Between seeing a Pikachu card sell for $16 million and reading that the average value of a Pokémon card rose nearly 46% in a single year, there’s a point where you start to wonder if the financial world has quietly changed while everyone was arguing about interest rates.
It’s not a joke. Card Ladder, a website that tracks trading card values, says that the value of Pokémon cards has gone up by about 3,261% in the last twenty years. To give you an idea, the S&P 500, which is what institutional investors chase for their whole careers, usually gives back about 12% a year. In recent years, Pokémon cards have made that look pretty small. It’s still not clear if this is a long-term asset class or just a fancy cultural moment dressed up in financial terms. That being said, the numbers are hard to ignore.
Who is buying is part of what makes this interesting. Roy Raftery, an expert on trading cards who works at the London-based auction house Stanley Gibbons Baldwin’s, has seen a clear change in the types of people who buy trading cards over the last few years. There are still collectors, like the kids who used to chase holographic Charizards when they were young. They are, however, sharing the market with a different type of buyer more and more: people who made a lot of money in cryptocurrency and are now looking for a place to put it. Raftery said, “People tell me that they’re putting their money in this because they have nothing else to do.” He meant that buyers aren’t so much interested in the cards themselves as they are in the asset they represent.
If you look around any crypto-related social media site, you’ll see the pattern. People talk about Pokémon card markets in the same way they talk about altcoins: they argue about price drops, look at price charts, and guess which sets will be valuable in the future. Ten years ago, this mix of cultures would have seemed crazy. Now it doesn’t even make people look twice.
Also, the demand that’s behind it is real. When Smyths opened in March of last year in Staines, U.K., there was already a long line outside the store waiting for more toys. There have been similar events all over the United States, and videos have gone around showing crowds stumbling over each other to get card packs. It only takes minutes for new albums to sell out. To find out where inventory has arrived, people work together on Discord servers and X. It seems like the frenzy is real and not fake, though once momentum builds, the two tend to feed off of each other.
The Pokémon Company has done its part. The franchise is now 30 years old, and to celebrate, they’ve been putting out special sets with characters from the late 1990s that are sure to please millennials. Stephanie Farnsworth, a media and communications lecturer at the University of Sunderland, put it very well when she called it a “Pokémon renaissance.” The timing, along with a collecting boom after the pandemic and a general desire for tangible assets in an uncertain economy, has led to conditions that are hard for even experienced analysts to fully explain.
Of course, not everyone has done well. People who aren’t as experienced have bought quick flips, and some of them have paid for it. A caller to Dave Ramsey’s podcast said they had bought Pokémon cards with credit cards for four months with the goal of reselling them for a profit, which put them in $26,000 of debt. It did not work out. These kinds of stories are a good way to remember that speculative markets always come with real risks, even when it comes to cardboard.
Even so, the numbers are still very interesting at the high end. An index made by Collectors, which owns the grading agency PSA, shows that the prices of Pokémon cards went up 282% from 2004 to 2020. In just the year 2020, that same index has gone up by 1,350%. Logan Paul, an influencer, sold a Pikachu Illustrator card earlier this year for over $16 million. He had bought the card for just over $5 million in 2021. This is the kind of return that most hedge fund managers would find hard to match in the same amount of time.
Even though it’s hard to put into a neat category, it’s hard not to notice that something real is going on here. It’s likely that we won’t find out any time soon if Pokémon cards should be talked about in terms of serious investments or if they should just be seen as a fun cultural phenomenon with a fringe of speculation. But the analysts who have begun to look at those price charts? They’re not trying to be funny.
