9 grading mistakes killing your sports card and Pokémon profits broken down by skill level. 

Matt covers PSA's new 50–70 business day turnaround at the $80 tier, why Beckett only bumps a certain amount off the average, how PSA actually grades, and why annualized ROI matters more than raw margin. 

Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced grading traps drawn from ~$50K in personal grading spend over 18 months. 

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Five of the most graded cards in history. Every grade from every grader. The data says a PSA 10 is easier to obtain than most competing top grades, and the market pays for it anyway.

Cards analyzed: 2023 Van Gogh Pikachu, 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie, 1990 Fleer Michael Jordan, 1986 Topps Jerry Rice rookie, 1999 Unlimited Charizard Holo.

Covered: PSA vs BGS vs CGC vs SGC vs TAG, gem rates and condition rarity, percentile difficulty by grade, BGS 10 Pristine and Black Label scarcity, CGC 10 Pristine mispricing, why SGC 10s look underpriced, PSA 9 value cases, and why I have to play Devil's advocate with PSA.

Sourcing note: population data from GemRate and public pop reports. Values are last-sale references, not appraisals.

Keep Building.

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Grading built this market. Grading is now changing again.

This episode traces card grading from the 1990s, when buyers and sellers eyeballed condition and negotiated it live, through the trust-building years of the mid 2010s, into the COVID volume surge that turned grading into the backbone of an asset class. We cover what old label standards mean for the population data you rely on today, and why PSA 10 counts across sports and TCG look nothing like they did in 2020.

From there we get into the squeeze. Bulk and value submission tiers are closing across the major graders. We work through what an $80 per card floor does to submission math, how lock-up time factors into grading ROI, and which cards stop making sense to send at all.

The back half covers what each grade actually represents. PSA 10, BGS 9.5 True Gem, BGS 10 Pristine, Black Label, CGC 10 Pristine, and where TAG sits. Vintage centering versus ultra modern parallels. Then three predictions on where grade premiums move next.

Topics: card grading history, PSA population inflation, bulk submission shutdown, grading cost thresholds, repackers and breakers, institutional capital in collectibles, BGS Black Label, CGC 10 Pristine, TAG accuracy, Pokemon and ultra modern grading, PSA 9 versus PSA 10 ratios.

Keep Building.

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The bull run is roughly a year and a half old. People are getting nervous.

Matt takes the temperature three ways: Fanatics Fest, the National, and the SoCo Expo. Three different reads on the same hobby.

Covered in this episode:

 Loss aversion and the psychology behind selling
 Why the COVID comparison breaks down
 Institutional money, breaking, and new distribution
 The Panini to Fanatics shift as a market signal
 Pokemon, One Piece, Disney, F1, and modern soccer as early markets
 What a healthy pullback looks like

No call on the top. A method for reading the room.

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The hobby is loud. Buzz, hype, panic...and it all sounds the same until you learn which frequencies matter.

Fresh off Fanatics Fest and headed to The National in Chicago, Matt breaks down what he saw on the floor and what it says about where the sports card and tcg markets are going. 

Then it's into listener questions: does soccer rebound? Matt walks through:

• The full World Cup cycle,
• why he was wrong on Pulisic, 
• why you sell before the tournament and not during, 
• and why he's still long-term bullish on soccer cards with the World Cup hosted stateside.

Finally, Pokémon. The index has been up 27 straight weeks even while headline cards pulled back 40%. New collectors are shook. Veterans aren't. A pullback is not a crash and Matt explains how to tell the difference.

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What do 18 years of fantasy football tell us about sports cards markets?

This episode maps the five phases of dynasty fantasy football onto sports card and TCG investing. 

The core argument: most people think you win in the accumulation phase. You don't. You win in the two phases before it, and the two after.

Covered in this episode:

• The running back age cliff as a model for card value curves
• Hype as opium: why "best shape of his life" and "this player's team is going to be good" are the same worthless signal
• Jonathan Taylor vs Clyde Edwards-Helaire, and what that trade teaches about buying undervalued assets
• Why Messi cards will not go 2-3x on a World Cup win (10-20% bump, then a fade)
• Cash flow management and why stale inventory is locked capital
• The three things championship teams actually do

You cannot manage what you have not measured.

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Is the PSA 9 dead? Not so fast. Matt digs into three iconic cards across three sports to test a strange pattern: PSA 9s outperforming PSA 10s.

He indexes every sale against player and sport baskets, then walks the data. 2003 Topps Chrome LeBron. 2014 World Cup Prizm Messi. 1999 Base Set Charizard.

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 A 15-month soccer card investment fund, reviewed in real time during the 2026 World Cup. Why demand trickles top-down in illiquid markets, why case hits (Kaboom, Color Blast, Stained Glass) hold a floor, and why Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland moved the market while prospects burned capital. Supply, demand, and the pre-tournament dip. 

Invest, don't gamble. 

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 I looked at all 83 parallels of Victor Wembanyama's 2023 Prizm rookie and indexed every sale against his player market. The best returns did not come from the 1/1s. This episode is a thought dump on that, plus two bigger questions: is vintage cheap relative to modern, and what happens to slab prices now that PSA cut off low-value grading. Your job this week is to tell me which project matters most to you. 

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One Victor Wembanyama rookie card. Sixty-three parallels. Every grade, every grader, tracked from first sale to today. 

Only on Slabnomics will you hear a ranking of all parallels by return percentage AND grader breakdowns.

I broke down the entire 2023 Panini Prizm #136 rainbow to find which colors and which grades actually paid, and the answers cut against what the hobby repeats. The famous Silver underperformed. A PSA 9 beat the PSA 10 in a lot of parallels. 

Listen in for which parallels had the best ROI; a full data teardown of a $138 million card market. 

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