Market Recap Week of May 24th, 2021

The biggest event of the week was the Hustle & Show series drop #2 with eight new cards including; D Lillard, T Young, KA Towns, JT Anderson, M Thybulle, F Campazzo, OG Anunoby, DJ Murray.

I picked up a JT Anderson in my pack which I immediately sold for $18. Boom! Pack paid for thank you very much. I next opened three boring moments which will certainly become trade tickets. But the last moment I opened was the LB James block! I can admit to letting out a childhood cheer seeing that one come open and the girlfriend got a high five. This was the one card I was hoping for the most because it currently was not in my budget. So, it was an excellent pack that I couldn’t have been happier for. It almost made up for the disappointing Throwdown pack I bought for $149.

This was not the only pack drop of the week however as the very next day another common base set drop occurred. This time there was a total of 245K packs available and several days there are actually still packs available. To my knowledge, it is the only drop not to immediately sell out.

In total, I estimate that 1.25 Million new moments dropped into the marketplace in less 24 hours.

Now anyone who has taken a first year economics course should be able to tell you what happens to the price of a commodity when there is a supply side shock. Yes of course, the price goes down. Top Shot did not add 100K new collectors in this same time so the prices could only go down, and they certainly did just that.

The market for the series 2 base set hit another new low as it appears that $2 moments are here to stay. If your reaction time and connection is fast enough, you may even pick up some for $1. It is hard to say how much of a boost this floor will receive when the trade tickets are introduced as there will be many collectors scooping up the cheapest moments they can get their hands on to trade in. My guess is $2 will become the standard for the majority of the ‘dog sh*t’ moments that no one wants and you may even pick up a few good players in this pack as well.

So what is a good strategy to use when they market is in a free fall situation as it is now?

In a bull market, you want to buy high and sell higher. In a bear market, you should be selling low and buying lower. Holding Dapper in these times would be an effective strategy as well, but this is boring and none of us really want to do that.

The next thing that happens is there is a fight to value. What does this mean at TopShot? It means you should be only buying the superstar players.

The first thing I did was sell all my moment that were at $3 or on their way to be. This can be a painful process because it means taking a loss on pretty much every moment in this group. I wanted to create as much Dapper as possible to take advantage of the extremely low prices for the league’s best players.

I made a list of the 40 top players in the league that made the playoffs, and I went about buying them all. I picked several players I was missing including Durant, Harden, AD, Doncic and Curry and several others. I traded my Kawhi in for the same moment but in a low serial number. These are the moments that will hold their value over the long run as all others in the base set will all be on a slow decay path towards a trade ticket.

The next thing I did was start buying up the secondary new moments from stars. The best one I think is the Zion for $6 because his other moments are not in everyone’s budget. My other pickups included secondary cards from Giannis, AD, Trae, Lillard, Tatum, Randle and Westbrook.

The two cards that were currently out of my budget were the LBJ and LM Ball. As I mentioned, I was lucky to open the James in my pack. The Ball will have to wait as the Hornets got bounced in the play-in anyway and his price should drop in the near future. Other than that, I now have every player in my top 40 list of superstars still in the playoffs.

My current strategy is to slowly start dropping these moments (hopefully for a profit) as the playoffs progress and interest peaks.

Over the summer, I plan to start picking moments with fixed serial numbers. I am not happy that TopShot decided to start minting new serials to existing moments. Many of the base moments have increased from 35K to 40K and they have not ruled out further increases in the future. This can only have a downward effect on prices. If you can afford it, you can avoid this problem by staying with issued with a fixed number of serials such as any of the sets.

There is good news however. I do feel we are nearing the end of this bear market. Once summer hits and they stop minting new moments, the prices should get upward pressure from new collectors. TopShot has started some new promotions including a cross promotion with DraftKings that will surely bring in new eyeballs.

I was not lucky enough to get a CoolCat free issue of the Curry team points record, it’s a great moment if you did. I did however get the Simmons CoolCat plus a $20 bonus. I used my bonus to buy a low serial number of the league’s MVP Jokic, of which I was quite please. I am also looking forward to my $16 bonus for tweeting my favourite moment from the first weekend of playoff games.

Happy collecting.