and maybe the floor rises a bit on some of the home's cards as well. But beyond those kind of a couple quarterbacks, football is done until we start seeing what the playoff picture is going to shape up like. We're basically done until, you know, the holidays. We say done till Christmas, which by the way, you also have basketball. You got the preseason so people are going to get a little excited about basketball now.

11:26The piranha on his new team, Wembee, but then basketball starts and people don't really pay attention to it until like February. You know what I mean? Christmas, let's say, right? Christmas, you know, we got the Christmas games on footballs about to be the playoffs. Baseball is completely done. We're not even talking about it. So we have this kind of low that always happens from the middle of October into like the middle of December. Last year wasn't as pronounced as the years prior, but you could almost set your clock to it in prior years that if you bought in December, you know, that first, second week of December, you were buying it at a lower kind of period now. You were, you know, you were buying at a period where, you know, things kind of took off from there. So you're combining a couple of things here. Number one, if you're looking at Brady cards, you're looking at Jordan cards, you're looking at these cards. You're looking at cards that have had a monumental meteoric rise this year already.

12:27And you're now looking at it at a historically seasonal low. You know, there's a seasonality to our space, to our hobby to, you know, our market, if you want to call it that. So when you combine this kind of, you know, seasonal low point, you know, where people are starting to save up money, you know, you got college payments, do, you know, people are back in school. They're doing sports with their kids in school. It's high school football. You know, the sports themselves are not really conducive to like, you know, wow, who's, who's doing crazy things right now. That will pick up again, December, January, you know, that will pick up again. You know, as football we head into, you know, the playoffs and the Super Bowl and then basketball really starts to ramp up. We kind of see that start to pick up then. So you're combining this run that has to take up pause, that has to take a breather with the seasonality of our space. At a time where usually we have a little bit of a low, it makes sense that cards that were previously hot and running might take up pause right now.

13:36Is that when you want to sell your cards in a pause? You know, at a time seasonality wise where, you know, prices are usually at their lowest. Completely up to you. It's not where I want to sell my cards. It's usually where I do my buy-in. Now, a lot of people talked about this last year, myself included. I remember bringing it up to some smart people in the hobby and then them talking about it and making charts about it and stuff. Maybe that cats out of the bag. You know, maybe I won't be able to buy, you know, my, my buy so heavy in the end of November and beginning of December, you know, like I have in years past. But if everybody's thinking that, I mean, maybe we don't see that long of a pause. Anyway, that was my take. That was my answer to, you know, to a couple of people who have really great collections, really great cards, goat cards. And they woke up and they were like, you know what? I'm thinking about selling. I'm thinking about selling it all.

14:38I'm selling it all, episode 464. You can. There's absolutely nothing wrong with selling your cards, right? There's nothing wrong with selling a couple of cards here. There's nothing wrong. We talk about this, you know, once a quarter, probably about that time. To do an audit of your collection, do an audit of your PC, you know, all the cards in there, ones that you really want to own, do you want to really want to own them long term? All the cards that are impossible to replace, you know, is this a card that has run enough that it is worth more to somebody else than it is to you and your PC? You know, we've gone through this a bunch of times, you know, or doing an audit on your collection. Really what we came down to for today's conversation was this. Let's say you sold a card or two. What do you do with the money? Is there another card you think you would buy with that that one you would rather have in your collection? And two, you think it's a better use of those funds. And ultimately after about 40 minutes of going back and forth on the phone with this new hobby friend, I didn't charge for this.

15:46This is not like a consultancy service. This is a labor of love. I love doing this. The decision that this individual made themselves was I can't figure out a better place to have this money. Even though the card has come down a bit in the last two months and you know, the chart kind of looks like this, I think this card in a year is going to be here. It's going to be higher. And I can't think of a better place to put my money with less downside, with more potential upside. So I'm not going to sell. So we went from I'm selling it all to I'm keeping it all. It's a matter of a half an hour. Could I be wrong? Sure. It's happened before. Has it? I don't know. Maybe. It happened so infrequently. I can't remember the time I was wrong. But anyway, I could be. And there's another episode for you guys. 464 of these. I got a little message today of my my sixth anniversary on YouTube.

16:51I'm going to be 20. We started doing the podcast Lucas Targazam bronze in July of 2020. But we didn't actually hop on to YouTube for a couple months. We were doing audio. I was camera shy. If you could believe that. I didn't want to put my ugly mug on a camera. My daughter was animating us in the beginning. We had little cartoons and stuff. I remember we had Chris Hoseon. And my daughter was animating me and Andrew and. Hose, a little animated cartoons. I got to go find those. It's pretty funny. But yeah, it's I guess it's my sixth YouTube birthday today. We'll start year seven on YouTube. And anybody who's watching on YouTube or listening anywhere out there. Thank you for that. Because I mean. If you told me back in 2020 that seven years later or you know six and change years later, I'd be you know still doing this talking. You know having a blast in the hobby making new hobby friends getting on the phone and talking through cards and buys and sells and you know spending my time doing that. You know, I'd sign up for that in a second. And I'm able to do it because of you guys. So thank you. And thank you to Arena Club. Check out the slab packs.

17:56They got some good stuff in those slab packs. The Philly show. Card ladder best sweatshirt game in the biz here. Look at this little card ladder sweatshirt. So comfy. It was called cage. Save us a couple bucks. And by the real is check out their auction man. The that Otani Jersey. Now we have the Otani logo man card from the crazy game that he had the home runs and the strikeouts and the whole deal selling at the same time as that jersey. It's a cool little thing to watch. You know probably as we get closer to the 17th and that auction is going. I will probably do well, you know, a piece of an episode about that about you know game use memorabilia versus cards. The portability of the card. The easily transfer ability of the card that scarcity that's created by making it into a one-on-one card instead of the full on Jersey. But you know that car is in a cell for millions millions of dollars. And it's going to be interesting to see what the Jersey does. You can identify the game for each one of them. It's not like the you know the gold logo man card where it's like we don't know exactly what game it could be any of the games he played this year.

18:57This card you know what game it's from that Jersey know what game it's from. So that's a fun little thing to watch. Head over to the realist and check out that that Jersey. That's it. We're we're just I 20 minutes. I got the energy this morning. Little little caffeination little soda. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you guys take care everybody.