If you have to be convinced, maybe you shouldn’t.
But if you like sports and money, cards might just be for you. 
Here are three reasons many have turned to sports cards as an alternate investment or as a full side hustle:
Vested Interest
Do you love sports? Avid fantasy player or sports gambler? Cards give us a way to own a vested interest in an athlete’s performance that you can keep as long as you want. It’s kind of like the stock market for athletes, where cards are the stock and athletes are the entity into which you are investing. You can buy cards of all your well-known favorites, or take a chance on that up and coming sleeper hoping for a big payout if you’re right. There are lots of approaches, but cards present a way to use knowledge and love of sports to make money.
Flexibility
Cards also present flexibility and an opportunity to make progress around the clock. Since eBay and related buy/sell sites are open for business 24/7, getting in the card game makes for a great side hustle, as the bulk of the work can be done anytime – not just during business hours. You can be listing cards at 1:00am if that’s more in line with your schedule. Additionally, it takes some effort to buy the right things and to actually list cards for sale, but once you’ve put in the up-front work, you can go on with your life and wait for them to sell. It will not be fully passive income since you’ll still have to ship once a card sells, but it can become a low effort extra stream of income.
Rising Values
Perhaps the most appealing aspect of sports cards is the possibility of their values rising over time. To be clear: there are absolutely no guarantees of values rising, however there is a strong history (over 100 years of history at this point) of the key cards of key players rising over time. Sometimes it takes work on your part to flip a card for a quick profit and reinvest into another. Sometimes you can put money into a card and forget you own it only to realize your card is worth 5x a couple years later. Some cards & players are more volatile than others, so you have choices to find an option that fits your risk tolerance.
Scenario
Let’s say you have $1000 to invest, and your goal is to double your investment to $2000 as quickly as possible.
The average savings account offers around a 0.07% interest rate, meaning if you have $1000 in the account, you make 70 cents for the year. It would take you 137 years to make $100, and we’re nowhere near our goal of doubling our investment. Since we’d preferably like to be alive when we reach our goal, this option is not very enticing, right?
The S&P 500 has returned a little over 10% per year on average over the past 100 years. That sounds much more productive than the savings account, but if you invested that same $1000 assuming a 10% annual return, it would take about 8 years to double your investment. Not bad! But that’s still a long time to wait.
A Different Way Forward
We propose to you that there is another way. In the card world, you have more control and can move faster; and instead of our money sitting stagnant earning an uninspiring return, we can be active in flipping one card into the next into the next until we’ve achieved our goals.
Again, there are no guarantees – values can go down just like they can go up – and you have to be both smart about where you put your money and active in buying and selling if you want to be profitable. But we’ve seen examples of people turning $1000 into $2000 in a matter of weeks. It can and does happen. We’ve also seen people get greedy and lose half their investment in a matter of weeks. Risk exists and it’s up to you to decide whether or not you’re comfortable getting involved and accepting the inherent risk. If you’re good at this, it’s not unrealistic to make 15-25% per year, with many experienced card flippers making 40-80% year over year, and the best flippers even making over 100%.
Given the potential for larger gains, many have started to view cards as a really strong alternate investment to the traditional avenues. It’s a way to diversify, it’s a way to stay involved in sports, and it’s a way to actively work toward growing your money instead of letting it sit in a low return account somewhere.
Want more? A good place to build a foundational understanding of the sports card world is our guide of Sports Card Basics.