Is the Hottest Investment Pokémon Cards?

0:05Not long ago, a 27-year-old named Lucas Shaw went hunting for treasure. He found it in his parents' basement. Inside a dusty box were some prized possessions that Lucas hadn't thought about since grade school. Something that was relatively worthless for 20 years is now worth their weight in gold, it seems like. It was a collection of Pokemon trading cards, a collection that Lucas had obsessed over as a child and that Lucas as an adult now turned into a small fortune. You know, I tried my hand in crypto, took some losses, tried my hand in some stocks, but Pokemon cards was definitely my best investment.

0:52And then just used that to splurge on things such as an engagement ring with three and a half carats of diamonds. A sparkly diamond ring valued at$7 ,000, courtesy of some sparkly cardboard. It is time to dig out your old Pokemon cards. Pokemon trading cards are not just for kids anymore. Pokemon cards can fetch tens of thousands of dollars when sold on eBay. First edition cards have appreciated by, get this, over 10 ,000%. it. Pokemon cards, based on the video game turned global franchise about monsters that battle for glory, have evolved into a speculative asset, one that's hotter than a flaming Charizard.

1:39These cards have turned into an investment with a 3 ,000 % return, and it's blazing past the S &P 500.

1:49Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, November 24th.

2:03Coming up on the show, are Pokemon cards a nest egg or a bubble?

2:20One more. You've come this far. Do not miss out on this incredibly rare card at$46. I will sell it to my advance bidder. Back in August, a sale took place at Heritage Auctions, an auction house where you can buy anything from ancient coins to Andy Warhol's. But on this day, thousands of dollars were pouring in for Pokemon cards. Thank you to our bidders online as well. Lot 73, what do we have? Think about the kinds of things that auction houses typically sell, right? vintage furniture or artwork, things like that. And so here is this Pokemon card being auctioned off. And we're seeing the bids on that really pile up.

3:03That's our colleague Crystal Herr. She covers financial markets, stuff like stocks, bonds, the Fed. Now, she was watching a card with a yellow mouse-like monster on it go for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The person auctioning it off is calling it the Holy Grail card that doesn't need any introduction. The rarest cards out there. It's the Holy Grail itself, Pikachu, Illustrator. And we're at$500 ,000. And I think it ended up selling for about$500 ,000. That's amazing. $500 ,000 has it. It's with you, Heritage Live. It really goes to show that Pokemon cards are being seen as an actual legitimate store of value.

3:45Do you think there is still anybody out there who doesn't know what Pokemon is? I mean, I feel like even if people don't know all the ins and outs of Pokemon, they definitely will recognize a Pikachu. The Pokemon company has an estimated value approaching$100 billion. By total lifetime revenue, Pokemon is one of the highest grossing media franchises in the world. If you look at some of their numbers, they're beating Star Wars, even the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Wow. It started off in the 90s with Nintendo when they launched these video games. But since then, they have TV shows like the animated series.

4:29Movies like Detective Pikachu. Pikapika! Yeah, Pika, Pika, Pika, he's adorable. I'm sure people might remember the Pokemon Go craze a few years ago. Well, he texted me like 30 minutes ago saying let's meet up in Hollywood to catch Pokemon. Trying to catch them all, you know? And I don't know about you, but I actually played Pokemon on Game Boy as a kid. My brother and I had the red and blue games. So I also have a brother and we both played the games. I like had my old DS that I used to play on all the time. Yes. After school, I would play it. I would sneak it into my mom's purse when we ran errands and played at the grocery store.

5:11Even at the dentist's office when I was waiting to get my braces tied in, like, I was always on those games. And then, of course, there were the trading cards. When they debuted in the late 90s, it was just a tabletop game. Each card features a picture of a Pokemon with individualized stats. Kids built decks to battle each other. And it was huge, for a while. But then those kid collectors grew up. They got jobs, moved out, and the cards got left behind, banished to attics, shoved into storage bins, forgotten. So a lot of the people that I spoke to when reporting this out, they had told me that they collected these cards as kids and sort of forgot about them for a while.

5:55Right. And so for a long time, people consumed these things just for fun. When did Pokemon cards start to get the attention of investors? Yeah, so in 2020, if we go back to that time, right, a lot of people were stuck at home because of lockdowns. Couldn't go outside or do anything. And stimulus checks stimulated a different market than I think they were expecting. They were getting a lot of government stimulus cash. And the thought was, well, what else is there to do but to shop and to trade? Around this time was when meme stock mania began. Amateur retail investors poured money into things like GameStop shares.

6:35But there was also another more fringe group of traders who were instead going into Pokemon cards and really driving up the value of those as well. It made everybody kind of dust off their collections and just kind of rediscovering something that we all cherished as children. So I spoke with this guy named Matthew Griffin, who is an enterprise architect in Arkansas. I'm also a Pokemon enthusiast, investor, and massive collector. For a while, Matthew ran a small hobby shop where he sold all kinds of collectibles. Stuff like model airplane parts and anime figurines. You know, a lot of us don't really have a lot of stuff from our childhood.

7:14So we end up chasing our childhood throughout our entire adult lives. When his shop was forced to shutter during the pandemic, Matthew and his wife boxed up the leftover merchandise and stuffed it into a closet. Among the stash were packs of Pokemon cards. And then prices spiked. You know, still had some of the old stock, and that stock has gone 5X. And I've recently turned about 10 % of that into about 40X. It was the luck of the closet, is what I call it, right?

7:48So I've got Charizard Pikachu in both X and Y, which are the blue and red. That set alone is worth almost 10 grand. What had started as a sentimental pastime now looked like an asset class. Collectors began seeing other collectors raking in cash. And the hype was getting a huge boost from one major influencer in particular. In 2022, this YouTuber named Logan Paul, he revealed that he acquired a near-perfect grade card called the Pikachu Illustrator worth$5.3 million. $5 million? Yes. I may have an opportunity to purchase the one and only PSA 10 Pikachu illustrator in the world. He like wore it around a necklace at WrestleMania.

8:37I mean, I guess you just wear your bling. Right. I mean, what's the point if you can't show it off? So it was a huge thing. And I really got people thinking, wow, these cards are actually worth a lot of money. If you look at the cumulative returns going back a couple of decades, you'll see that the returns on these are actually beating the S &P 500 index and even big tech stocks like Meta platforms. Huh. According to one data analytics firm, Pokemon cards have delivered a roughly 3 ,800 % return from 2004 until this past August. By comparison, Meta has climbed around 1 ,800 % since the company went public in 2012, meaning Pikachu has thunderbolted past Mark Zuckerberg.

9:22But traders say when the market is this hot and prices rise this quickly, you have to wonder, just how high can these Pokemon cards fly? And what happens once we reach peak Pikachu? You know, Pikachu doesn't have a balance sheet. Pikachu doesn't have quarterly earnings that investors can look to. And a lot of people, even the traders that I talk to, right, will be like, you know, we got these really big returns, but how much longer will it last? We don't really know. This is, you know, in other words, sort of like a vibes-based rally. So there's a lot of wildcards here that people may not be taking into account.

10:01Those wildcard factors are after the break.

10:24— Go, go. — Hey! Hey! — Grab her! Grab her! Grab her! Grab her! — Grab her! Grab her! — Stop! Stop! — Earlier this year, at a Costco in California, a brawl broke out over pallets of Pokémon cards. — Get the f— off!

10:43What kids once collected for fun had become something else. I have heard from people who have said that there is this tension between people who are trying to make money off of Pokemon cards and others who view it just as purely nostalgia and they sort of see themselves as collectors. They say that it has sort of ruined the fun of Pokemon, you know. In the Bay Area in July, one man was stabbed during an argument in a line outside a store. The cards have become such hot commodities that they've inspired scalpers, counterfeits, and a global crime wave. A Pokemon card crime spree has reportedly been sweeping Japan.

11:25It is a problem we are seeing more of in metro Detroit. Two thieves made off with dozens of rare Pokemon cards from a store in Texas. And in Massachusetts, cameras captured this brazen thief, smashing his way off with a Pokemon haul worth over$100 ,000. Rule breaking, fraud, extreme valuations. These are some of the possible warning signs economists look for that could indicate an investment frenzy is in its final act. I asked our colleague Crystal whether that might be happening here. Are you already hearing worries about a Pokemon card's bubble? Yeah, there's actually a lot of people who, despite spending a lot of money on these cards and really seeing it as a true investment, they do point out that there have been some times where these cards have declined a lot since the big pandemic boom.

12:18Huh. If you've been a longtime collector, you also know the Pokemon card market has actually crashed a couple of different times. I'm expecting the prices to drop heavily. Well, although Pokemon is still popular today, this card and many cards like it have plummeted. Pokemon sort of becomes popular again among the general population. The scalpers come in, the demand skyrockets, production ramps up. And then once that demand and that popularity sort of wanes, it sort of starts to cycle over. For people less bullish on Bulbasaur, there's already a cautionary tale to point to. This is the factory baseball blowout.

12:57This is factory. The baseball cards craze of the 80s and 90s. We're going to start you off with a 1987 top set. Factory. Factory set. We got a 1990 Fleer factory set. At first, kids collected them. Then adults hoarded them. And investors insured them. And then baseball card producers went into overdrive. They ushered in the junk wax era, named after the glossy packs the cards were wrapped in. Baseball cards famously crashed in value a few decades ago when these companies ramped their production and suddenly flooded the market. We're going to give you the jumbo box, the vending boxes, and one, two, three, four, five, six...

13:38There's always the risk that Pokemon could do that as well. Of course, Pokemon could somehow lose its popularity in years. That's the thing about collectibles like this. Because their value isn't tied to earnings or dividends, it makes for a tricky investment, one that doesn't play by Wall Street's usual rules. A lot of people will just look at how these cards are sold and at what price and how many they are. And so that leads to the fact that there really isn't a standard price for a card in the same way that there is for a stock. So is there any real way to measure value here? Or is it all just feelings?

14:16You can't really tell how Pokemon is doing, right? You just have to sort of believe that Pokemon is going to continue to be popular 5, 10, 20 years from now. And a lot of the factors that go into how much a card is worth that could maybe be seen as fundamentals are actually quite subjective. So cards with Pokemon that are more popular, like Pikachu and Charizard, tend to be worth more just because people really like those Pokemon. So sometimes that can even trump things that are more easily measured, like how rare a card is or how long it's been in production. So even the fundamental aspects of how these cards are valued aren't always so standard.

14:58One other thing that makes this different from sort of the standard things that people invest in, right, is that they're tangible. Like they're actual physical cards versus like stocks that sort of just exist. Yeah. So a lot of people that I spoke to for this story, they saw it as a good thing. I spoke with one person who kind of enlightened it to a Picasso painting where he said, you know, you hang up a Picasso at your wall for 20 years, you admire it, then you sell it. And he views Pokemon cards in the same way. But having a tangible asset also has its risks, right? Like what about if your house floods and you get water damage?

15:34What about if there's a fire or what if you lose it? Some hardcore collectors have gone to great lengths to protect their investments. Take Matthew Griffin. He's the guy who stashed his collectibles in a closet during the pandemic. He now views those cards as heirlooms. And he's upgraded a lot since the closet days. And he stores Pokemon cards and binders in a climate-controlled storm room. I would call it a hermetically sealed environmental control room. And he plans to collect these cards as his kids grow up and eventually present them to them when they have milestones like having their first child or getting married or buying a home so he can say, look, you have this nest egg and you can use it to buy something really nice for yourself or pay for this big purchase.

16:19On their wedding days, they can expect something borrowed, you know, something new, something old, something blue or however it goes, right? And I hand them a squirtle card or a blue binder or, you know, a blue card deck box that has cards in it. And they're just going to be looking at me like, are you serious, dad? And then they'll open it up and realize, OK, this is 15 grand worth of cards, right? For his part, Matthew isn't worried about a bubble. He isn't just securing an investment or a piece of his family's future. He's also safeguarding memories. And that's enough to make him happy. This is money that I'm investing in sentiment, not flipping for value, right?

17:01So to me, if this is a bubble, and for some reason, next year, Pokemon is worth the big zero, to me, this is a personal collection.

17:14I can almost remember every day that I collected each card, right? I can remember the feeling when I open the pack to pull it. It is the child in me. To Matthew, it's a way to keep his past close, hermetically sealed. To Crystal, as a markets reporter, it's a sign of where we are now, a world where anything can be saved or sold. It's nostalgia commodified. People more and more so are trying to make anything and everything tradable, whether it's prediction markets when you can bet on things that are outside of just your traditional sports or political bets. And so I think this really speaks to the fact that nothing is really off limits when it comes to what you can trade, even a childhood hobby with Pokemon.

18:01Do you have any of these cards at home? You know, as I was reporting this story, I remember that I had a few back home. Like, I think my brother and I both had them. I think when I go home for the holidays, I'm going to put on gloves first so I don't accidentally ruin them with like my finger oils or whatever. And then I'm going to go hunting for them because maybe I have a$500 ,000 investment somewhere that I don't know about. You got to catch them all, Crystal. You never know what you might find. Yeah, for sure.

18:41That's all for today, Monday, November 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Special thanks to Michael Laval.

18:56Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.