At a card show, seeing a 55-year-old businessman and a 19-year-old in a hoodie stand next to each other and reach for the same binder is rather interesting. Someone is after a 1952 Mickey Mantle. One is looking for a Charizard that was made in the first run. They can’t be in the same community at the same time.
Having fun with trading cards has been around for a long time. But no one could have predicted even ten years ago who would be in it, why they would be in it, or how much they would spend.
Brady Hill, a CEO from Louisiana who is 47 years old, bought his first car and paid for college with baseball cards. Now he’s really into the hobby again, and he has a 1916 Babe Ruth and a 1952 Mickey Mantle that are worth about $1.2 million between them. Cards have been worth about 20% of his and his wife’s total net worth. He once asked, “What’s more fun?” “Having a Babe Ruth rookie card or shares of stock where one false move and it goes down?” A lot of people are coming to the same answer to this question, which makes sense.
A list of the top 500 baseball cards has done more than twice as well as the S&P 500 over the past ten years. People are interested in numbers like those, and a lot of people are interested. The same market is being used by venture capitalists, professionals who are nostalgic, and hobbyists who like to do things on the weekends. The fact that they’re not really competing with each other is interesting, and maybe even a little surprising.
Some of the rarest cards in the world are owned by Ken Kendrick, who is the managing general partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks. By putting them in a frame, he talks about them like an art museum curator would. “The cards that I own are more akin to works of art,” he has said. Many people think that his 1909 T206 Honus Wagner is the most sought-after card ever made. Kendrick still thinks about the play sets he and his brother built when they were kids. The tension between memory and investment is likely what keeps people honest in this hobby.
Something just as interesting is going on at the other end of the market. Gen Z first learned about collecting cards through Pokémon, not baseball parks or old, dusty shops. Among Gen Z on eBay in 2025, trading cards were the most-bought used item, surpassing both clothing and electronics. That’s not a small piece of information. It seems like a whole generation has found something special about collecting things that the internet just hasn’t been able to replace. It looks like having a rare holographic card still means something in this day and age of streaming, scrolling, and subscriptions.
It’s not just age or background that makes this community truly diverse; it’s also the people who live here. People gather because they love the game. Some people get paid because the returns are real. A Pokémon set from the first run recently sold at auction for $98,000. It costs about $400,000 to buy a Grade 8 1952 Topps Mantle. Over the past ten years, the value of the Aaron rookie card has gone up by almost 830 percent. These numbers are no longer hobby numbers. There are, however, many collectors who are still the same people who used to trade cards at recess.
Professional Sports Authenticator’s work to make card grades more consistent has been very helpful. A 0–10 scale that almost everyone agrees on has built trust in the market, which changes a person’s opinion about a condition into something more like a fact that everyone agrees on. It also means that a teenager in Ohio and an old lawyer in Alabama can both try to get the same card with the same information on it. That’s not nothing.
It seems like the hobby is still trying to decide if it wants to be an investment, a cultural artifact, or a family tradition. Most likely all three. And the fact that it’s not clear might be its strength. There is room for everyone. For now, both the boss with the climate-controlled vault and the kid with the plastic-sleeved binder are welcome at the same table.
