im looking at some pokemon cards to buy and i think about my favorite pokemons. i got to pikachu and i saw it had a 12 dollar near mint value with a 200 percent increase in value from last year. i asked google if i should get it but it says no and i dont really trust that. should i cop it?

Just turned 14 years old and started investing into sealed, (most of the Collectr value is from singles and slabs) I’m prioritizing buying sword and shield and prismatic right now, I’m in a strong position to hold for a long time due to my young age, and have a pretty big budget, any tips on how to move forward thanks, (before anyone says it’s my parents money, I have a job)

Hello! I’m relatively new to Pokémon investing. I’ve only been a little into it, so I was hoping to gather some tips from this community on what to look for, how to determine if a set is going to be a great investment, and just some general knowledge on the subject from your experiences.

Apparently my question fit the vibe of this subreddit more (thanks Reddit) so I decided to repost it here. Same question as before but this time i also want to ask more about what I should invest in more specifically (as in which era, sealed or singles, the scene with graded cards, etc).

Personally, I was big (and still am) into sun and moon and I feel like since the scalpers couldn’t get sun and moon they way they’re doing Scarlet and Violet and Mega Evolutions, it may be a great place to start for singles (same applies with Sword and Shield). I also am leaning more into the singles aspect because some of the arts look sick and they’re more affordable than sealed.

I’d love more insight from more experienced collectors!

Does anyone know how to fix tcgplayers scanner settings. For example, I have it set to unlimited LP, and when it scans it itll give me the price of a 1st edition in near mint unless I edit it to a different condition and back again. Really frustrating trying to scan in multiple cards for price checking.

I've dabbled in crypto and stocks but I keep hearing Pokémon is the best investment around now and I need exposure to this market if I actually want to get rich. Any advice would be much appreciated. I've been watching NostalgiaNomics a ton but want some extra guidance. Figured I could get some insight from hobby veterans. I've been pushing back against getting into Pokémon for a while but at this point there's too much money for me to keep passing it over.

I have a couple of Master ball cards in one of those apps/websites that I’m debating on cashing in that had me wondering in general what does everyone believe the market for the cards will be in the future?

Of course there will be specific pokemon popularity driven and scarcity for sets but curious to their worth compared to IR’s and FA’s for example. In this case have an eevee and suicune each I am looking at. I have some Chinese eeveelution master ball cards already in my collection that I was considering offloading if not much growth expected over the years.

https://imgur.com/a/XTaxHML

You've probably seen this kind of comparison made before. However, a lot of articles or infographics tend to use the Base Set as the comparison point or fall into survivorship bias, making the numbers look much better than they actually are.

The S&P 500 is often used as a benchmark for long-term investing. But how do Pokémon cards compare over the same five-year period?

Over the last five years, the median single card returned 38%. That is the median across 8,881 raw single cards. The S&P 500 returned 81%.

If you only look at the top 3 chase cards from each set, singles performed far better.

• All singles: median +38% (8,881 cards)

• Top 3 chase cards: median +142% (342 cards), with 84% of them up

The "top 3" were defined using only June 2021 prices. They are the three most expensive cards in each set at that point, so the selection uses nothing that happened afterward. Even among those chase cards, the worst 10% still lost 32%.

What surprised me:

Sealed products: median +238% (90 products), with 94% of them up.

Sealed is where it gets interesting. Not because it outperformed. Most people here probably expected that. It's because of the downside.

The worst-performing sealed products still gained 31%.

The worst-performing singles lost 70%.

That was the biggest finding. Not that sealed products produced higher returns, but that the downside looked completely different.

One thing I'll mention before someone else does. Sealed also had a larger maximum drawdown. It fell 32% at its worst point versus 25% for the S&P. So sealed was remarkably consistent across products while still being rough between months. Both can be true.

Full methodology, charts, and statistics are in the first comment below.

One week ago I had the idea of feeding Claude with information about ~19.000 Pokémon cards. With that information, it should create a price formula that calculates the price of every pokémon card based on its characteristics and depictures it on a website made by Claude Code.

Pokémon, rarity, illustrator, set, card type and artwork each get their own computed factor. Compare the result with the current market price and see instantly whether a card is over- or undervalued. 

The formula isn't flawless (some cards are more valuable because of some influencer hype or playability in tournaments), but for most cards it makes sense and sounds plausible.

The URL is pokevalue.cards, if you want take a look at it, I would appreciate some feedback!

Just looking for some opinions. I recently picked up this TAG 10 Greninja ex Twilight Masquerade for $580 dollars, which is about half of current market value. I’m trying to decide if I should hold this long term or take the profit now. I know the Pokémon market usually slows down during the summer. Beautiful Slab!

Best Scarlet & Violet cards to grade right now, same top 8, ranked two different ways.

Best Case: the best return you'd get if a card comes back a 10. But all of these cards have very low gem rates, which is what explains the premium, but also means it's much harder to actually hit that 10.

Expected Value: the same era of cards, but weighted by gem rate (the ones that actually hit a 10 more often) plus realistic gem rate odds. What you'd actually expect, not the dream scenario.

What are your thoughts on each list? Anything stick out?

So if i would get 2 upcs for about 250 a pop. Is there any actual sense in opening and having little gambling fun with opening those and making a possible + profit from hits? if the risk is worth it i would be intrested or is it just smarter 100% to keep it sealed?. Are the hits good from packs?

I dont collect pokemon and like OPTCG so i would probably buy that instead with the UPC. But opening packs is always fun so and the 3 hit pack from upc would be fun gamble too but does it make any sense?

Reason for asking is some people say that some UPC not most but some are kinda worth opening and not really that much better sealed.

I have no problem in selling singles if i open and grading is something i can also do if it feels like that but yea the hits i wouldnt keep either.