A one-of-a-kind Mike Trout rookie card sold for $3.9 million in August 2020, setting a record that was beaten five months later by a $5.2 million Mickey Mantle and then again the following August by a $6.6 million Honus Wagner. New categories of collectibles, including sneakers and non-fungible tokens, helped attract a younger demographic. Cancellations of in-person events forced fans to find other ways to engage with their passions. Celebrities and influencers like entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, rapper Drake and YouTube star Logan Paul spread the gospel on social media. Inflation fears, low interest rates and uncertainty around the stock and bond markets pushed investors toward alternative and tangible assets, even if they were cardboard rectangles smaller than index cards. “It was really a perfect storm,” Nathan Wolfe, Collectors’ vice president for corporate development, says of the last two years. Trading cards spent the last 20 years on a steady upward trajectory-until the pandemic.
With the renewed emphasis on quality over quantity, the industry recovered from the “junk wax” era of the 1980s and ’90s, when massive overproduction by card manufacturers sent prices plummeting. The goal is to level the playing field with information.įor card graders, that has included creating reports and registries to allow collectors to see just how rare their prized items are and price them accordingly. It’s not all that different from GIA certifications for diamonds, Moody’s credit ratings for corporate borrowers or Nielsen’s TV viewership numbers. Authenticators, including Collectors competitors like Beckett Grading Services and SGC, have become an indispensable part of the market. But prices for high-end collectibles have soared, and counterfeiting has become more sophisticated. Customers pay a fee, which at PSA ranges from $50 to $12,000 per submitted card, based on the item’s estimated value and whether it includes an autograph. They also judge physical condition, assigning a 1-through-70 score for coins and a 1-through-10 score for cards. Both divisions are in the business of verifying that collectibles, whether they’re coins or trading cards or other sports memorabilia, are authentic and unaltered. Ollectors, which is based southeast of Los Angeles in Santa Ana, was created as a holding company in 1999, but its history stretches back to the 1986 founding of Professional Coin Grading Service, more commonly known as PCGS, and the 1991 founding of Professional Sports Authenticator, or PSA. A 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan card in a PSA holder.
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