Well, after a bit of time off from the blog (but definitely not from the card business itself), I’m back.

Since my last post, you guys probably are aware that PSA paused all Value level grading services, a change that I was worried would have a large impact on our business. Interestingly, that’s turned out not to be the case, as we have an average purchase price on raw cards of around $350. As a result, not much changed except that we completely stopped buying cards in the $75 to $150 price range (with occasional exceptions).

In terms of the market conditions themselves, we’ve seen a big slowdown in Pokémon (which may or may not be related to PSA’s pause), while One Piece and sports cards have surged.

Speaking of One Piece, we’ve actually started buying One Piece cards for the first time ever, and have invested about $5k into these cards. You’ll hear more about this in future posts. We also are planning to look into buying Riftbound cards, as well as Topps Chrome Disney and other non sport product. In the past we’ve limited ourselves to sports rookie cards, but the goal now is to expand into every profitable category we can reach.

Finally, I’ve made some slight modifications to our Expected Value model to increase accuracy. The long story short is that we found our grading results are significantly better than the average Gem Rates, but also that about 20% of the cards we buy, we decide not to submit to PSA. So I’ve updated our model to reflect these realities. For the purpose of this blog, I will continue presenting card profitability data very similarly to how I did before, but I do plan to explain the concepts above in more detail.

With that said, welcome back everyone.

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