When I started getting back into baseball cards, I was absolutely floored by prices. Sure, I understood that the pre-war cards were worth an arm and a leg and everything up until the 80′s probably carried some weight too, but I didn’t expect current baseball cards to hit triple digits. Players that hadn’t even taken a professional AB, let alone a MLB AB, weren’t just eclipsing triple digits, they were getting into thousands and then tens of thousands of dollars.
After I picked my jaw off the floor, I realized that I could use my knowledge of baseball to buy and sell cards on eBay as if it were eTrade. Well, it wasn’t quite that simple. In a completely rational thought, I equated knowledge with the ability to profit. If I knew more about minor league baseball and advanced metrics than 99.9% of the prospectors, I should make more money than 99.9% of the prospectors.
After I lost a lot of money, I realized it wasn’t about knowledge. It wasn’t even about production. It was about being slightly less stupid than the other guys investing in sports cards.
When people call eBay and sports cards a market, I’ll chuckle. If it is a market, it’s filled with the most irrational and dumbest actors known to man. If you decide to invest in sports cards and treat eBay like a market, you’ll follow my footsteps and end up losing money.
If you want to make money, you have to treat eBay like a broken market ruled by irrational actors and a series of fools searching for greater fools. Essentially, sports card trading on eBay isn’t a market, it’s a bubble bath. Assets spend almost their entire life span being greatly overvalued or drastically undervalued.
