Aug3rd

Interview with CardCollectingRambler

By Adam McFarland | Posted at 11:10 am | Filed Under Cardcollectingrambler, Interviews

I’ve received a lot of emails about CardCollectingRambler, the anonymous writer who writes Break Open Another Box and occasionally guest posts on this blog. His in depth analysis of sports and how it relates to the card industry is the best I’ve ever read, and obviously many of you feel the same way as well. He was recently nice enough to answer a few of my questions about his collecting background and the methods of his analysis:

How did you get your start in collecting?

I first started collecting back in the early ’80’s. I used to go to Dodger games once in a while with my little league team (the Dodgers), so I was a big fan of players like Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Pedro Guerrero and the other Dodgers of that time. A couple friends and I started buying packs & going to local shows, trying to get as many Dodgers cards that we could.

What do you collect and why?

I actually only collect a few players. Among them are Andruw Jones (I was hooked ever since he hit 2 HR in game 1 of the ‘96 World Series against the Yankees), Vladimir Guerrero (Great player, reasonable card prices, future HOF’er), Kobe Bryant (I’m a Lakers fan & I think that he’s the best player in the NBA since Jordan) and Carmelo Anthony (I think that he has a lot of potential, and his cards are undervalued due to Lebron & Wade being in his rookie class). I’ve also recently become a Baron Davis fan. I was so impressed watching him lead the Warriors in the playoffs this past year.

Do you think that most collectors collect for the enjoyment or for an investment? Is it wise to collect cards solely as an investment? If so, can you compare the differences between short-term buying/selling and long-term buying/selling?

I think that most collectors now, being adults (since card prices are so high), are probably collecting for both enjoyment & investment. People should collect for whatever reason that makes them happy. To me, short-term buying/selling is probably the easiest & most prevalent among collectors, because in a lot of instances, it takes some period of time for a particular card to raise up to its peak price, giving people the chance to buy earlier when they first notice the value starting to rise (they probably won’t get it at its lowest price this way though), and sell at its peak to make a profit.

Long-term buying/selling is much riskier, especially if you’re investing in a younger player, since they have so much time till retirement to experience unfortunate career changes before they have a chance to really achieve anything significant, which would then make their cards worthless.

How do you feel about the current state of the hobby? How do we rebound and bring the hobby back up to the glory days of 15-20 years ago?

I don’t know that much about this subject, but my opinion is that 15-20 years ago, you had both kids & adults collecting. Now, I think that the hobby has lost a lot of the kid collectors, because of high pack prices and the extensive list of brands available. The whole fun of collecting back in the day was that everyone was buying the same cheap packs (because there were only three brands), and everyone had an equal chance of pulling say, Cal Ripken Jr.’s best RC card. Today, only the adults can afford to buy a pack from a brand that contains someone’s best RC card.

I understand that the card companies are thinking that with 15 or so brands available, they can cater to every age & socioeconomic group out there, but in reality, I feel that it creates an obvious disparity between the “haves” & “have nots”, generating high demand for 5 of those brands among those who can afford them, and making the other 10 brands undesirable to the rest of the population (who can’t afford them) because the cards you can get out of them are overproduced, worthless pieces of paper in comparison to the low #’d, autographed RC cards that they see other people pulling. This then decreases the sales of those lower-end products, even with would-be kid collectors. I feel that this current situation creates more investment collectors, and reduces the number of personal collectors.

It might be interesting to see if card companies would have only 1 base set of RC cards (they can be #’d, autographed, etc.) with a couple of parallels, that would be inserted in all of their brands (number of brands of course reduced to around 5-7). They could change the seeding odds based on the cost of the product (and maybe have better inserts in the higher priced products to maintain their sales). This way it would encourage people of all ages & financial well-being to buy the products because they’d all have a chance at pulling the same high-end RC cards. This might be a workable compromise between how it is today, and how it was before.

Couldn’t have said it better myself (I honestly think you know more about the subject than 99% of the collectors out there). I also think your idea of 1 base set of rookie cards is a great way to level the playing field.

Your blog – Break Open Another Box – provides brilliant in-depth analysis of the Baseball and Basketball card markets. Can you go into detail about your process (how you track, what you track, and why)?

I’ve only been doing card market analysis for a little over a year now. I found that when I was buying cards using the established price guides as a benchmark, I would often end up paying more than I should have, since they only come out once a month. I basically just have a list of players that I want to keep track of, pick their RC cards that I think are key to the market, and monitor their actual sales each month on ebay. This way, at any given time, I can see what a particular card’s market price should be for today, yesterday, last week or last month. I then try to cross reference a card’s market movement to the player’s performance and look at various other stats & factors to determine if a card is a good/bad investment. I guess I view it kind of like the stock market.

Now that’s just smart. I see a lot of people “collecting for profit” but not willing to put the work in that you do. And I’m sure it shows in the results - you’re probably the first collector I’ve ever met that really tracks the market and has a method to their investing, and in turn I’m guessing that your investments are better than what the average collector does.

Thanks for sharing, and we’re all looking forward to your next post!

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One Response to “Interview with CardCollectingRambler”

A Reality Check on What You’re Cards are Worth at Sports Collectibles News on August 22nd, 2007 11:58 am

[…] really fun…but probably won’t fund your retirement. Unless you analyze the market like CardCollectingRambler does, you’re probably not going to have much of investment […]

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