“But some people who don’t have the money themselves go around raising capital to buy the big stuff, which is really annoying.” “Billionaires chasing cardboard - we can deal with that dynamic,” Davis said. The soaring prices have created such a frenzy that investment groups are being formed to buy cards, making it harder for individual collectors to compete - even extraordinarily wealthy ones.
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Earlier this month, a 1997 Michael Jordan card fetched $1.4 million at auction. Conrad/The New York TimesĪnd the market continues to boil. Now it competes with modern cards where the scarcity was built in from the start. The “T206” Honus Wagner card from 1909 was long considered the pinnacle of high-end sports cards because of its rarity. Ivy said that with the coronavirus pandemic shutting down many businesses, the sports collectibles industry expected hard times, too. “It is nearly impossible to keep up with demand from buyers.” “The industry is at its hottest point in my 40-year history,” Ken Goldin, the founder of Goldin Auctions, said in an email. It can be had on eBay for a cool half a million dollars - just click on “Add To Cart.” A rising star card in the collectibles world is an immaculate so-called Logo Man card of Zion Williamson and Ja Morant (the top two picks from the 2019 N.B.A. Of the top 10 prices paid for sports cards at public auction, seven were cards of modern stars who were playing as recently as 1999, and five of the 10 cards have players pictured who are still active. “The vintage market is very strong, too, but the modern cards have joined in.” “The modern cards are taking the market by storm,” said Chris Ivy, the director of sports at Heritage Auctions.
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Antetokounmpo is 26, with barely eight seasons in the N.B.A. In September, two months after the James rookie card sold for $1,845,000, a Giannis Antetokounmpo rookie card produced by Panini fetched $1.9 million. Trout’s card sold in August, shortly after the market for modern cards went into overdrive. “Maybe I should have kept that one,” Trout joked with reporters a few days later. Instead, they spent it on a small piece of cardboard depicting a 29-year-old slugger who has never won a World Series. The buyer of that Trout card, who remains anonymous, could have purchased a Brooklyn brownstone for that amount.