Author: Melissa Bridwell

There is a time in every market cycle when something out of the ordinary causes things to change. In February, a Pikachu Illustrator card owned by Logan Paul sold at auction for $16.492 million. That was the moment for most people. It sold for more than any other trading card ever. It’s not the most expensive baseball card. These sports memorabilia are not the most expensive. This is without a doubt the most expensive trading card. At that number, it’s hard not to stop. It’s shocking not because of itself, but because of what’s around it. About five years ago,…

Watching a room full of serious adults bid thousands of dollars on cards that kids used to carry around in their backpacks and trade on playgrounds is a little strange. But that’s exactly what’s been going on, and the numbers that come with these sales are starting to get our attention in a different way. Over the past few years, the Pokémon card market has steadily grown in the auction world. But 2025 has pushed things to a point where even experienced auctioneers are taking a moment to think. Heritage Auctions recently held a sale of trading cards that brought…

Sometime in the past few years, sports trading cards quietly turned into real money-making tools. A piece of cardboard with two signatures, a patch of jersey fabric, and a hole in it can now sell for millions of dollars without getting much attention. That’s the world we live in. It’s important to pay close attention to a lawsuit that says the auction system that runs a lot of that market was hacked from the inside. Market for sports cards Alt sent a lawsuit to the New York Supreme Court this week against PWCC, the company that used to own an…

If you think about the same idea for six weeks, you become very focused on it. Daniel saw it in himself: that kind of tunnel vision where you can’t tell if what you’ve made is smart or stupid. He was making a tool to help people see their portfolios and was trying to connect their stock holdings to a football formation. But somewhere along the way, he happened upon a conversation that felt more real than anything he’d read in a financial newsletter: people in Calgary and across Canada were buying NFL rookie cards in a quiet, methodical way, similar…

The line started to form early. People were already lining up outside the Fresno Fairgrounds Commerce Building on June 20 before it even opened. Kids were carrying binders, adults had backpacks, and some vendors were still carrying boxes across the parking lot. The crowd had grown to over 3,000 by mid-morning. That’s a lot of people for a card show in the Central Valley of California. That is an assertion. It’s been two years since The Big Fresno Card Show began. At first, it was small, with only about 70 to 80 vendor tables and, on a good day, 500…

On draft night, there is a certain kind of electricity that flows through the trading card market. Collecting money is already going on while the commissioner reads a name and the new draftee puts on a hat. Before the cameras cut away, prices change. They picked Florida defensive tackle Caleb Banks with the 18th pick in the draft on April 23, 2026. That electricity had a special charge because this one had a story attached to it. Banks isn’t your average first-round pick, and teams knew that. He is a little over six feet six inches tall, weighs 327 pounds,…

Every teacher secretly wants that one moment when students stop looking at the clock and start arguing about ideas. Something to do with a board game, a die, and the ghost of Marshall McLuhan seems to be causing that moment to happen more often lately. The MediuM card and board game is based on McLuhan’s Tetrad, which is also called the Laws of Media. Marshall McLuhan, a famous Canadian philosopher, came up with this framework and later formalized it with his son Eric McLuhan in their 1988 book Laws of Media: The New Science. The four laws ask what a…

One type of athlete quits the game and goes on with their life in a way that no one really knows about. Josh Donaldson, the former third baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays who carried the team’s World Series hopes on his back, looked like he might be one of those. Retired in early 2024 and not seen much since. Then he walked into a podcast locker room and casually said that he owned trading cards worth about $35 million. John Elway, who was sitting next to him, choked on his drink. We can pretty much sum it up in…

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…

A certain moment tells us a lot about where this business has come to. A worker at a hobby store on North Island takes a Mind Stone card out of a pack. It is one of only 150 ever made, and within hours, the store’s phone starts ringing with questions from famous American athletes. The card is finally sold for about the same amount as a small down payment on a house, and two employees personally bring it to America the following week. That’s not a startup dream. In fact, that did happen at Hobby Lords. The 34-year-old managing director…