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 to how a fund manager builds a tech position. Not by chance. That’s not out of nostalgia. With charts and tables.
The market for sports cards has been very strong for a few years now, and the trend isn’t very subtle. This sentence, “Supply hasn’t kept up with demand,” should get the attention of any investor. A 2003 Topps Chrome LeBron James card that was worth about $1,050 in mid-April of that year went up to over $6,000 in just nine months. Not long ago, a 2018 Panini Prizm Luka Doncic card cost about $55. Now, it costs over $300. The odds of these things happening aren’t like winning the lottery; they make sense, like when you buy into a company early before the market figures out what some people already think.
The Calgary angle is interesting because it takes away some of the romanticism in American sports and leaves behind something colder and more calculated. The people who are collecting these items aren’t always huge NFL fans. Some of them didn’t know how deep an offense’s line was. What they can tell you is the difference between a PSA 9 and a PSA 10, why rarity is more important than popularity, and which first-year players are statistically underpriced compared to how well they’ll do in their second year. Framing might seem simple to people who have been interested in art for a long time. But it’s also just true.
It seems like the smartest people in this space are thinking about decades instead of quarters. Having cards tied to Hakeem Olajuwon or early Giannis Antetokounmpo rookies is not a trade; it’s a position. It wasn’t a hot hand if someone bought a Giannis Panini Prizm for $120 and held on to it for $180, $500, $1,000, and then to $2,000 or more. They were putting money on a personality, a career path, or a cultural moment that hadn’t quite come together yet. In 2018, growth investors talk about a company like Nvidia in the same way. Different asset class, same way of thinking.
Clearly, the risk profile is not the same. Cards can break. Grades can be disappointing. It’s not like a stock split would change the math overnight if someone got hurt and couldn’t work again. Still, it’s not clear if these risks are worse than holding on to a single tech name with a lot of conviction during a volatile period. You can’t get out of a card position at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday because of illiquidity, but for patient capital, that might be a good thing.
The discipline that goes into being a Calgary investor is what makes this type of investor so interesting. This isn’t buying something on the spot at a card show. It involves looking into print runs, keeping an eye on auction results, figuring out which sets tend to hold grade distribution, and becoming more and more sure of your decision over months. A good example is the 1986 Michael Jordan Fleer sticker, which is often overlooked because the sticker format is seen as less important than the base card, even though the supply and demand dynamics are very similar. When the market as a whole decides that a price is wrong, the change can happen quickly. The real money can be made by buying before everyone else does.
An interesting thing about these investors that does well is that they’re like the best early-stage tech analysts: they don’t mind being early or being ignored while they wait.
