It began with a single $20 booster pack, the kind you choose without giving it much thought as you walk up to the register. That impulse buy didn’t just start a hobby for one Toronto teen. For most adults, it’s still hard to fully understand how cardboard, nostalgia, and market logic can all come together in the same world.
The beginning of the story is not unique. There are a lot of kids who have opened Pokémon boxes in the hopes of finding a rare hidden Charizard. What made a difference in this case were the spreadsheets, the research, the early mornings spent scrolling through eBay listings that had already been sold, and finally, a trading business that was making well over six figures.
One way to tell this story might sound like a fantasy. It’s not. Within the last few years, Pokémon cards have grown into a real secondary market. According to data from The Pokémon Company, around 10 billion cards were made just in 2025. Some older sealed boxes and high-grade rare cards are still going up in value, even though the print runs that mattered the most ended years ago. Scarcity isn’t just made up to sound good; it’s built in. Every two to three years, a product is no longer being made. When this happens, supply gets tight, but collector demand doesn’t.
Early on, this teen understood something that many adult investors still find hard to explain: the card market rewards those who are patient and clear. You don’t have to chase every card. Professional authenticators give a perfect 10 rating to the ones that are sold for a lot more than copies that are only slightly flawed. A small fold, a bent corner, or a print flaw that you can’t see can all lower the value by a large amount. It takes time to learn how to do that kind of detailed quality assessment. The vast majority of buyers never bother.
It is important to keep in mind the larger generational context here. According to a report from 2026 by ZipDo, 68 percent of people who bought collectibles in the U.S. in 2023 were millennials, and 35 percent of people in Gen Z had bought collectibles the year before. People here aren’t kids getting toys. These are young people who see physical collectibles as an alternative to money—something real in a financial world that feels more and more vague and unstable.
But it’s still important to be honest about the risks. Thomas Ravert, managing director of Pathway Capital Corp, says it straight out: a collectible you buy today might not be worth as much when you sell it four years from now. There is a market for nostalgia, but it won’t last forever and we can’t count on it. The teen from Toronto seems to be successful because he or she knows this and treats the hobby like a business instead of a lottery. They know when to hold on to sealed items and when to sell graded singles.
You can feel the change in energy when you walk into any card shop today. Teenagers huddle over phones in hobby shops from Manhattan to Mississauga to check the values of cards in real time and argue about which sets are worth cracking and which sealed boxes should be left alone. It feels more like a trading floor than a playground. Yes, a small one. But it still makes sense.
It’s almost poetic that a franchise that started in 1996 for kids on Game Boy handhelds is now quietly turning teens into business owners. It likely wasn’t what the designers had in mind. Yet, markets don’t really care about what people want. They care about who shows up early enough to understand both supply and demand. It was a kid in Toronto with twenty dollars who was interested enough to follow the thread all the way through.
