Good Times; Bad Times: Have we now had our share?

katoy2j said:
I don't see much impact to the hobby.

Interest rates rising only matter if you have debt and/or are heavily levered.

If you were paying 5 figures or more for cardboard it's because you likely had plenty of disposable income and interest rates could rise to 50% and it won't matter because you likely didn't have any or very little debt to begin with.

High end cards will likely hold their value extremely well because there are such scarcity on them.

The housing market and the card market are completely different. You aren't getting a mortgage to buy a PSA 9 Ovechkin SPA rookie. You had the money to buy the card and you bought it. A lot of people think of these cards as investments. So they are fine holding cards for years. The boom in cardboard was a result of people who had bought cards years ago at lower prices and as increased demand came into the hobby cards were sold for multiples of what they paid for them. The people who bought those cards at high prices did so because they could afford them and likely have plenty of financial resources that don't rely on what interest rates are. They won't have to rely on selling their collection at lower prices to pay for food.

The majority of collectors are the 99% of the hobby who have a set amount of disposable income. They for the most part were priced out of the current hobby already and buy items like series 1 and 2 primarily. They may pause if there situation changes but it won't have much of an impact on the hobby either that would create any kind of crash. A young gun dropping 10 or 15 dollars means nothing.

Box prices will likely come back to normal prices which will just bring back people who were priced out to come back in.

Inflation is a problem but it's a World problem. One which every country is tackling. Remember though this was caused by the pandemic primarily and inflation data is quite a bit behind and you are already seeing prices dropping where if we haven't reached peak inflation yet we will very shortly. We aren't even sure to get a recession and if we do it will be relatively minor one and unemployment rates are super low. A recession is not always a bad thing and if it curbs demand shortly it will allow inflation to fall even faster.

The idea that people will be rushing to liquidate their collections at huge losses to pay bills is a comical one. It's not going to happen. Will a couple people have to? Sure it's possible if you over leveraged yourself and took out money from a home equity line of credit to buy cards but very few people are in that category. That's such a small fraction of a percentage of people though and any cards they are forced to sell are likely so scarce that they certainly won't sell for pennies on the dollar as small dip in price will likely be seen as a steal by another collector
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If the hobby is just high end then yeah sure. But it's not. Unfoturnately there are people who took out loans, HELOCs, credit cards, etc to buy cards. The Makar YG collectors are not high end collectors. These people will not be as eager to participate in the hobby for the next little while and may need the money now for whatever.

While you may not think the YG collectors are important but those who started with YGs at the end of the last cycle benefitted from the boom and upgraded their YGs into FWA. And the FWA holders upgraded their RCs into Cup RCs, etc. So even then the high end market could see stagnation but agreed should hold out better than the base RC guys.

There are non-zero amount of people who are severely impacted by higher interest rates, high inflation, etc. in the following ways:

1. People who borrowed to buy cards based on some investment advice that they also paid for
2. Gambling addicts who used credit to enter group breaks, etc.
3. Small business owners who entered into the hobby due to the craze and used business lines of credit to do so

This list is not exhaustive.

Even your comment on people with a set disposable income to buy cards. If they set $X away from their paycheque for Hobby, and their rent goes up y% and transportation to and from their job is up y% and basic foods are all up y%... then they will have to reduce their budget from $X to $x*(1-y%). Again these budget conscious people may not have been in the Cup market but the YG market will feel the loss of these people right away. And maybe that will trickle ot high end maybe not.
 
The hobby won't change because the price of boxes is not dramatically increased by the manufacturer. Upper Deck sells the boxes to the distributors.

Because of supply chain issues a lot of distributors simply didn't get the allocation they asked for or needed. They then went to the stores and gave them a fraction of what they preordered. For the most part they didn't really increase the price on preorders.

They then sold their remainder to stores at heavily inflated prices to make up for the fact they didn't get the normal volume. Stores then had to decide if they were willing to pay the premium price which would then be paid by the customer.

None of these are long term issues as they were greatly caused by the pandemic. There were major issues with supply chain and printing which is why things are so backlogged. Believe me Upper Deck lost out big time by not having product available for regular release but there was nothing they could do. As supply chains get back on track this won't be an issue and products will eventually get back to a more normal schedule and a more normal production runs. It's mostly been solved at the low end level of series 1 and 2 which you can get for the same price as release date from distributors.

Anyone who leveraged themselves heavily to invest in hockey cards can have financial issues sure. However they are such a tiny fraction that there simply won't be an issue even if they are forced to dump all their cards. Someone will buy them and it certainly won't be at penny on the dollars. However people in this position are a decimal of a percentage point.

Everything you are worried about is the secondary market. The secondary market really only caters to high end cards and low end cards are pretty much insignificant to it. A 100 dollar card that sells for 75 means nothing to the market. After every Stanley Cup there are a few players who have their cards sell for double or triple or what they did before. Then it goes back to close to what it was before a few months later. The market doesn't crater.
Upper Deck makes no extra or less money once the box is sold to shops or distributors.

You relate to past economic issues as a thesis to what will happen in the card market. It doesn't apply. Past issues happened because people lost their jobs and lost their houses. The majority of people pay a mortgage or rent every month so those things are important. Cardboard is not. You can't eat your 2010-11 young guns set. Is it possible that people who have a fixed income and collect will have to dial down their spending? Sure but that would apply to things like travel, restaurants or going to the movies as well. For 99% of the hobby cards are something that is disposable income.

People speculated on Kevin Mass rookie cards back in the day too. The hobby survived and thrived after it. Back then the issue was there was such a crazy amount of supply that was never going to meet demand. When a product sold well they would print even more. Those days don't exist anymore. They make a print run now and that's it. There aren't really issues with over supply to crash the market.

If a store struggles because they over leveraged themselves then it is what it is. That store could go under but the hobby will move on and there won't be a crash. What happens though with stores that have nothing to do with hockey cards though. It's part of a business cycle. Otherwise anyone could open a store in any category and make money. It doesn't work that way.

Gambling addicts who bought group breaks doesn't do anything either. They could have easily lost their money in the casino instead.

Will things affect individuals? Sure it's certainly possible if you over leveraged yourself. The same way it would with a car. The difference is if you can't pay your car payment they come back and take your car. Nobody is knocking on the door looking to reposes your Cale Makar YG. My point is though there won't be any kind of meaningful crash where you can buy cards for pennies on the dollar as what was mentioned previously.

While some may seem cards as an investment it is simply the greater fools theory. You buy something hoping to sell it to someone else for more. Eventually someone on the chain won't be able to sell it for more. So they can sell it for less or keep it. High end cards are so scarce nowadays that if you want to sell it you may have to eat a loss and get 85% of what you paid for it but you certainly won't have to settle for 10% of the price you paid.

The majority of low end cards people don't actually care what their prices are. People will collect sets or simply want to have a card that is their favourite player. It will sit somewhere in their room and equally as likely to end up in a landfill as it is the secondary market. There are a lot more blaster boxes of product that are sold as opposed to hobby boxes. Those drive the hobby market for producers

Again it doesn't matter if a tiny amount of people over leveraged themselves because they really won't matter to the hobby. The producers have a monopoly and as long as they don't over supply the market then they are fine. Upper Deck or Topps certainly won't lose any sleep if someone over leveraged themselves in group breaks hoping to make a profit. The secondary market is not one they pay much attention to.

The biggest risk to the hobby lives outside the hockey world in my mind in that Fanatics is the one that eventually over leverages themselves and has to cease operations. In a scenario like that since they will be running so much of the other sports I could see a problem where there is a year or two where no product is put out until other arrangements are made. The leagues did that to themselves though in their push for exclusives. It works until it doesn't but there will eventually be someone else to come in and pick up the slack where the damage is basically a year or two of no product.
 
katoy2j said:
The hobby won't change because the price of boxes is not dramatically increased by the manufacturer. Upper Deck sells the boxes to the distributors.

Because of supply chain issues a lot of distributors simply didn't get the allocation they asked for or needed. They then went to the stores and gave them a fraction of what they preordered. For the most part they didn't really increase the price on preorders.

They then sold their remainder to stores at heavily inflated prices to make up for the fact they didn't get the normal volume. Stores then had to decide if they were willing to pay the premium price which would then be paid by the customer.

None of these are long term issues as they were greatly caused by the pandemic. There were major issues with supply chain and printing which is why things are so backlogged. Believe me Upper Deck lost out big time by not having product available for regular release but there was nothing they could do. As supply chains get back on track this won't be an issue and products will eventually get back to a more normal schedule and a more normal production runs. It's mostly been solved at the low end level of series 1 and 2 which you can get for the same price as release date from distributors.

Anyone who leveraged themselves heavily to invest in hockey cards can have financial issues sure. However they are such a tiny fraction that there simply won't be an issue even if they are forced to dump all their cards. Someone will buy them and it certainly won't be at penny on the dollars. However people in this position are a decimal of a percentage point.

Everything you are worried about is the secondary market. The secondary market really only caters to high end cards and low end cards are pretty much insignificant to it. A 100 dollar card that sells for 75 means nothing to the market. After every Stanley Cup there are a few players who have their cards sell for double or triple or what they did before. Then it goes back to close to what it was before a few months later. The market doesn't crater.
Upper Deck makes no extra or less money once the box is sold to shops or distributors.

You relate to past economic issues as a thesis to what will happen in the card market. It doesn't apply. Past issues happened because people lost their jobs and lost their houses. The majority of people pay a mortgage or rent every month so those things are important. Cardboard is not. You can't eat your 2010-11 young guns set. Is it possible that people who have a fixed income and collect will have to dial down their spending? Sure but that would apply to things like travel, restaurants or going to the movies as well. For 99% of the hobby cards are something that is disposable income.

People speculated on Kevin Mass rookie cards back in the day too. The hobby survived and thrived after it. Back then the issue was there was such a crazy amount of supply that was never going to meet demand. When a product sold well they would print even more. Those days don't exist anymore. They make a print run now and that's it. There aren't really issues with over supply to crash the market.

If a store struggles because they over leveraged themselves then it is what it is. That store could go under but the hobby will move on and there won't be a crash. What happens though with stores that have nothing to do with hockey cards though. It's part of a business cycle. Otherwise anyone could open a store in any category and make money. It doesn't work that way.

Gambling addicts who bought group breaks doesn't do anything either. They could have easily lost their money in the casino instead.

Will things affect individuals? Sure it's certainly possible if you over leveraged yourself. The same way it would with a car. The difference is if you can't pay your car payment they come back and take your car. Nobody is knocking on the door looking to reposes your Cale Makar YG. My point is though there won't be any kind of meaningful crash where you can buy cards for pennies on the dollar as what was mentioned previously.

While some may seem cards as an investment it is simply the greater fools theory. You buy something hoping to sell it to someone else for more. Eventually someone on the chain won't be able to sell it for more. So they can sell it for less or keep it. High end cards are so scarce nowadays that if you want to sell it you may have to eat a loss and get 85% of what you paid for it but you certainly won't have to settle for 10% of the price you paid.

The majority of low end cards people don't actually care what their prices are. People will collect sets or simply want to have a card that is their favourite player. It will sit somewhere in their room and equally as likely to end up in a landfill as it is the secondary market. There are a lot more blaster boxes of product that are sold as opposed to hobby boxes. Those drive the hobby market for producers

Again it doesn't matter if a tiny amount of people over leveraged themselves because they really won't matter to the hobby. The producers have a monopoly and as long as they don't over supply the market then they are fine. Upper Deck or Topps certainly won't lose any sleep if someone over leveraged themselves in group breaks hoping to make a profit. The secondary market is not one they pay much attention to.

The biggest risk to the hobby lives outside the hockey world in my mind in that Fanatics is the one that eventually over leverages themselves and has to cease operations. In a scenario like that since they will be running so much of the other sports I could see a problem where there is a year or two where no product is put out until other arrangements are made. The leagues did that to themselves though in their push for exclusives. It works until it doesn't but there will eventually be someone else to come in and pick up the slack where the damage is basically a year or two of no product.
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This post is the exact reason why this engineered recession to control inflation is going to hit society assymetrically. It's like you can't even phathom that most people in the hobby aren't high end colectos. And those who don't buy high end didn't also get hooked on cheap money and levered up to buy stupid stuff (car included, that thing is a known depreciating asset and people still lever up to buy it). Then you just disparage them by saying the low end sucks and won't impact the hobby... the hobby isn't just high end. I've never opened a Series 1 pack in my life but that doesn't mean their cards don't matter. Series 1 is a way bigger profit maker than Cup. High end collectors need low end collectors to subsidize their high end stuff or else the high end doesn't get made and if you want autos you'll just have to do private signings. Some Series 1 collectors move on to FWA then Cup.

Also you think someone who has a mortgage or a car payment is going to keep their cars while their stuff gets repossessed? Not that it matters because those cards belong in the landfill anyway right?
 
You missed what I said I believe. The low end is the majority of the market. The retail purchaser. The person that buys a blaster at Target or Wal Mart.

The OP main point was that the sky was falling and that cards would be sold for pennies on the dollar. My point is that it won't happen because the cards in the secondary market have no impact to producers. They have made their money. They are also so scarce that there will always be a buyer. Selling something for 10% less than you bought it for isn't a crash. You simply overpaid. However if there is only 25 copies of said card then chances are you can find a home for that card in time for the price you paid.

Lower end doesn't move the market to create a crash. It just doesn't happen. There are players from 2005-06 that sold for multiples of what they did today that you can get for nothing. Dion Phaneuff was once one of the hottest young guns.

You also missed my point about cards ending up in a landfill. It's not because they are worthless or hold no value. It's because the majority of people who bought those cards didn't buy them as an investment. They bought them as an impulse purchase by picking up a blaster and don't see the hobby as most people on here do. It was something fun to do at that time and they moved on from it and went onto other interests. Got tired of their cards and just threw them out because it was never an investment to them. It was just something to do for entertainment. Look at some of the most expensive cards from the 90's. You have cards from the mid to late 90's with print runs in the thousands that are extremely valuable because the majority of people who ended up with them looked at them for a minute and put them in a box. Then 10 years later just threw them out even though parallels and what not could fetch hundreds if not thousands of dollars. You and most on here are an educated and passionate collector. The majority of the market though and the most important part of the market treats sports cards like a magazine. It gives them temporary enjoyment, it sits in a closet for years and is forgotten and then it gets discarded. Customers like this are 99% of the card market. Collectors that are on this board or attend the Expo are the 1% of the market. The super high end collectors might be the 1% of the 1% thats why there won't be any crash because it's simply too small of a niche. For every hobby shop there are probably 50 other stores like Wal-Mart or Shoppers Drug Mart selling blasters.
 
BrookIsland said:
With 20-21 SPA now finally being released in the next few weeks, I'm again wondering whether we're getting close to some form of major correction in wax...
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I think the short answer is yes.

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pwag31 - I'd argue it's even more extreme than 100 CAD off 329 CAD given the delta in the value proposition of SPA Hockey: if the box price is flat (and/or 5-15% up) on 19-20 given inflation, rising production costs, etc., then I think fine given the decreased value per box, but not 3.5x.
 
pwag31 said:
those prices are still $100.00 more then they should be in my opinion. IF they are in CAD.
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Prices were in USD.

BrookIsland said:
pwag31 - I'd argue it's even more extreme than 100 CAD off 329 CAD given the delta in the value proposition of SPA Hockey: if the box price is flat (and/or 5-15% up) on 19-20 given inflation, rising production costs, etc., then I think fine given the decreased value per box, but not 3.5x.
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I agree with you both. I feel like 4 or 5 years ago a hobby box of SPA cost ~$110-130 CAD.

Gone are the days of 3 guaranteed FWAs... then it was 3 guaranteed autos, only 2 FWA... now you're guaranteed 1 FWA.

The secondary market for 2020-21 FWAs is hot (certainly box prices contribute to this). Kaprizov, Lafreniere, Stutzle, Sorokin, Oettinger, JRobertson, Norris all sell above $300 CAD.
 
It's met with a relief from financial markets because there is a high probability that it means we have already reached peak inflation. Once you have reached peak inflation then you can temper future interest rate hikes needed as inflation then comes down on it's own, significantly lowering the risk of a recession.

It also means that you will go back to lowering interest rates within less than a year because once inflation is under control then it's easy to bring rates down to a neutral rate.

The markets are 6 months ahead of all of us and what the are saying is that corporations prepared for the worst and things are nowhere near as bad as expected. Supply chains are normalizing and people in the workforce aren't changing jobs every 2 months any longer. Corporations can now focus on productivity which has been the real problem the last few years. Record low productivity in the workforce because of the pandemic and safety precautions.

If you have reached peak inflation then a year from today the inflation rate will likely be a negative number thus allowing you to smooth out the inflation rate over multiple years. So while an 8% increase from 2021 to 2022 looks ugly, if the 2022 to 2023 number is -2% year over year then you have an approximately 3-4% inflation rate from the 2021 to 2023 period which is more than manageable .
 
So couple things: (i) I'm definitely not convinced that we've reached peak inflation and (ii) I'm not sure we're going to move from inflationary to deflationary in 12 months.

Have you seen any G7/G20 central banker say we're now at peak inflation? I haven't.

I'm not a central banker but at least in my experience, observation and (albeit long time ago), Econ classes - that much of a whipsaw (moving, as you suggest, 1000 bps from inflation to deflation in 12 months) to monetary policy is likely way too much for an economy to safely bear before the Volcker shocks (that quincy mentioned) or something different/worse come into play.

McKinsey and other top-flight consultants are definitely not always right, but comments like this speak to this not being a single rate hike and done:
“The debate has shifted on inflation,” Asutosh Padhi, managing partner overseeing North America at consulting firm McKinsey & Co., said in an interview with POLITICO editors and reporters. “People have stopped trying to forecast, at least clients I speak with, on how much and how long” the run of inflation will last. “It’s permanent enough, therefore let’s strategize to think what it means to lead through inflation.”
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Canada's central bank isn't alone in rate hikes. The US Fed is likely raising rates by another 75 bps at their next meeting. Btw - this is the article headline from Reuters: "Fed to stick to 75 bps hike in July; 40% chance of recession."

We're not done here. We're still printing the highest CPI spikes since the 1970s in the US and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who determines the constituents of CPI, has removed some of the largest moving constituents because they spiked the most so we don't even really have an apples-to-apples comparison from then.

These aren't the only economic indicators that are worrisome.

New home construction falling to where it was at the height of the pandemic, is also not a good sign particularly if you're right that supply chain is normalized - which, by the way, at least in my experience is absolutely not the case.

Hopefully I'm wrong.

But if I'm right, things are going to get worse before they get better. And in the most discretionary of non-essential goods spending (i.e., cards), hard to see how cards don't take a big hit.
 
They will continue to raise interest rates for the rest of the year. Possibly into 2023 as well. The goal is to get the inflation rate down. The typical way to do that is to raise the interest rate to above the inflation rate. Now going to an 8% central interest rate would cause massive issues so that won't happen. What is key is to reach peak inflation because once you reach that point every time you raise interest rates it brings down inflation even further going forward and you can then take your foot off the gas in terms of super aggressive rate hikes. Eventually the inflation rate falls below the central bank rate and at that time you can start dropping interest rates to a neutral rate and let inflation run it's course at the normal 2% pace.

All the inflation data coming out is past data and every interest rate hike effects the future. Already at the next US rate hike they were expecting to raise 75 basis points. They may consider dropping to 50 since there are signs in the system of peak inflation and prices dropping. While gas prices are still high, they are 20% lower than they were in May and this is the peak driving season. The high prices softened demand and that trickles down to everything in supply chain to lower costs.

As they say the cure for high prices is high prices.

New home construction is supposed to fall. Housing was at record highs and with interest rates rising its designed to soften demand and thus resale pricing retreats. New homes are generally more expensive than resale so you don't rush to build homes in a rising rate environment. You build existing sold homes. The slowdown in new builds lowers demand for materials such as copper and lumber that got ahead of itself because of high demand thus causing prices to fall as they have. The market normalizes. It starts to pick up again once rates start to fall again which they will again in 2023.

Supply chains are not back to 100% but that's not the goal. The World worked on a just in time model and we're unlikely to ever go back fully to what it was before. However companies have adapted and are adjusting. One of the biggest issues with supply chain pain in the past was microchip shortages. Multi nationals have brought that facet in house where companies like Apple and Samsung now produce these items in North America which was unheard of. It's not a light switch though and takes time but there are strong signs that things are going well.

The biggest issue with inflation was wages rising out of control. I had friends who moved jobs 4 times in a year because there was a 10K raise every time they moved. This created a dangerous spiral because then that position needed to be filled at a higher salary. That seems to have stagnated which is a good thing. The job market slowing down is the ideal scenario. The unemployment rate is ridiculously low. Companies though for the most part are in extremely good shape. Any layoffs are minor and most companies are going with not replacing exiting positions as opposed to layoffs which is an optimal scenario as opposed to being forced to lay off employees for survival.

I know you believe the sky is falling but I assure you it's not. It's more likely we won't have a recession at this point. I would say it's a 75% chance we won't. Even if we do though it's going to be a very minor one that very few would notice. It will also be very quick and North America will return to growth in 2023 in the worst case scenario.

Europe is a very different scenario because they lack energy independence. It will be extremely painful there if the Ukraine issues continue as natural gas prices are multiple times higher there than North America and the risk is more of a humanitarian issue in that there may not be able to heat their homes in the winter. North America though and especially Canada will actually thrive. Canada only uses 1/3 of the actual oil related resources we produce with the majority getting exported to the US.

The amount of money going into cards was always going to come down. People were locked in their homes with nothing to buy. Lots of people got back into collecting cards again from their childhood days. Once things opened up again they were going to exit the market and go back to putting their dollars to what they did before the pandemic. For most it was travel related expenses. Even if a family of 4 took a week long vacation that required a flight it was 10k a year. For the better parts of 2 years that money had nowhere to go and for some people it went to cards. I certainly don't see any kind of meaningful mass liquidation of collections because everyone is struggling. Could some be forced to see because of life circumstances? Sure but that can happen at any time.

I know you like to compare the card market to the financial markets but they are completely different. You don't buy cards on margin, a stock can go bankrupt and shareholders are left holding the bag. The issue with stocks is that a retail investor has very little control of the share price. If you hold rare, valuable cards you can decide when to sell them and at the price you want. Doesn't mean you will get it but because collectors control the market they aren't forced to sell and most will just hold onto a card till they get the amount they want. Hobby shops I'm not a huge fan of long term as I think they will have a challenge in an e-commerce world. Especially with one company in fanatics that has a background in e-commerce basically having a monopoly in most of the major sports.
 
katoy2j said:
The issue with stocks is that a retail investor has very little control of the share price. If you hold rare, valuable cards you can decide when to sell them and at the price you want. Doesn't mean you will get it but because collectors control the market they aren't forced to sell and most will just hold onto a card till they get the amount they want.
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Pretty much everything you’ve said is bang-on, but I wanted to expand on the above as cards are heterogeneous goods/assets (they are assets as many people will use them as a store of wealth). I think we’ll see some segments of the card market get hammered more heavily than others:

(1) As you say, rare cards (let’s say with print runs < 15) shouldn’t see much of a correction, since there just won’t be many recorded sales. If sellers don’t get the prices they want, they won’t sell. Very illiquid market.

(2) More common cards that have large print runs and are widely-held (like YGs), have been behaving like financial assets in recent years due to the high number of trades and the widely-available information about trading prices. Given that their print runs are fairly high, I’d expect more sellers and fewer buyers in this category — hence a price correction as the economy heads into a downturn.
 
katoy2j - I don't know if it's deliberate but we're still talking past each other.

The point, going back to the original post in this thread, is all about my concern around two things:

1. Any kind of broader economic set back (whether that takes the form of recession or worse or more mild) could be bad for the card market (meaning manufacturers, dealers, breakers, and collectors)

2. Whether this broader economic set back, if any, will bring box prices back to earth

I continue to think that any form of recession (whether very mild or more intense) will be bad for the broader eco-system of cards on the basis of the reduction in discretionary spending and in turn, on demand. I believe this to be the case for all the reasons I've posted in this thread which I'm not going to repost here.

The supplemental additional posts that I've made from the OP generally, at least in my view, support that some kind of economic correction is happening. We may disagree about the severity, but that G7 economies are struggling with inflation and GDP growth is somewhat unassailable.

On that basis, the big unknown, and again, the basis for the thread, is how that will affect the broader eco-system of cards given that a recession is typically not good for discretionary spending, which is generally the exact kind of spending that drives demand in cards.
 
The price of wax was raised by supply and demand issues mostly exacerbated by supply chain problems.

Lots of people had extra money during the lockdown and nowhere to spend it. Many childhood collectors went back to buying sports cards. With things opening up the majority of those collectors will go back to their normal lives ignoring cards again.

While still behind, producers are catching up so you will see a regular release schedule in Q4 of this year or Q1 of next year.

As for SPA pricing, I don't see that falling to previous pricing. It appears to me they value SPA as a more mid tier premium product now so while the price might retreat some from it's current price it probably won't ever go back to close to 2019 prices. They have elevated the brand to the market. Collectors enjoy hard signed autos and that's fine but there is a cost to that in the end.

SP retail was created for that reason to provide an affordable option for collectors so that SPA could progress into a different pricing tier.
 
Supply chain issues have delayed product, but product supply has dramatically increased.

At my end of the card spectrum (MVP) the Hobby print run has more than doubled from 20-21 to 21-22. Sounds like much the same for products like SPA. The current 21-22 MVP is selling for 37.- USD on one major site.

I'm not sure how 20-21 MVP got caught the hype train (corners, heavily damaged silvers, poor centering, and other factors) but was pushing 80.- USD this time last year. I'm also not convinced a lot of people were buying at those prices, but that's a different can of worms.
 
Sold off most of my graded Young Guns collection.

As soon as the graders (PSA and Beckett) are cleared out of their backlog, we'll see a massive influx of graded young guns onto the market, which will coincide with a massive reduction in demand. Might rebuy the ones I want later at a discount.
 
As someone whose other priorities in life took over the hobby, it's been an interesting ride to watch all of this from the sidelines.

If you've got vulture-like patience I think there could be some real deals to be had once the bubble completely bursts. Definitely some interesting times ahead!
 

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