Over the last few episodes, I walked through my first full year of selling sports cards...my wins, my mistakes, and what I learned in buying, selling, and grading. Today is different. This one is slower, more reflective, and honestly one of the most important frameworks I’ve shared:
How time actually works in the sports card market.
In this episode I cover:
- Market cycles & engineered scarcity
- Why we’re living in an era of engineered scarcity
- How Kabooms became the “reserve currency of flippers”
- Why bull markets push money into SSPs and inserts… until liquidity tightens
- Risk-on vs risk-off and the flight to safety
- What happens when geopolitical risk and macro events flip the switch
- How smart money quietly rotates out of hype and into safer stores of value
- Why modern parallels get hit first when the music stops
- The three time taxes on every card you buy
- Narrative decay – media hype, attention, and the slow fade when storylines die
- Opportunity cost – what you can’t buy because your money is stuck
- Liquidity risk – getting trapped in illiquid players, sets, or parallels
- Velocity of money vs “being right”
- Why I’ll take 20% in two weeks over “maybe 100% in six months”
- When it makes sense to break your own rules and let winners compound
- How to recognize when an investment thesis is dead and it’s time to take the loss
- Using your 1,440 minutes like capital
- Why time is your second balance sheet—right next to your cash
- How to audit your strengths/weaknesses and build a trading journal
- The system I use to log every purchase and sale, and find patterns in my own behavior
- Buying back your time with consignment
If you’ve ever:
- Sat on a cold prospect hoping “it gets back to what I paid”
- Felt stuck with cards you don’t love, but don’t want to lose on
- Wondered how to balance time, capital, and attention in this hobby
…this episode is meant to be a reset button.
Website: Slabnomics.com
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