A certain type of investor learns not to have to explain themselves at dinner parties. Around 2018, Marcus Heller, a hedge fund manager who works out of a small suite in DUMBO, Brooklyn, with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out over the Manhattan Bridge, became that type of investor. It was that year that he quietly started putting some of his extra money into Pokémon cards. No, not as a hobby. To make a point. It was about three years before anyone noticed the money coming back.
Heller ran concentrated equity strategies for almost twenty years. These were based on companies that had structural dominance, which meant they not only led their markets but also made competition very hard. Apple, Amazon, and Google. He knew, almost instinctively, that things that are hard to leave behind are the best sources of long-term wealth. Ecosystems where it costs money to switch. Networks that get stronger as more people join. Assets where the advantage in data grows faster than any competitor can copy. At some point in that thought process, Pokémon came up.
It seems crazy at first, but after giving it some thought, it makes sense. The Pokémon Company, which is a partnership between Nintendo and Game Freak, owns the Pokémon brand. It has been around since 1996 and doesn’t seem to be losing its cultural significance. In fact, the nostalgia cycle has made it stronger. The adults who used to open booster packs as kids in the late 1990s now have money that they don’t need to spend. Original Base Set boxes that have been sealed. Holographic Charizards that have been graded by PSA and are in perfect condition. Shadowless copies from the first run of prints. These aren’t little things. If they are in the right condition and have been graded by the right person, they are truly rare items that are part of a very loyal cultural ecosystem.
Heller started to buy quietly, the same way he would build a position in an equity: methodically, without making his intentions known, buying when prices were low and holding on for a long time. An early PSA 10 Charizard that could have brought $5,000 in 2017 went for over $300,000 at auction in 2021. Even after the collectibles boom during the pandemic and the subsequent slowdown, the cards that held their value were the ones that were really hard to find: low-pop PSA 10s, sealed vintage items in their original cellophane, and error cards that only exist because a printing mistake was found too late.
In a way, what Heller saw right away was like the Monopoly principle applied to a different type of asset. It’s not just sentimental value that makes the most valuable Pokémon cards valuable. They have control over a part of the board that no one else can get. For the first time, you can’t print any more Base Set cards. The number of PSA 10 Charizards is set by what already exists and what makes it through grading. With fewer items available and more people wanting to buy them, prices tend to move in one direction over time.
It’s still not clear how spread out his card collection is or what percentage of his overall collection is in collectibles at any given time. Like always, he hasn’t said much about specifics. However, people who know how he thinks say that he has a collection that is now worth seven figures. It wasn’t built by luck or viral resale flips, but by slowly collecting high-quality cards from the first print runs.
When you look at this from the outside, it’s hard not to notice the bigger picture. Alternative assets like cards, comics, sneakers, wine, and watches have been quietly making their way into institutional conversations for the past ten years. Collectors who entered the market with a strong sense of analysis and real expertise in the subject have, in some cases, made returns that are on par with those of traditional asset classes. Heller’s approach wasn’t based on nostalgia. Pattern recognition was used in a place where most of his peers weren’t looking.
That might be the most important part of the story. It’s not like Pokémon cards made people rich. It’s that someone who was trained to find structural advantage in markets found it somewhere they didn’t expect to, and they were brave enough to act on it before everyone else did.
