Darren Rovell on Investing in Sports Memorabilia
Darren Rovell on Investing in Sports Memorabilia
Video Transcript:
Nicole Lapin:
So we talked about YouTube acquiring the rights for Sunday Ticket, Amazon NFL's Thursday Night Football. What are some of the opportunities for investing in this clearly growing business that normal investors could take advantage of?
Darren Rovell:
Yeah. Listen, I think the closest thing and why we saw in COVID so many people getting into sports memorabilia is the access to that marketplace, right? eBay auctions, anyone can do it. What's interesting is how that investing involved much like betting. You invest in a player, you watch that player that night, and you hope that what that player did raises the value of the card. Of course, I think a lot of young people also noticed that it cannot be just one sole factor, right? It has to be the whole macro environment. This is an interesting example. So Luka Doncic, who plays on the Dallas Mavericks, his card, his rookie card, his base card, Prizm card was $2,000. And there were 10,000 of them that were graded a PSA 10, which is the highest gem mint condition.
And I always say, "Well, there's too many of them." The analyzing some of these markets, what makes it move? I thought it was based on, "Oh, there's too many of them. I'm not comfortable." But what I learned was I was actually uncomfortable with the age of the people buying them. So the age of the people buying this card was somewhere in the 16 to 25 range. And what does that mean? It means that when the tough get going, when the market gets tougher, they don't have the wherewithal to hang. They could hang as a group, like a cartel, and not lower the price and it will continue to stay up. But those cards and modern basketball cards that these 16 to 25-year-olds over-indexed in fell faster because they don't have the backup money to hold on.