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I've spent a bit too much of my evenings and weekends thinking about the card market lately, both as a collector and investor fascinated by the business. As a record-shattering summer wraps up, a few observations: 1. The market is much bigger - and growing much faster - than most people realize. Online marketplace sales of cards surpassed $900M in Aug alone (via @CardLadder), 5x+ the peak during the pandemic and 2x+ since the beginning of this year. And that doesn't even include the massive offline market across shops, shows, and private sales. Nor does it include perhaps the fastest growing channel, live shopping. @Whatnot recently raised $545M at a $20B valuation after doing $8B GMV in H1 2026 which equaled their entire 2025. Even @eBay itself grew 67% y-o-y in H1 2026 to $1.36B of card sales, and they're a dinosaur. Cards aren't having a covid comeback, they've blown through covid. 2. The demographic tailwinds are perfectly set up for this moment. The kids who grew up on Pokémon, Magic, video games, and internet culture are entering their prime wealth-creation years. No offense but: the nerds got rich. Then enter @michaelrubin @mikemahan @Fanatics to make card collecting mainstream and cool, and now the nerds become both rich and cool. 3. The collector base is expanding, by gender and geography. TCG has done wonders in bringing women into the market: trading cards were the #1 secondhand category purchased by Gen Z women on eBay in 2025. I visited the SF Card Show this weekend and it was a far cry from the dude fest card shows I grew up with. While some sports like soccer and basketball are largely global, most fandom has geographic boundaries. But TCG literally has no boundaries. Pikachu is Pikachu in Tokyo, London, Paris, São Paulo, or San Francisco. 4. The infrastructure is finally catching up to the market. Marketplaces. Live commerce. Grading. Authentication. Vaulting. Custody. Data. Analytics. Portfolio Management. @PSAcard's grading backlog peaked at ~14M cards in June, which shows how the demand is forcing the infrastructure to find a way to keep pace. What's emerging is less like just infrastructure for a niche hobby and more like infrastructure for an alternative asset class. 5. Innovation is accelerating. @Topps Instant Rips backed by physical cards. Digital repacks. Instant buybacks. Break-to-grade-to-vault streamlined. Computer vision and AI-assisted authentication and grading. Real-time portfolio tracking. The entrepreneur in me looks at all this and knows we're just scratching the surface here. 6. Cards are becoming entertainment. People watch card breaks they aren't even buying into. Whatnot hosts 550,000+ hours of live shows every week. @netflix's King of Collectibles @KenGoldin is on Season 3 now. The transaction itself has become the content. 7. And yes, cards are now an alternative asset class. The Pokemon @CardLadder index returned ~3,800% from 2004-2025 vs. ~480% for the S&P 500 according to WSJ, which even beat Meta since its IPO. And this was reported before the 2026 boom. I even heard recently from a trusted source that a blue chip top tier asset management firm is launching a card hedge fund soon. Obviously, cardboard != equities. But long-term returns like these will continue to attract capital. 8. None of this means the market will only continue to go up. In fact, a correction feels likely - and may be overdue. Manufacturers will overprint. Speculation has outrun collecting in places. Breaks and repacks blur the line between collecting and gambling. Large markets growing 100%+ annually eventually slow down. And mo money mo problems. But zooming out, what fascinates me is the transition happening in real time: from hobby to market to ecosystem. It feels like the card market has a credible path to $100B+ and relatively to its size, growth, and engagement, it still feels remarkably nascent with a ton of opportunity ahead. What do you think? And more importantly, what do you collect?

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