Plus the existence of high inflation makes people demand inflation hedges way more, so why wouldn't they go up in price faster than inflation?
For example a lot of the more common rookie card prices have already deflated back toward something closer to sane prices. Take the Greg Maddux 1987 Leaf rookie card - that went up ten fold in less than two years, primarily during the pandemic bubble, and has now deflated by around 60-70% from the peak of the bubble. That card (and numerous others like it from other prominent players of the past 40-50 years) is unlikely to quickly reinflate back to the peak, it might take five or ten years to get back there.
What isn't going to dramatically deflate, are the exceptional cards. The higher quality 1952 Mantle cards are not going to drop by 60-70%. The 1986 Fleer Jordan rookie in a PSA 10 is never going back to the days when it could be purchased for $10,000-$30,000. A high-end Lebron James rookie (seven figures) isn't likely to roll backwards by 70% from the peak. Those days are forever over. There is a lot of money willing to pay up for such cards. The high-end part of the card hobby is and will remain closer to behaving like the art market than like the mainstream cards-from-packs hobby.
And the giant premiums that card companies can command for high-end boxes, they're not giving that up if they can avoid it, they have no interest in rolling that back to the old days. Granted, Fanatics and their new monopoly may screw everything up.
There are a lot more PSA 10 quality cards sitting in collections ungraded than have been graded and are “in circulation”. But now that those top cards are 6-figures and higher, nobody in their right mind is going to put one of those things in the mail and not get it back for 12-18 months (the grading firms aren’t even accepting cards now anyway). Something worth $1 million once graded is worth $1000 ungraded. You can’t insure it for $1 million until it’s graded. Chicken v. Egg.
Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless you were speculating on some black swan.
This. I had a conversation with my boomer father the other day in which I tried to explain that the availability of cheap consumer debt means that individuals can now operate like mini hedge funds, making highly leveraged bets on everything from stocks to crypto to trading cards. Used to be that housing was the only highly leveraged investment available to the average consumer (20% down = 5x leverage).
To be fair, aggregate debt and interest rates don’t really tell the whole story, because credit providers are a lot more creative as well. Anecdotally, I routinely get offers for promotional low- or no-interest balances on unsecured credit (i.e. credit cards) that overlap such that I can fairly easily maintain a condition of “negative working capital” in excess of my annual income for maybe 2% APR.
Those offers aren't new either. They were around 20 years ago. And back then you could stick the balance in a savings account to arb a few percent positive interest.
Even Limited Edition Warhammer books have been selling for absurd prices. Many books are selling for 10 to 20 times RRP. It’s been very odd to see
Only the wealthy with nothing better to spend a marginal % of their capital on, the middle class (good income) indebting themselves up the balls, and speculators looking to profit from the prior two categories, are buying these things at these crazy prices.
Some poor folk might fall in to the speculator category, but they're taking huge personal risk on what they hope is a ticket to riches.
Same goes for Bitcoin imho
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1457064697782489088?t=t-...
His brother just sold a large chunk on Friday... totally not coincidental.
He's also frequently made jokes about how overvalued the stock is... definitely knows it's totally mispriced/overvalued.
Makes sense to diversify a bit either way. It may tank bigly before he can even sell though. I'm sure many will try to front run. But who knows, let's see.
2. Short TSLA
3. ???
4. Profit