A Renewed Outlook on the Sports Card Market with the Return of PSA Bulk Grading
It’s been almost two years since sports cards could be submitted to PSA for grading at an affordable price. The wait is over.
As of early September, PSA has brought back its Bulk service. For Collector’s Club members, cards can now be submitted for $22 (Editor’s Update: PSA Pricing continues to come back to earth, and currently sits at $18/card for Bulk service as of October, 2022.). The estimated turnaround is 120-150 calendar days.
Note: If you’re not a Collector’s Club member, we recommend using a group submitter. Before we dive in, quick transparency disclosure:
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What happened?
PSA was a major factor contributing toward the market climbing to extraordinary heights in 2020. Cards could be graded affordably, and premiums on PSA 10 grades and even some PSA 9s were massive. Base rookie cards of many players could be bought for $5-20 apiece, graded for $10-15, and sold as a PSA 10 for $100-250+.
Imagine spending $12 on a card, grading for $10, and selling the PSA 10 for $165. Imagine having 20 PSA 10s of that card in your order. As an example, the Gerrit Cole rookie card pictured below was around $5 raw and could be sold for $125 as a PSA 10. These days you can find them on eBay for much cheaper, but at the time it was an amazing business strategy. You could repeatably create huge value and profit margins thanks to grading.
It’s worth noting that even before the market boom of 2020, this was a viable strategy. Cards could be graded and instantly flipped for significant profits, even if not quite as large as during 2020-21.
And then PSA stopped taking new submissions.
Do you know what else happened around this time? It was March 2021, and this is when a large part of the market began to fall apart.
The pullback was a healthy correction in a lot of ways. Some of the values we saw in 2020-21 defied all logic and weren’t sustainable. Those days are mostly gone, and so are a lot of the people who didn’t know what they were doing and put money into unexplainable “investments” that predictably tanked in value. Pro tip: A PSA 9 2nd year base card of a fringe star is not a high-upside card.
PSA plays a major role in all levels of the card market, but its role is enormous with lower end cards. A PSA 10 grade can make an otherwise-unappealing base card or low end parallel into a far nicer product to buy, sell, and collect. When the option to grade these kinds of cards disappears, so does the market.
What happens to the market now?
With the return of PSA bulk grading, we anticipate a renewed sense of excitement and increased volume in the lower end market. Grading is one of the easiest ways for a collector or investor to grow the value of their portfolio.
Price per card is up from two years ago, and there is still a relatively lengthy wait. We don’t blame PSA for starting with a conservative turnaround estimate. They’ve angered customers by advertising meaningless turnaround times for the majority of the past 3 years. But people can get back to submitting lower end cards knowing they’ll be returned within months, not years. The buy-grade-flip model for lower end cards will become viable again.
Grading gives sellers built-in margin, so they can sell without squeezing a buyer to the top of the market. That means volume of sales will rise. More volume puts more money into the hands of sellers to go re-buy more cards. This means liquidity of almost all meaningful cards will rise, at least slightly.
PSA reopening bulk service will create a cascading effect that positively impacts the whole market, helping everything get moving again. We’re excited to get our next sub in motion! What will you be submitting?
Disclaimer
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