Pokemon Card Mania Sparks Bubble Fear: “Just Doing A Crazy Bull Run”

The hyperscaler and neocloud bubble has dominated the attention of traders and investors this fall as cracks emerge in the AI data center buildout craze. But a much smaller speculative bubble has emerged in Pokémon cards, echoing the Beanie Baby pump-and-dump craze of the late 1990s. 

“Facebook Marketplace is littered with people offloading under market. Sealed is going up 20-30% week over week of some generations. Card shows becoming much more frequent. Restocks happening consistently. Seems like market is just doing a crazy bull run, anyone worried about the drop off?” one Redditor recently wrote in the subreddit PokemonInvesting.

Pokémon card pricing and market analytics website CardTrack has created an index tracking the 100 most valuable cards, valued at $274,371 and up 161% since September 2021.

Much like the stock market’s “Fear & Greed” indicator, CardTrack captures a snapshot of investor sentiment, which has entered “Extreme Greed” territory.

“The 100 most valuable Pokémon cards aren’t a fund you can buy … but if you could, here’s how the same money would have done against Bitcoin, gold and the stock market Sep 2021 → Nov 2026,” the card-tracking website wrote on its site.

Here are the biggest movers in the index.

The index’s top constituents.

InvestingLive analyst Justin Low commented on the Pokémon craze:

We are no longer just talking about people spending a few thousand dollars on nostalgia anymore. At these extravagant prices, collectibles are competing for the same pools of capital that could otherwise be sitting in stocks, crypto, watches, art or other alternative assets.

In the current landscape, there is somewhat of an investment infrastructure forming around the hobby. Grading companies provide the necessary authentication and condition benchmarks, major auction platforms are playing a role in terms of improving price discovery, while vaulting services and online marketplaces make it easier for expensive collectibles to change hands without owners physically carrying millions of dollars worth of cardboard around.

Low asks whether all this momentum in Pokémon card prices is a bubble.

I would say parts of it definitely does draw some parallels to one. Record prices attract attention, and the attention then attracts new buyers and new buyers push prices higher and higher. We’ve seen that script play out one too many a time in traditional markets before.

For context, baby boomers and young millennials remember the the Beanie Baby craze that inflated in the mid/late 1990s, peaked around 1998, and unraveled in 1999, just ahead of the Dot Com bust. That bubble turned $5 plush bears into perceived investments, while some consumers paid thousands of dollars for rare bears at the market’s peak.