Making Money, Investing, and Flipping Sports Cards: A How-To.
I recently read a guide on blowout cards on how to make money on sports cards and while I agree with many of the general principles, genuinely investing in sports cards is an intricate beast. This is about buying low and then selling high, but you don’t have to be able to forecast a Mike Trout-ian ascent through the minors to make money.
There are a few minor questions that you should be asking yourself prior to attempting to make money in sports cards:
1. What percentage of this endeavor will focus on attaining profit and what percentage is just good ol’ fashion fun?
When it comes to my investing, it’s almost 100% fun. I’m signed up to Yahoo! for my fantasy baseball and football keeper leagues, I use Bodog Sportsbook and a pre-paid VISA for my sports bets, and I use eBay to purchase some cards. Let’s just say that I’m not using cards to pay the bills, but rather give myself a quick little high while I’m busy patting myself on the back for being right most of the time. Investing in prospects is basically a combination of gambling and a keeper league. In the past, the only benefit to nailing a prospect was getting to keep him for a few years, but with eBay I can now make a couple bucks on the side.
If you’re not doing it for fun and you’re actually interested in making money off sports cards, you definitely need to start with some seed money. If you’re patient, starting with a couple hundred dollars will suffice. If you’re planning on purchasing enough to add a substantial amount of discretionary funds to your account each month, you’ll need quite a bit more than that. There’s plenty of times when prospects have increased 400-500% in under a year, but you should be pretty happy with a 50% ROI after fees. If you start getting too greedy, you’re bound to make some mistakes.
2. How Long Will You Be Holding Onto The Cards For?
This ties into the previous question. If you’re doing this mainly for fun, you’ll probably be buying and selling at a fairly decent clip. There aren’t that many reasons why you should be holding onto a card for more than a year or two if you’re doing this for short-term profit or fun. Occasionally a prospect will take longer to ascend Baseball America’s Top 100 list or get the call. If the prospect has shown steady growth and it’s just a matter of him being blocked at the major league level, it works in your favor to wait it out rather than sell prematurely. If you’re not in the prospect market, you could be waiting for a player to kick the bucket, make the HOF, reach a milestone or retire. These are long-term goals that require far less work and generally pay-off, but as I’ll point out, my confidence is fading on the HOF market.
3. How Much Time Will You Dedicate To Sportscards?
Above and beyond whatever time you spend now reading Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus, how much time do you plan on dedicating to your new adventure? Bidding is made infinitely easier with sniping software and really shouldn’t take longer than the ten minutes per day you’d spend looking for your targeted cards. The real question is how long you want to spend researching the market and tracking the value of your cards.
Making money on sportscards is possible because everyone believes that they are into the market early. Baseball and Football fans alike mistakenly correlate the weeks before a player’s breakout as the optimal time to purchase. In reality, this is amongst the worst times to purchase a sportscard. Research is imperative and until otherwise proven, you should assume that you are into the market late and bidding at inflated prices.
This will function as a Table Of Contents for All Articles On Investing in Sports Cards.
