- Thread starter
- #1
All The Hype
Active member
Thought it might be interesting for any of you who care to read about how I got into prospecting and see some of the investments I have made and the reasoning behind each. A lot of times prospecting is understandably overly secretive, so I thought maybe some of you prospectors might like to look at someone else’s insight and decision making process. And maybe any of you newer prospectors out there can take something from this and apply it to your own prospecting ventures. I personally love hearing about other people’s prospecting successes and failures, so maybe you guys will feel the same.
My name is Ryan and I am a college student. I am going into my junior year and I am an Economics/Communications double major. I have pitched in college and I am also on the basketball team at a DIII school in Indiana. As a college student, I don’t have a ton of money, so I have basically worked with a budget of $2000-$3000 and have done fairly well with it. To some that may be a lot of money, to others, maybe not so much. But it’s all I have to work with so I have done what I can with it. I waited until I turned 18 to get an eBay account, because that is the rule that eBay has for registration. I have collected cards my whole life, but since registering on eBay, baseball cards have reshaped my way of life, and I really love it. At first, I went through the stage of buying too much of everything (many of you can relate, I’m sure). After awhile, I realized that I was going to run out of money since I was going to school and had no income until the summer, so I decided to stop buying every single cool Justin Verlander card that popped up on eBay and started looking into some different kinds of cards for investments. I figured it would help me make some money to put into Verlander cards, but it eventually turned into a whole new passion. At the time, I didn’t know much about Bowman products, prospects, or even much about how to sell on eBay. So I looked into the Beckett Rookie Rolodex thinking it was the #1 tool on earth for a prospector and picked a couple guys that I liked. I watched some of their cards on eBay and was unsuccessful at winning any of them. Eventually I won my first investment card, and was it ever a beauty. A 2007 Bowman Chrome Ole Sheldon Gold Refractor for $5.85 dlvd. What a buy. What I didn’t realize was that the reason I got the card for less than six dollars was because Sheldon was a 24 year old first baseman in A Advanced with minimal power and not much room for further development. Not the smartest buy I’d ever made, but believe it or not, I eventually sold it for a profit of $8.90 over a year later.
After having a few chats with some more experienced prospectors over on the old BMBs, I gained a more firm grasp on the concept of prospecting, on what kind of players to look for, and on what kind of stuff to think about when deciding what to buy. Although this was helpful to get me started, I have found that personal experience is the best way to learn. Since that first Ole Sheldon card, I have invested in a ton of different players including the likes of Jay Bruce, Evan Longoria, Wilkin Ramirez, David Price, Madison Bumgarner, Wes Hodges, Gerardo Parra, Ryan Strieby, and most recently, Ryan Perry and Rick Porcello. As I’ve gained more experience, I have become more confident about the players I choose to invest in.
As far as I’m concerned, prospecting is essentially investing in the baseball stock market. The overall goal is to buy in low and wait until the player becomes popular or starts to outperform other players. You have different players to choose from and lots of cards from which you need to decide how much to buy. Do you go with a well-known, more expensive player that will probably be the safer bet down the line? Or do you take a risk on a player who is basically unknown and hope that he turns into the next big thing? I personally have found both to be successful at times, but from what I’ve seen, from what I’ve done, and from common sense, I have decided that it is much more fun and rewarding to choose an unknown player and put a ton into him at a much lower risk than a bigger name player. If the kid turns into a star, then you just made a mint. If he turns into a total bust, you lose money, but not as much as if you had been buying a well-known and more expensive player.
Pick your team. You don’t have to stick to one team, but I have found that it is more fun for me if I prospect players in the Tigers’ system simply because they’re my favorite team to follow. That way I cheer for them not only because they can make me money, but because I actually want them to play well so my team can win. I don’t always do this, but if there is a decent player in the Tigers’ system, you can bet that I probably have at least a handful of their cards.
One rule I have always tried to follow is the old standby of “If you can turn a worthwhile profit, do it, and don’t look back.” What I mean by “worthwhile profit” is to consider how much you paid for the card, how much you can sell it for, and what a realistic ceiling for the card might be. If you buy a blue refractor for $20, is it really worth it to sell it for $28? How high is the ceiling for that particular player…$50? $80? $120? Or is it $28? These are all things you have to look at when determining whether or not to sell. Reality is that sometimes you make an investment that simply will not result in a huge profit. This is where the great prospectors are separated from the novices. You have to know when you’re defeated and take what you can. Likewise, you have to not get too greedy when you’re making a big flip. If you can sell that $20 blue refractor for $65, is it really worth it to hold off and hope for it to go to $80? The way I see it, take your profit, and don’t look back. You made money so how can you possibly be upset? Sometimes you could have made more, but at the same time, sometimes you would have lost money if you had held out longer. In the end, I figure these ups and downs even out, so take the money and be happy.
Set goals for yourself with particular investments. If you invest $100, do you want to make $100? $200? $50? Ask yourself what a reasonable goal might be and do what you can to reach that goal. Also keep in mind how long you plan to hold the cards. Obviously the ideal would be to buy a card and sell it the day after it arrives for triple the price, but in reality, investments take time to yield decent returns.
Be organized and don’t cheat. Profit is not what you sell a card for. It is what you sell the card for minus fees, minus what you paid for it. I have kept a detailed spreadsheet with every single purchase I make. I do not include wax or anything that I pull from packs (I don’t do much wax anyway), just the singles that I buy or trade for. This is the most important tool of all because it is so easy to reference. I keep track of what I bought for, what I sell for (MINUS ALL FEES), and obviously the profit. This is what I mean by “do not cheat”. It sucks, but reality is that you cannot break even by selling a card for the same price at which you bought it on eBay. So just be realistic about how much money you are actually taking in when you make a sale. Subtract all shipping, eBay, and paypal fees. Then subtract the exact amount you bought it for and you’ve calculated yourself the profit. If I trade for a card, I put down the assumed value of the card that I traded as the price.
I also appraise my inventory every month or two and keep track of what I could sell for at current prices if I had to jump ship for some reason. This is helpful to understanding the big picture. I’m currently down about $1,000 according to my spreadsheet, but my realistic appraisals show me that I’ve got a little over $2,000 in inventory, which means that if I sold everything I have right now at current value, I would be about $1,000 ahead of where I was when I started. When you appraise, always underestimate the value rather than overestimating. The $2,000 I have in inventory is probably closer to $2,500, but by underestimating, I’m not in a situation where I’m counting on value that I don’t really have. In the future, if the guys pan out like I expect them to, that $2000 could double or more pretty quickly.
I think a lot of people out there think they are doing a lot better than they actually are because they have a selective approach to calculating “profits”. Lots of people say “I have made sooo much money on baseball cards”. To be honest, I have a hard time believing a lot of these claims. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s simply that from my experience, it has taken about two years of very organized careful spending and precise selling to get to the point where I have approximately 1,000-1,500 dollars of value that I did not have before. Am I the best prospector out there? No probably not. But I have made some pretty smart moves and have had some good luck to get to the point where I am right now, so I find it hard to believe that everyone out there is making big money like a lot of them seem to claim. I’m a numbers guy- I like to see people’s buy and sell numbers.
Lastly, keep in mind that everything adds up. You might not think that 50 bucks is that much money, but when you make 50 bucks a few different times, it starts to add up to a pretty significant stack of cash. Don’t be scared to take a small profit. Also keep in mind the amount you have to work with. For someone who is investing $10,000, that same 50 bucks might not be worth as much as it is to someone who only has $500 to invest. No profit is too small. A lot of times, I buy or trade for low end stuff that I can flip pretty quickly for more on another site, usually just for $10 or $15. But it’s money that is waiting to be made, so I choose to take advantage of it. And it really does add up.
Before I show some of my prospecting successes, here are a couple failures:
1. Jason Heyward—Bought a single BGS 9.5 Sterling auto. Value did not move for over a year. Sold for about the same price at a time when I needed some money for other things, losing $7.88 to fees. Will this card eventually move higher? Probably. Will that time come soon? Probably not. Lesson Learned: Stay away from most of the big name guys, because their cards take a lot more performance by the player to move up value-wise.
2. Jhoulis Chacin—Bought a couple Threads autos. Same situation as Heyward, needed the money so I sold them before I would have liked to, but the value had dropped way down since he had an auto in Elite as well. Invested $20.03, lost $12.03. Lesson Learned: Don’t invest in products that may lose value if the player is also in another product later that year (i.e., Threads).
3. Trevor Cahill/Brett Anderson—Bought some Future’s Game parallels of these guys from an off-eBay site thinking they were underpriced. Went to eBay as soon as I got them and listed them in lots. I got killed on them. I use the term “killed” pretty loosely because I only lost a few bucks. It’s just that I was expecting them to go for about $40 total, and instead they went for a total of $12.33. Invested 17.25, lost $4.92. Lesson Learned: Don’t buy 2nd year FG cards as investments.
So far these are the only things I have really lost money on. Eventually I’m sure it will come to the point where I have stuff of a player or two who never made it to the spotlight and whose cards I will eat the cost of, but so far all of my major investments have either paid off or are looking good.
So without further ado, here are a couple of my prospects and what I put into them, in no particular order:
1. Jay Bruce—My first real investment. Bought and traded for two Sterling autos and flipped them for a nice profit about 4 months later when he debuted. He was the second player I bought into (behind that Sheldon gold ref), but Bruce’s sell point came sooner, so he was the first player I made money on. I bought into him because he was one of the top ranked prospects in baseball and had shown tons of power in the minor leagues. I assumed it would be a quick flip since he was in Triple-A at the time, and it was. Not a huge profit, but this really got me going.
Total Invested: $25.50 Total Sold: $74.63 Total Profit: $49.14
2. Gerardo Parra—When 2008 Bowman came out, I had my eye on Parra from the start. I decided to try a new buying strategy and go after as many chrome base as I possibly could instead of trying for the higher end parallels. I ended up having 172 chrome base through eBay and a handful of trades to go along with a couple refractors and a couple SOTF autos. Parra was never a guy that I assumed would be a huge MLB star, but he is basically a solid five tool player rating about average or above average in just about everything. This leads to another point: you don’t always have to pick the next big star…sometimes a role player that makes a nice splash in the big leagues can make you just as much or more than a future MLB superstar. I sold most of this stuff after Parra’s homerun in the first at bat of his debut for a nice profit, and I still have a small portion of my stash left just in case his stuff goes even higher (perhaps if he ends up winning the ROY Award).
Total Invested: $101.79 Total Sold: $232.79 Total Profit: $131.00 Inventory Remaining: 27 Chrome Base, 1 Refractor, 1 SOTF Auto
3. Ryan Perry—This guy started as a collection, but turned into a stash when he made the big leagues and I made a huge flip on an elite auto /25 that I had bought only a month or two earlier. He’s only a reliever right now, but as a Tiger pitcher I was instantly attracted to him and his three “plus” pitches. He can really light up the radar gun and has hit triple digits with regularity before. This is a win-win investment because even if he turns out to be awful, I am happy to keep the cards that I have left of him in my own collection. I bought some of everything, chrome parallels, elite autos, and even some Bowman base cards. I graded the worthy chrome parallels and all came back 9.5 which led to another huge sale and probably a couple more nice sales in the near future.
Total Invested: $143.91 Total Sold: $220.14 Total Profit: $76.21 Inventory Remaining: 10 Chrome Base, 1 Blue Refractor, 1 Xfractor BGS 9.5, 2 Gold Refractor BGS 9.5s
4. Wilkin Ramirez—Tiger outfielder that reminded me of Curtis Granderson. He was the first bigger investment I made (about $200), and the mammoth homerun he hit in his debut a couple weeks ago helped me turn some nice profits. I am basically free riding on what I have left of him since the profits from the cards I have sold cover the initial cost of what is left.
Total Investment: $196.09 Total Sold: $197.67 Total Proft: $1.58 Inventory Remaining: 5 Chrome Base, 2 Refractors, 1 Sterling Gold Refractor #/10
5. Ryan Strieby—Guy has hit the cover off the ball each of the last two years. Led the league in 2008 in just about every major offensive category, most notably his 29 homers…and he didn’t even play the last six weeks of the season due to injury. This year he is already atop the league in homers again and is near the top in about five other categories. Chicks dig the longball and so do baseball fans, so Strieby should be popular once his name gets out a little more. He has ONE card. One. If he gets the attention he deserves, this will be huge down the road, as 2008 Bowman was his only first year card and will be the most sought after. Good players + Limited Number of Cards = Lots of Money for the People who Own the Cards. At this time I would rather not share my investment numbers, but I will be happy to disclose them in the future when I start to move some more stuff.
6. Rick Porcello—One of the few “big name” guys I have bought into heavily. Why? Because he’s 20 years old and literally has endless potential. This kid could actually be the greatest pitcher of all time someday. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves because he’s still young and lots of things can happen, but he really is THAT good. And for me he’s an obvious choice as a Tiger pitcher. This is another situation where it is okay with me if I don’t move everything I have of him because I am happy to keep some stuff in my own collection. I have sold a few things of Porcello but not much. I am at the point right now where I could sell all my stuff of him for a small profit, but I have decided to wait and try to make some huge money off this guy (even if it takes another year or two). I bought a number of Leaf Limited autos because numbered or not, these are very rare cards based on the small number that have surfaced on eBay since the product’s release. I figure that eventually lots of people will collect Porcello, and in turn, lots of people will want to add one of these cards to their collection. Like all cards, many will settle into collections permanently and there will be fewer and fewer that show up on eBay, which will help them demand a premium. Again, at this time I would rather not share my investment numbers, but I will be happy to disclose them in the future when I start to move some more stuff.
Number Update Edit: I bought the Elite Black Status Auto 1/1 for $1000 before the 2009 season and sold it for $1800 near the end of the season, which was $1643.92 after fees, a $643.92 profit. I am currently up $304.86 on Porcello, and I still have 7 Leaf Limited Autos, 3 AFLAC Autos and some chrome stuff (highlighted by a BGS 9.5 Xfractor). I'll likely move most of this during the 2010 season even if it's not for a huge profit.
I have been prospecting for about two years now. I have had a lot of success so far and not many failures. None of my main investments have turned out to be complete busts yet, and hopefully I can keep it that way. I am very close to getting to the point where I am no longer investing my own money, but rather, the profit that I have made from prospecting. I think the best piece of advice I can give is to be realistic. I’ve used this word a lot of times in this document, but it’s true. If you have realistic expectations, set realistic goals, have a realistic idea of what money you actually get when you sell, and overall just have a firm grasp on reality, you will be just fine. It’s not always easy, and sometimes it takes a long time to pay off, but overall, if you do your homework and make smart decisions, you will be well on your way to making money as a successful prospector.
My name is Ryan and I am a college student. I am going into my junior year and I am an Economics/Communications double major. I have pitched in college and I am also on the basketball team at a DIII school in Indiana. As a college student, I don’t have a ton of money, so I have basically worked with a budget of $2000-$3000 and have done fairly well with it. To some that may be a lot of money, to others, maybe not so much. But it’s all I have to work with so I have done what I can with it. I waited until I turned 18 to get an eBay account, because that is the rule that eBay has for registration. I have collected cards my whole life, but since registering on eBay, baseball cards have reshaped my way of life, and I really love it. At first, I went through the stage of buying too much of everything (many of you can relate, I’m sure). After awhile, I realized that I was going to run out of money since I was going to school and had no income until the summer, so I decided to stop buying every single cool Justin Verlander card that popped up on eBay and started looking into some different kinds of cards for investments. I figured it would help me make some money to put into Verlander cards, but it eventually turned into a whole new passion. At the time, I didn’t know much about Bowman products, prospects, or even much about how to sell on eBay. So I looked into the Beckett Rookie Rolodex thinking it was the #1 tool on earth for a prospector and picked a couple guys that I liked. I watched some of their cards on eBay and was unsuccessful at winning any of them. Eventually I won my first investment card, and was it ever a beauty. A 2007 Bowman Chrome Ole Sheldon Gold Refractor for $5.85 dlvd. What a buy. What I didn’t realize was that the reason I got the card for less than six dollars was because Sheldon was a 24 year old first baseman in A Advanced with minimal power and not much room for further development. Not the smartest buy I’d ever made, but believe it or not, I eventually sold it for a profit of $8.90 over a year later.
After having a few chats with some more experienced prospectors over on the old BMBs, I gained a more firm grasp on the concept of prospecting, on what kind of players to look for, and on what kind of stuff to think about when deciding what to buy. Although this was helpful to get me started, I have found that personal experience is the best way to learn. Since that first Ole Sheldon card, I have invested in a ton of different players including the likes of Jay Bruce, Evan Longoria, Wilkin Ramirez, David Price, Madison Bumgarner, Wes Hodges, Gerardo Parra, Ryan Strieby, and most recently, Ryan Perry and Rick Porcello. As I’ve gained more experience, I have become more confident about the players I choose to invest in.
As far as I’m concerned, prospecting is essentially investing in the baseball stock market. The overall goal is to buy in low and wait until the player becomes popular or starts to outperform other players. You have different players to choose from and lots of cards from which you need to decide how much to buy. Do you go with a well-known, more expensive player that will probably be the safer bet down the line? Or do you take a risk on a player who is basically unknown and hope that he turns into the next big thing? I personally have found both to be successful at times, but from what I’ve seen, from what I’ve done, and from common sense, I have decided that it is much more fun and rewarding to choose an unknown player and put a ton into him at a much lower risk than a bigger name player. If the kid turns into a star, then you just made a mint. If he turns into a total bust, you lose money, but not as much as if you had been buying a well-known and more expensive player.
Pick your team. You don’t have to stick to one team, but I have found that it is more fun for me if I prospect players in the Tigers’ system simply because they’re my favorite team to follow. That way I cheer for them not only because they can make me money, but because I actually want them to play well so my team can win. I don’t always do this, but if there is a decent player in the Tigers’ system, you can bet that I probably have at least a handful of their cards.
One rule I have always tried to follow is the old standby of “If you can turn a worthwhile profit, do it, and don’t look back.” What I mean by “worthwhile profit” is to consider how much you paid for the card, how much you can sell it for, and what a realistic ceiling for the card might be. If you buy a blue refractor for $20, is it really worth it to sell it for $28? How high is the ceiling for that particular player…$50? $80? $120? Or is it $28? These are all things you have to look at when determining whether or not to sell. Reality is that sometimes you make an investment that simply will not result in a huge profit. This is where the great prospectors are separated from the novices. You have to know when you’re defeated and take what you can. Likewise, you have to not get too greedy when you’re making a big flip. If you can sell that $20 blue refractor for $65, is it really worth it to hold off and hope for it to go to $80? The way I see it, take your profit, and don’t look back. You made money so how can you possibly be upset? Sometimes you could have made more, but at the same time, sometimes you would have lost money if you had held out longer. In the end, I figure these ups and downs even out, so take the money and be happy.
Set goals for yourself with particular investments. If you invest $100, do you want to make $100? $200? $50? Ask yourself what a reasonable goal might be and do what you can to reach that goal. Also keep in mind how long you plan to hold the cards. Obviously the ideal would be to buy a card and sell it the day after it arrives for triple the price, but in reality, investments take time to yield decent returns.
Be organized and don’t cheat. Profit is not what you sell a card for. It is what you sell the card for minus fees, minus what you paid for it. I have kept a detailed spreadsheet with every single purchase I make. I do not include wax or anything that I pull from packs (I don’t do much wax anyway), just the singles that I buy or trade for. This is the most important tool of all because it is so easy to reference. I keep track of what I bought for, what I sell for (MINUS ALL FEES), and obviously the profit. This is what I mean by “do not cheat”. It sucks, but reality is that you cannot break even by selling a card for the same price at which you bought it on eBay. So just be realistic about how much money you are actually taking in when you make a sale. Subtract all shipping, eBay, and paypal fees. Then subtract the exact amount you bought it for and you’ve calculated yourself the profit. If I trade for a card, I put down the assumed value of the card that I traded as the price.
I also appraise my inventory every month or two and keep track of what I could sell for at current prices if I had to jump ship for some reason. This is helpful to understanding the big picture. I’m currently down about $1,000 according to my spreadsheet, but my realistic appraisals show me that I’ve got a little over $2,000 in inventory, which means that if I sold everything I have right now at current value, I would be about $1,000 ahead of where I was when I started. When you appraise, always underestimate the value rather than overestimating. The $2,000 I have in inventory is probably closer to $2,500, but by underestimating, I’m not in a situation where I’m counting on value that I don’t really have. In the future, if the guys pan out like I expect them to, that $2000 could double or more pretty quickly.
I think a lot of people out there think they are doing a lot better than they actually are because they have a selective approach to calculating “profits”. Lots of people say “I have made sooo much money on baseball cards”. To be honest, I have a hard time believing a lot of these claims. It’s not that it can’t be done, it’s simply that from my experience, it has taken about two years of very organized careful spending and precise selling to get to the point where I have approximately 1,000-1,500 dollars of value that I did not have before. Am I the best prospector out there? No probably not. But I have made some pretty smart moves and have had some good luck to get to the point where I am right now, so I find it hard to believe that everyone out there is making big money like a lot of them seem to claim. I’m a numbers guy- I like to see people’s buy and sell numbers.
Lastly, keep in mind that everything adds up. You might not think that 50 bucks is that much money, but when you make 50 bucks a few different times, it starts to add up to a pretty significant stack of cash. Don’t be scared to take a small profit. Also keep in mind the amount you have to work with. For someone who is investing $10,000, that same 50 bucks might not be worth as much as it is to someone who only has $500 to invest. No profit is too small. A lot of times, I buy or trade for low end stuff that I can flip pretty quickly for more on another site, usually just for $10 or $15. But it’s money that is waiting to be made, so I choose to take advantage of it. And it really does add up.
Before I show some of my prospecting successes, here are a couple failures:
1. Jason Heyward—Bought a single BGS 9.5 Sterling auto. Value did not move for over a year. Sold for about the same price at a time when I needed some money for other things, losing $7.88 to fees. Will this card eventually move higher? Probably. Will that time come soon? Probably not. Lesson Learned: Stay away from most of the big name guys, because their cards take a lot more performance by the player to move up value-wise.
2. Jhoulis Chacin—Bought a couple Threads autos. Same situation as Heyward, needed the money so I sold them before I would have liked to, but the value had dropped way down since he had an auto in Elite as well. Invested $20.03, lost $12.03. Lesson Learned: Don’t invest in products that may lose value if the player is also in another product later that year (i.e., Threads).
3. Trevor Cahill/Brett Anderson—Bought some Future’s Game parallels of these guys from an off-eBay site thinking they were underpriced. Went to eBay as soon as I got them and listed them in lots. I got killed on them. I use the term “killed” pretty loosely because I only lost a few bucks. It’s just that I was expecting them to go for about $40 total, and instead they went for a total of $12.33. Invested 17.25, lost $4.92. Lesson Learned: Don’t buy 2nd year FG cards as investments.
So far these are the only things I have really lost money on. Eventually I’m sure it will come to the point where I have stuff of a player or two who never made it to the spotlight and whose cards I will eat the cost of, but so far all of my major investments have either paid off or are looking good.
So without further ado, here are a couple of my prospects and what I put into them, in no particular order:
1. Jay Bruce—My first real investment. Bought and traded for two Sterling autos and flipped them for a nice profit about 4 months later when he debuted. He was the second player I bought into (behind that Sheldon gold ref), but Bruce’s sell point came sooner, so he was the first player I made money on. I bought into him because he was one of the top ranked prospects in baseball and had shown tons of power in the minor leagues. I assumed it would be a quick flip since he was in Triple-A at the time, and it was. Not a huge profit, but this really got me going.
Total Invested: $25.50 Total Sold: $74.63 Total Profit: $49.14
2. Gerardo Parra—When 2008 Bowman came out, I had my eye on Parra from the start. I decided to try a new buying strategy and go after as many chrome base as I possibly could instead of trying for the higher end parallels. I ended up having 172 chrome base through eBay and a handful of trades to go along with a couple refractors and a couple SOTF autos. Parra was never a guy that I assumed would be a huge MLB star, but he is basically a solid five tool player rating about average or above average in just about everything. This leads to another point: you don’t always have to pick the next big star…sometimes a role player that makes a nice splash in the big leagues can make you just as much or more than a future MLB superstar. I sold most of this stuff after Parra’s homerun in the first at bat of his debut for a nice profit, and I still have a small portion of my stash left just in case his stuff goes even higher (perhaps if he ends up winning the ROY Award).
Total Invested: $101.79 Total Sold: $232.79 Total Profit: $131.00 Inventory Remaining: 27 Chrome Base, 1 Refractor, 1 SOTF Auto
3. Ryan Perry—This guy started as a collection, but turned into a stash when he made the big leagues and I made a huge flip on an elite auto /25 that I had bought only a month or two earlier. He’s only a reliever right now, but as a Tiger pitcher I was instantly attracted to him and his three “plus” pitches. He can really light up the radar gun and has hit triple digits with regularity before. This is a win-win investment because even if he turns out to be awful, I am happy to keep the cards that I have left of him in my own collection. I bought some of everything, chrome parallels, elite autos, and even some Bowman base cards. I graded the worthy chrome parallels and all came back 9.5 which led to another huge sale and probably a couple more nice sales in the near future.
Total Invested: $143.91 Total Sold: $220.14 Total Profit: $76.21 Inventory Remaining: 10 Chrome Base, 1 Blue Refractor, 1 Xfractor BGS 9.5, 2 Gold Refractor BGS 9.5s
4. Wilkin Ramirez—Tiger outfielder that reminded me of Curtis Granderson. He was the first bigger investment I made (about $200), and the mammoth homerun he hit in his debut a couple weeks ago helped me turn some nice profits. I am basically free riding on what I have left of him since the profits from the cards I have sold cover the initial cost of what is left.
Total Investment: $196.09 Total Sold: $197.67 Total Proft: $1.58 Inventory Remaining: 5 Chrome Base, 2 Refractors, 1 Sterling Gold Refractor #/10
5. Ryan Strieby—Guy has hit the cover off the ball each of the last two years. Led the league in 2008 in just about every major offensive category, most notably his 29 homers…and he didn’t even play the last six weeks of the season due to injury. This year he is already atop the league in homers again and is near the top in about five other categories. Chicks dig the longball and so do baseball fans, so Strieby should be popular once his name gets out a little more. He has ONE card. One. If he gets the attention he deserves, this will be huge down the road, as 2008 Bowman was his only first year card and will be the most sought after. Good players + Limited Number of Cards = Lots of Money for the People who Own the Cards. At this time I would rather not share my investment numbers, but I will be happy to disclose them in the future when I start to move some more stuff.
6. Rick Porcello—One of the few “big name” guys I have bought into heavily. Why? Because he’s 20 years old and literally has endless potential. This kid could actually be the greatest pitcher of all time someday. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves because he’s still young and lots of things can happen, but he really is THAT good. And for me he’s an obvious choice as a Tiger pitcher. This is another situation where it is okay with me if I don’t move everything I have of him because I am happy to keep some stuff in my own collection. I have sold a few things of Porcello but not much. I am at the point right now where I could sell all my stuff of him for a small profit, but I have decided to wait and try to make some huge money off this guy (even if it takes another year or two). I bought a number of Leaf Limited autos because numbered or not, these are very rare cards based on the small number that have surfaced on eBay since the product’s release. I figure that eventually lots of people will collect Porcello, and in turn, lots of people will want to add one of these cards to their collection. Like all cards, many will settle into collections permanently and there will be fewer and fewer that show up on eBay, which will help them demand a premium. Again, at this time I would rather not share my investment numbers, but I will be happy to disclose them in the future when I start to move some more stuff.
Number Update Edit: I bought the Elite Black Status Auto 1/1 for $1000 before the 2009 season and sold it for $1800 near the end of the season, which was $1643.92 after fees, a $643.92 profit. I am currently up $304.86 on Porcello, and I still have 7 Leaf Limited Autos, 3 AFLAC Autos and some chrome stuff (highlighted by a BGS 9.5 Xfractor). I'll likely move most of this during the 2010 season even if it's not for a huge profit.
I have been prospecting for about two years now. I have had a lot of success so far and not many failures. None of my main investments have turned out to be complete busts yet, and hopefully I can keep it that way. I am very close to getting to the point where I am no longer investing my own money, but rather, the profit that I have made from prospecting. I think the best piece of advice I can give is to be realistic. I’ve used this word a lot of times in this document, but it’s true. If you have realistic expectations, set realistic goals, have a realistic idea of what money you actually get when you sell, and overall just have a firm grasp on reality, you will be just fine. It’s not always easy, and sometimes it takes a long time to pay off, but overall, if you do your homework and make smart decisions, you will be well on your way to making money as a successful prospector.
