A Glimpse of What I’ve Been Collecting
Posted by Jeremy on May 21, 2010 under Market Watch, Online Buying and Selling | 
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Now that we’ve gotten the “good to be back” formalities out of the way, I thought I’d give you a little peek at what I’ve been working on over the past 6 months. It’s been a while since I have been writing and the following blurbs are my attempt to knock some of the rust off.
This offseason, I decided to get more serious about stocking my eBay store. After all, paying $15 a month for a vacant storefront is not a sound investment strategy. Going through my inventory at home, I quickly came to the realization that I was woefully disorganized. I spent the better part of two days separating my cards by players and alphabetizing them. I then pulled out the cards that I felt would stand a good chance to move on the market and created storefront auctions. The great thing about eBay store auctions is that they run for 30 days (opposed to 3, 5, 7, or 10) and are cheaper to do than the customary fixed price auctions. Also, items can be listed in bulk for no additional charge (a real boon for the prospector). I built my storefront up to about 300 items and priced my items at about 10-15% lower than the median prices of other storefront items in hopes that they would attract more attention. I also made the decision to offer free shipping on combined item shipments.
Things started to vanish out of my inventory quickly and I used the revenues to purchase more prospects. I targeted players that I felt would have a good chance of making early impacts at the major league level. Jason Heyward, Starlin Castro, Chris Carter, Michael Taylor, Michael Stanton, Jesus Montero, Julio Borbon, Brett Anderson, Desmond Jennings, Freddie Freeman, Carlos Santana, Reid Brignac, and others. I snagged base and chrome bulk lots of each of these players with the intent of having a considerable quantity available if and when these fine young players made their marks at the major league level.
Since this time, players like Heyward, Santana, Castro, and Stanton have long since left my inventory, as their hot starts created a frenzy of market activity. Others like Borbon, Carter, Taylor, and Jennings battled injuries or poor performances in the early going, and the demand for their RC’s is still a bit below what it should, and very well could, be. So still they sit in the inventory, and I look for opportunities to add to the quantities every day.
The other buying strategy that I employed was to find good deals on short print, refractor, and serial numbered cards of MLB stars. Players like Albert Pujols, Ichiro, Joe Mauer, and Evan Longoria are always in high demand and available in bulk quantities. Being a prospect guy, I was a bit leery of risking too much capital on non-RC’s but soon found myself quite surprised with the rapid, and profitable, turn around on several of these players’ cards. I’ll be tinkering with this a bit more to further optimize the process.
One area that I didn’t research as much this year was lower level (i.e. Low and High A) prospects. The main impetus behind this notion is the simple fact that long term prospect holds tend to have a diminuative effect on cash flow. I’ve covered this theory in past blog posts but, for those of you who are new to this site or to prospecting, I’ll go over it again.
The eBay market for first year cards is highly active upon the initial release of the products within which they reside. For example, a can’t miss prospect in the latest Bowman Chrome set will command high dollar values as the masses of eager collectors snap them up for their collections. As a prospector, this is a bad time to buy the particular product. However, it is an excellent time to research the prospects within the set to gain a better feel for their skills, projectability, future impact potential, and the anticipated speed of their track to the major leagues.
Eventually new products come out and the hoards divert their attention elsewhere leaving you with the opportunity to buy. If you’ve done your research and have monitored the progress of the prospects, you should have a pretty fair idea of who to buy and approximately how long you will have to wait for that player to don a major league uniform. As you see from my list above, I hand picked several players that I anticipated would be making initial impacts this season and could be acquired in low-cost bulk quantities. Once some of the players debuted, I quickly got an an assessment of the way that the market was trending and set my prices within that range. As the players continued to perform, I gradually raised the prices of their cards until my inventory was completely empty.
Jason Heyward is a great case-in-point example of this method at work.
Upon the arrival of the 2007 Bowman Draft and Chrome set, Heyward was lauded as one of the high demand prospects to be had within the product. Chrome cards went regularly for $4-5 each as many collectors were, for good reason, intrigued by his considerable upside. Heyward performed well at each stop of his two year minor league stint and remained an elite prospect, but his cards lost some of their early steam and dropped into the $2.50-3.00 range. Base and gold cards from the set were even cheaper at just $1-2 each.
BUY, BUY, BUY!
Fast forward to spring training. Heyward ripped through Grapefruit League pitching and prospectors took notice. Soon his chrome cards pushed north of $5.00 on eBay and threatened to push into double digits. I was tempted to cash in at this point and price my stuff to market. I held, however, and waited for April to roll around.
Opening day. A laser beam home run and multiple comparisons to baseball legends by the Baseball Tonight bunch pushed all of his cards into the stratosphere. His ‘07 BCD cards shot into the $20-25 range almost overnight. Even the base and gold cards were going for $8-12 each. Within hours, I had my complete inventory up online, sold and shipped.
Now, a skeptic could read this and say “Duh, It doesn’t take a genius to know that Jason Heyward was going to be a star”. Precisely. While his cards were a bit more expensive than a deep sleeper toiling in Low-A ball, there was still enough room for a nice profitable growth and the risk of attrition was far less than casting my lot on a lesser known commodity. Additionally, the short term investment was much more beneficial on my cash flow situation and allotted me an opportunity to roll my income into another short term investment.
As for those short term investments….we’ll see what happens in the next few months.
Use the comments section below to further the conversation and thanks for checking in!
