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Slabnomics

Matt

Finance-Bro turned Card Bird explores the intersection of collecting, investment, and market theory for sports cards.

Think Financial Analyst meets Sports Card Collector.

New Episodes drop Tuesdays @ 7 AM CST.

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22 episodes
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Avg 22 min
English

Episodes 22

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#68
Tuesday · 21 min
Swimming Naked: Early Warning Signs in the 2026 Card Market
The sports card market is up big. Disney is up 5x in six months. Pokemon volume is at all time highs. So the question everyone is asking: how much longer? Let's talk dry powder. The rotation from modern into vintage. The speculative tells in sealed wax, breaks, and repackers. And the biggest structural throttle on the hobby right now: PSA and Beckett cutting their lower grading tiers, which pushed the raw to grade play from $100 cards up to $250 cards and squeezed collectors out. Volume is a leading indicator. It always peaks. This episode is about what to watch so you are not caught with your pants down when the tide goes out. Topics: sports card market cycle • Pokemon and sealed wax speculation • grading pipeline and PSA tiers • leverage and cash management • vintage versus modern rotation Keep Building. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#67
August 25 · 17 min
Grading Mistakes in Cards: Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced
9 grading mistakes killing your sports card and Pokémon profits broken down by skill level. Matt covers PSA's new 50–70 business day turnaround at the $80 tier, why Beckett only bumps a certain amount off the average, how PSA actually grades, and why annualized ROI matters more than raw margin. Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced grading traps drawn from ~$50K in personal grading spend over 18 months. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#66
August 18 · 23 min
PSA vs BGS vs CGC vs SGC vs TAG: Who Actually Grades Hardest
Five of the most graded cards in history. Every grade from every grader. The data says a PSA 10 is easier to obtain than most competing top grades, and the market pays for it anyway. Cards analyzed: 2023 Van Gogh Pikachu, 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie, 1990 Fleer Michael Jordan, 1986 Topps Jerry Rice rookie, 1999 Unlimited Charizard Holo. Covered: PSA vs BGS vs CGC vs SGC vs TAG, gem rates and condition rarity, percentile difficulty by grade, BGS 10 Pristine and Black Label scarcity, CGC 10 Pristine mispricing, why SGC 10s look underpriced, PSA 9 value cases, and why I have to play Devil's advocate with PSA. Sourcing note: population data from GemRate and public pop reports. Values are last-sale references, not appraisals. Keep Building. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#65
August 11 · 27 min
The $80 Floor: What Happens When Bulk Card Grading Dies
Grading built this market. Grading is now changing again. This episode traces card grading from the 1990s, when buyers and sellers eyeballed condition and negotiated it live, through the trust-building years of the mid 2010s, into the COVID volume surge that turned grading into the backbone of an asset class. We cover what old label standards mean for the population data you rely on today, and why PSA 10 counts across sports and TCG look nothing like they did in 2020. From there we get into the squeeze. Bulk and value submission tiers are closing across the major graders. We work through what an $80 per card floor does to submission math, how lock-up time factors into grading ROI, and which cards stop making sense to send at all. The back half covers what each grade actually represents. PSA 10, BGS 9.5 True Gem, BGS 10 Pristine, Black Label, CGC 10 Pristine, and where TAG sits. Vintage centering versus ultra modern parallels. Then three predictions on where grade premiums move next. Topics: card grading history, PSA population inflation, bulk submission shutdown, grading cost thresholds, repackers and breakers, institutional capital in collectibles, BGS Black Label, CGC 10 Pristine, TAG accuracy, Pokemon and ultra modern grading, PSA 9 versus PSA 10 ratios. Keep Building. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#64
August 5 · 15 min
Does This Bull Market Have Legs? (Fanatics Fest/National/Soco)
The bull run is roughly a year and a half old. People are getting nervous. Matt takes the temperature three ways: Fanatics Fest, the National, and the SoCo Expo. Three different reads on the same hobby. Covered in this episode: Loss aversion and the psychology behind selling Why the COVID comparison breaks down Institutional money, breaking, and new distribution The Panini to Fanatics shift as a market signal Pokemon, One Piece, Disney, F1, and modern soccer as early markets What a healthy pullback looks like No call on the top. A method for reading the room. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#63
July 28 · 20 min
The Pokemon Pullback and Putrid Pulisic Performance (World Cup)
The hobby is loud. Buzz, hype, panic...and it all sounds the same until you learn which frequencies matter. Fresh off Fanatics Fest and headed to The National in Chicago, Matt breaks down what he saw on the floor and what it says about where the sports card and tcg markets are going. Then it's into listener questions: does soccer rebound? Matt walks through: The full World Cup cycle, why he was wrong on Pulisic, why you sell before the tournament and not during, and why he's still long-term bullish on soccer cards with the World Cup hosted stateside. Finally, Pokémon. The index has been up 27 straight weeks even while headline cards pulled back 40%. New collectors are shook. Veterans aren't. A pullback is not a crash and Matt explains how to tell the difference. Free COMPED newsletter → Signup at Slabnomics.com Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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July 21 · 21 min
18 Years of Fantasy Football Taught Me How to Buy Cards
What do 18 years of fantasy football tell us about sports cards markets? This episode maps the five phases of dynasty fantasy football onto sports card and TCG investing. The core argument: most people think you win in the accumulation phase. You don't. You win in the two phases before it, and the two after. Covered in this episode: The running back age cliff as a model for card value curves Hype as opium: why "best shape of his life" and "this player's team is going to be good" are the same worthless signal Jonathan Taylor vs Clyde Edwards-Helaire, and what that trade teaches about buying undervalued assets Why Messi cards will not go 2-3x on a World Cup win (10-20% bump, then a fade) Cash flow management and why stale inventory is locked capital The three things championship teams actually do You cannot manage what you have not measured. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#61
July 14 · 19 min
Wait, Do PSA 9s Have Better ROI Than PSA 10s?!?
Is the PSA 9 dead? Not so fast. Matt digs into three iconic cards across three sports to test a strange pattern: PSA 9s outperforming PSA 10s. He indexes every sale against player and sport baskets, then walks the data. 2003 Topps Chrome LeBron. 2014 World Cup Prizm Messi. 1999 Base Set Charizard. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#60
July 7 · 20 min
I Ran a 15-Month Soccer Card Fund. Here's What Actually Worked.
A 15-month soccer card investment fund, reviewed in real time during the 2026 World Cup. Why demand trickles top-down in illiquid markets, why case hits (Kaboom, Color Blast, Stained Glass) hold a floor, and why Messi, Mbappé, and Haaland moved the market while prospects burned capital. Supply, demand, and the pre-tournament dip. Invest, don't gamble. Music licensed through Soundstripe. Code: HZJPVCKVKAJUFFXF, UXMVRMTVRBJROCR9, BKVEPZEKUG6S4GRO, CN3FU0R0WNSQEIMP, UZQZMIMZRGSWFOJQ, 0Q5RITPLSX8TZN25, I2I8GOQBXBKD8MSC Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#59
June 29 · 18 min
Parallels, Graders, and How PSA's Submission Pause Might Affect the Market
I looked at all 83 parallels of Victor Wembanyama's 2023 Prizm rookie and indexed every sale against his player market. The best returns did not come from the 1/1s. This episode is a thought dump on that, plus two bigger questions: is vintage cheap relative to modern, and what happens to slab prices now that PSA cut off low-value grading. Your job this week is to tell me which project matters most to you. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#58
June 16 · 34 min
All 63 Wemby Rookie Prizm Cards Ranked by Return
One Victor Wembanyama rookie card. Sixty-three parallels. Every grade, every grader, tracked from first sale to today. Only on Slabnomics will you hear a ranking of all parallels by return percentage AND grader breakdowns. I broke down the entire 2023 Panini Prizm #136 rainbow to find which colors and which grades actually paid, and the answers cut against what the hobby repeats. The famous Silver underperformed. A PSA 9 beat the PSA 10 in a lot of parallels. Listen in for which parallels had the best ROI; a full data teardown of a $138 million card market. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#57
June 9 · 15 min
Only 4 of These 1952 Topps Legends Beat the S&P 500
Out of the 10 biggest names in 1952 Topps, only four beat the S&P 500 over 22 years. We pulled 9,720 real sales back to 2004, ran every PSA grade through three market cycles, and spoiler alert, the winner isn't the 1952 Mantle. Plus the first look at RRR, the risk-return ratio built to tell you which cards let you sleep at night. Full grade-by-grade breakdown at slabnomics.com. Keep Building. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#56
June 2 · 17 min
PSA: The Federal Reserve of The Hobby
PSA just halted all four of its value grading tiers. The hobby is calling it a failure. We're calling it something else. PSA just acted like a central bank. This episode breaks down why PSA controlling the supply of grades is the same lever the Federal Reserve pulls when it controls the supply of money. We map the full analogy, the dual mandate between volume and grade integrity, and where it breaks down in a way every collector should understand. Then we run the backtest. PSA did this exact move in 2021, and the data tells us what comes next. Supply structure, grade inflation, and what to watch over the next two quarters. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#55
May 26 · 28 min
Mangos, Messi, and Market Cap: The Hidden Math of Card Prices
Sports card investing through a Wall Street lens. Matthew Worley breaks down supply, demand, and market cap mechanics using three Messi Prizm World Cup Silvers (2014, 2018, 2022). Learn float vs pop report, gem rate math, why hypermodern oversupply breaks and vintage tightens, and how to time entry points. Data-driven card investing from Slabnomics. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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May 19 · 15 min
Don't Buy New Card Releases!
Here's why it's a bad investment every time. Only on Slabnomics. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#53
May 12 · 30 min
Modern Cards Are Overvalued (Value vs. Growth)
174 of my own card flips: Vintage won 62.7% of the time. Modern won 40.7%. Value Premium, What cards are most like value stocks and growth stocks, and how to tilt a portfolio. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#52
May 5 · 26 min
How To Read the Card Market Like a Wall Street Analyst
Seven Card Ladder charts. Three years of price and volume. Seven different cycle stages. This episode applies the Wyckoff Method, the 100-year-old framework finance uses to read market cycles, to the sports card market. The three laws. The four stages. The Composite Operator. Then chart by chart through Low-End, Mid-End, High-End, Baseball, Basketball, Football, and Soccer. By the end you'll know which segments are still early, which are running hot, which are showing distribution warnings, and what to do about each one in your portfolio. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
- Transcript
#51
April 28 · 28 min
The Process I Use to Find Undervalued Cards (And the 4-Month Hunt I Walked Away From)
This is the first time I've walked through the full Slabnomics process from start to finish. Post-mortem to pattern recognition to filter to hunt to execution decision. End to end, with one real trade as the worked example. I talk about: Post-mortem methodology and tag-based pattern recognition The four-tag rule for win-rate stacking MLD framework applied to a current superstar's valuation Supply structure analysis on Prizm World Cup Silver parallels Alpha decay and the half-life of an information edge Enjoy the episode and share it with a friend! Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#50
April 21 · 23 min
Why You See "Buying, 80%" (And What to Do About It)
Every Facebook card group has the post. Cash in hand. Buying at 80% of comp. Same wording, different accounts, every week. Nobody asks where the 80% came from. Today we do. This episode walks through the why of that number, the three cognitive biases that keep sellers accepting, and two practical things to do so we can stop seeing those posts. Why this practice preys on the very people we should safeguard for the long term good of The Hobby: New Entrants. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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#49
April 14 · 27 min
The Discoverable Market: Why Cards Aren't Like Stocks
Both sides studied the stock market. Nobody applied this to cards. Until now. In this episode of Slabnomics, we introduce the Discoverable Market framework and make the case that the card market is neither efficient nor random. It's exploitable. The information exists. Most people just aren't using it. ✅ What the Efficient Market Hypothesis actually means ✅ The 3 conditions required for market efficiency ✅ Why collector behavioral errors aren't random The card market is newly becoming a real market. The frameworks that explain its behavior are barely being applied. The information required to price these assets correctly is freely available — and widely ignored. That's the definition of a discoverable market. The question is whether you want to do the work. Weekly Newsletter Signup: Slabnomics.com 🎥Youtube 📸Instagram
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Showing 1–20 of 22 episodes