We Have Over $8,000 of Drake Maye Cards. Now What?

Looking at updated profitability projections for our Drake Maye investment.

Drake Maye just lost in the Super Bowl, and his cards are falling in value. This is unfortunate for us, as we’ve been buying tons of Drake Maye over the last few months. This post is going to look at how Drake Maye’s market has moved since the loss, and how my investment looks going forward.

For a bit of context, we are what I like to call “momentum buyers.” In other words, we like to buy cards that are actively increasing in price. This is because generally, PSA 10 values increase faster than ungraded values, which means that these cards are often profitable to buy.

As a result, we’ve ended up with a large investment in Drake Maye cards.

Total Investment

• Total Cards: 26

• Total Purchase Price: $8,200

Included in these 26 cards are the following:

• 8 Prizm Silver cards

• 7 Select cards across different parallels

• 5 Autograph cards

• 1 Kaboom! Horizontal card bought for $1,900 four days before the Super Bowl

• 5 others including Optic and Obsidian cards

Out of all of these, the Prizm Silver cards are by far the most liquid, so let’s take a look at these.

2024 Drake Maye Prizm #329 Silver RC

PSA 10 Market

The chart above shows the PSA 10 values of this card. These peaked about 3 weeks ago, shortly after Drake Maye’s AFC championship win. Since then, they have fallen about $600, going from nearly $1,900 back down to $1,280.

Ungraded Market

And as you can see, the raw cards have followed roughly the same trend, peaking at around $300, before falling down to about $170.

Today, we have a total of 8 copies of this card and most of them are currently with PSA for grading. Luckily we didn’t buy them all at the peak; these were purchased between October and February for an average price of $230. While this is a bit above today’s raw market, the Expected Profitability of buying these at this price remains strong.

I’m going to keep the math brief for this post, but you can see our Complete Guide to Expected Value here.

Expected Value

Market Values & Gem Rate

• PSA 10 Value: $1,280

• PSA 9 Value: $223

• PSA 8 Value: $158

• Gem Rate: 23.0%

Profitability

• Expected Value (after all costs and fees): $347*

• Average Purchase Price: $230

• Expected Profitability Per Card: $117

• Expected Return On Investment: 50.9%

*Note: We included a 20% probability of a PSA 8 in this calculation.

Takeaways

In spite of the fall in Drake Maye’s market, the Expected Profitability of his Silver Prizm cards is still quite high. We normally target a minimum Expected Return on Investment of 25%, and these remain well above that. While I don’t think the rest of the cards will be quite this good, I think this speaks to a couple important points in our strategy.

1. We didn’t only buy at the peak. We’ve been buying Drake Maye consistently all season long, even when his market was rising.

2. The Expected Profitability on these cards was extremely strong. This gives us cushion for when the market falls.

3. As our investment increased, we gradually required higher profit margins to buy additional cards. This also lowers the risk when markets fall.

Overall, we do sometimes have batches of cards that are unprofitable due to market corrections, but so far it looks like we’ve handled this one well. We'll know for sure in a few months when these finish grading and hit the market.