You’ve seen the headline now: one billion dollars in one month. Cards and sealed wax in every category, tracked by Card Ladder, and it gets used as proof that the hobby has never been healthier. I wanted to know where that billion dollars in sales actually came from. So I went back into the October sales data and broke all 9,216,743 sales into five price tiers.
What came back isn’t a hobby-wide boom. It’s a small group of buyers doing most of the spending. The billion happened, but it doesn’t mean what most people assume it means.
Where the Billion Came From
Read that chart twice. The biggest pile of money didn’t come from the million-dollar slabs. It came from the $1,000-$9,999 tier. And the trophy cards everyone talks about, you know, the ones that sell for over $100,000, came in fourth.
100K+: 685 Sales Totaling $186 Million is 17.3% of the Billion
Cards that sold for $100,000 or more brought in $186.0 million in October. That’s 17.3% of the entire month, from just 685 sales. Let’s put those numbers into a typical day in October: 685 sales is about 22 a day across the whole hobby, every sport, every category. It’s 1 in every 13,455 sales, and the average one went for $271,582.
The sales that everyone was talking about included: 2017 Panini Flawless Logoman Autograph 1/1 #LMKB Kobe Bryant PSA 9/Auto 10 for $4.2 million, 2026 Panini World Cup Prizm Choice Nebula 1/1 Lionel MessiBGS 9 sold for $1.25 million, and a 2025 Topps MLB MVP The Game Dynasty Black Shohei OhtaniMLB Logoman Patch Auto 1/1 #SOD-1 PSA 9 sold for $3.24 million.
Those sales are real, and of course they matter, but 685 transactions can’t tell you how the hobby is doing. It can certainly tell you how the top of the market was doing in October. This tier gets all the headlines, and rightfully so, but they don’t bring in the most money.
Card Sales over $10,000 Represented 40% of the Money
Now let’s widen the analysis to include every card that sold for $10,000 or more and this should make you pause for a second.
Approximately 11,000 sales out of 9.2 million total sales brought in $430 million. That’s not even one-eighth of one percent of the transactions, and it carried 40% of the dollars for the month. Now, flip it around, and you’ll see that 99.88% of every card sold in October went for under $10,000, which represents about 297,000 sales per day. Those millions of sales only brought in 60% of the dollars in the hobby. That’s the gap between the headline and when someone says “the market did a billion,” what they’re really describing is a small group of high-end sales stacked on top of whatever everybody else bought.
The Real Engine: The Hobby’s Middle Class
If you want the hobby’s actual engine, look at the two tiers that most likely represent the hobby’s middle class, between $100 and $9,999. Those two tiers brought in roughly $564 million, about 52% of October’s dollars, from just over 1 million sales.
The $1,000 to $9,999 tier was the single biggests, that’s your graded rookie, your low-numbered parallel, or your vintage piece. The $100 to $999 tier added roughly $255 million on top of that
Then there’s everyone else, which encompasses about 8.16 million in sales volume, roughly 88.6% of everything sold for under $100. Together, they add up to roughly $81 million, representing 7.5% of that one billion headline. This includes the base cards, the singles for your personal collection, and guess what: it has the most activity and the smallest slice of dollars.
Imagine the hobby market as a pyramid: A huge base of cheap sales volume that barely moves the total dollars. A strong middle that carries half of it. And a small, very heavy top that includes the rarest of the rarest.
So is the Hobby Booming or not?
Both things are true, and that’s exactly why the “One Billion” headline is dangerous.
The Good News. The middle is strong. About a million sales between $100 and $9,999 brought in half the total dollars. That’s a layer of serious collectors spending real money every single day. Millions of sub-$100 sales mean people are still showing up, ripping, trading, and building personal collections.
The Risk. 40% of the total depended on roughly 11,000 sales in October. That’s a very thin floor for a number this large. If the top end cools, even a little, the headline changes. A 25% pullback on purchases of $10,000+ cards would wipe out about $108 million; that is about 10% of the whole month, while 99.88% of sales didn’t change at all. The hobby would appear to be crashing in this scenario when no one’s buying behavior had changed.
It can work the other way as well. One big auction month at the top can make the whole market look like it’s booming when the cards you collect haven’t moved at all.
What We Should do with this. Stop using the billion as your gauge of how the market is doing. Watch your market by watching the tier you actively participate in. If you collect in the $100 to $9,999 range, that’s where the depth is, and that’s the number that tells you whether the hobby is healthy. If November brings another billion-dollar month, we examine further and ask the only question that matters: what tier was that money spent in?
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Paulo runs The 90: A Soccer Cards Podcast and collector intelligence brand built on data. He also founded the site www.ultimate90.com. His background is in marketing, event, trade show, and conference production. Some of his favorite athletes to collect include Tony Gwynn, Ted Williams, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Larry Bird.
