Bruce Lee Would Have Been A Great Card Investor

Trigger Warning: this column uses the “I”word…

But first, a brief update on the Heritage Auctions outcome.  As you may recall, I bid $1800 ($2160) on the 1972 STP Petty with autograph and decided to go to bed and find out what happened in the morning.  Nailed it.  Bidding stalled at $1550 ($1860). 

I know what you are thinking, WTF does a dead martial artist-philosopher-actor’s work have to do with making smart card investments?  Everything, as it turns out, because when it came to life lessons, Bruce Lee got it.  I read his writings (including Tao of Jeet Kune Do) and got a lot out of it.  Bruce Lee was a friggin’ genius.  How about this quote of his:

“The most dangerous person is the one who listens, thinks and observes.”

I could not agree more.  We have two eyes, two ears, one mouth: we should be listening and observing 80% of the time, running our cakeholes no more than 20%.  My Bruce Lee-derived mantra as a card investor is:

“Listen, think, observe, because no deal is better than a bad deal”. 

Bad deal = no deal.  Repeat 500 times a day.  If you forget it, stick your head in a toilet and pull the handle repeatedly until you flush away the stupidity. 

Intelligent, disciplined card buying for investment consists of:

1.     Knowledge

2.     Market research

3.     Math

4.     Avoiding emotions and other magical thinking. 

Knowledge is power and if you do not learn, you will get hurt.  Your first task, grasshopper, is to acquire knowledge.  That means going to work and working hard at learning the ins and outs of every item you are going to purchase.  Or, as Bruce put it:

“Put 'going the extra mile' to work as part of one's daily habit.”

Preparation is everything and it pays off in multiples: 

“Luck is the residue of design”—Branch Rickey

OK, not Bruce but it is one of the best concepts ever.  You must put in your 10,000 hours learning about the hobby if you want to compete with those of us who are crazy fanatics about this stuff and know it by heart.  That means you must study.  I did.  I started a serious study of cards as a young nerdling in the 1970s, when knowledge was much harder to acquire and that much more valuable once gained.  No internet, no catalogs, few conventions, very few reference materials.  I read a book called The Complete Book of Baseball Cards by Steve Clark (1975; I was ten) and studied the chapter on rare cards until the binding frayed. 

Being studious as a young collector paid off quickly.  A kid on my block got a big box of old cards and wanted to trade for my 1968 Clemente.  We had a deal all worked out and I ask him to throw in an odd card of a guy we never heard of.  No problem.  The card was a 1958 Bell Brand Los Angeles Dodgers Gino Cimoli.  Some of you know where this is going.  1958 Bell cards are not easy to find anyway, but Cimoli was a journeyman player who got traded from Los Angeles to St. Louis early in the season and snack chip maker Bell pulled his card, making it a short print.  I knew that because I had studied up on rare cards; my trading counterparty did not.  That throw-in was worth 10x the rest of the deal. 

I still study cards obsessively.  I read old Standard Catalogs on the toilet (I know, TMI).  I spend hours watching auctions.  I troll hobby chat rooms. Whenever I can get to a show, I look at lots and lots of cards; thousands, even tens of thousands, pass through my hands every day at a card show.  I get to the National when it opens every day and spend the whole day each day poring over cards in bargain bins until the holder cuts on my fingers need bandaging.  Sometimes it can seem pretty ridiculous that I sit there sifting through ‘junk’, but it pays off when I pull a stack of $3-$50 cards out of a $0.50 box. I will take that deal all day, every day.    

Next is market research.  Market research is not just data mining prices.  Understanding the context is everything.  There are lots of databases with pricing information out there, so getting a rough idea of value can be pretty simple if the item is frequently transacted.  You still have to account for eye appeal and the odd outlier sale, but you can get pretty close.  For example, a 1954 Topps Hank Aaron sells hundreds of times a year (not rare, just demanded). You can get a pretty accurate real-time price on the card in any condition from any of dozens of data aggregating and scraping services.  The art is understanding how the data fits on the rare or non-mainstream stuff.  I recently needed to price a rare card that had not transacted in any tracked sale since 2014.  I had the data, but it was meaningless because the card is so rare that the data is grossly out of date.  If the data is meaningless, valuation is experiential.  You must know enough to extrapolate from other sales of other cards, and that takes knowledge of how the market works generally. 

So, we have card knowledge and market research.  The math is where we apply it to decide how much to pay.  Here’s the funny thing: most people who are trying to make money on cards cannot do arithmetic or basic algebra on the fly, let alone realistic financial projections.  Not calculus, which was my bête noir in college, the basic stuff, like the skills needed to balance a checkbook or calculate a rate of return.  If you are going to make money, especially if you plan to sit at a table at a show and invite people to lay down their cards for an offer, you have got to be capable of quickly doing the math necessary to apply your knowledge and research to the task and come up with a price that is a good deal. 

I also found Bruce’s thoughts on success to be instructive on the last point, eschewing emotions and magical thinking:

“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”

To me, focus means that you must apply what you know, rigorously and without hesitation, if it is to be of use.  If you are making a deal for profit, the “for profit” part must be the laser-like focus, not getting that cool card or winning out over another dealer.  Those are emotional goals with no place in this endeavor.  Last weekend I was bidding for myself; it was personal, not business, so I went all-in.  When it is business, there is no all-in.  Remember: bad deal = no deal.  Head.  Toilet.  Flush. 

Laser-like focus means that you need to use every tool at your disposal.  I know one guy who steadfastly refuses to get a cell phone or a computer, and he puts himself at a huge disadvantage every time he buys, sells, or trades.  When we trade, every time he condescendingly chides me for “looking that up on the computer” I just nod and smile (and it’s not a “computer”, it is an iPhone, you luddite; I can write critically about him here because I know he isn’t reading this).  Do I tell him he is being foolish?  Nope.  I take him apart on every trade instead.  If you underprice something because you won’t look it up, tough luck, bub.  There is no excuse in this era of instant electronic information not to use it. 

Laser-like focus also means that you must press every advantage, always and without hesitation.  When a dealer offers me a stupidly advantageous price, I take it.  If I spot a $50 card in a dime box, I am not going to tell the seller he made a mistake.  If someone is selling an item at a tiny fraction of value, that is on him.  I always ask for discounts, even on what were already hugely advantageous deals; why wouldn’t I?  It all counts towards my eventual return. 

One of the areas where people become squeamish is in dealing with a non-collector.  I don’t.  This is either a for-profit endeavor or it is something else.  As an investor, I pay as little as it takes to get the cards I am trying to buy, period; I certainly will not offer more for a card just because the seller is not involved in the hobby.  Nor will I educate the non-collector.  I won’t give up my knowledge advantage just to be ‘nice’.  Information is a precious, hard-earned commodity, so I keep it close to my vest. That can be surprisingly hard to do for some people.  Making the transition from pure collector talking cards and swapping stories with others to being a steely-eyed investor means you have to shut your cakehole.  If a guy presents with a box of stuff for sale, you cannot start dishing about how rare and desirable his cards are to collectors.  You make your assessment and close the deal without educating the seller.  I know some people feel differently about how to deal with a non-collector, and they are entitled to their feelings, but I do not share them. I won’t cheat or lie, but I sure as hell will not give a non-collector special treatment.  Wanna call me a greedy, souless pig, well…oink!   

Finally, from a style standpoint, I’ve noticed that card people go to great effort to adopt a non-professional persona when making a deal.  The older generation of collectors engages in lots of down-home, shucky-darn, beating around the bush dissembling when negotiating a deal; everyone tries to sound like an airline pilot: “well, we’re coming up on a little weather, so I’m just gonna turn on the seatbelt sign” when the plane is bucking like an unbroken stallion.  The younger generation’s patter reminds me of drug dealers and wannabe gangsters.  None of that should be a distraction: I try to focus on nothing other than the deal in front of us.  Every financial deal is a zero-sum game: somebody wins, and somebody loses.  You can’t sugar coat that.  Stay focused on the facts not the bullshit obscuring the facts. 

One more bit of Bruce’s wisdom, which sums up what you should do with everything of mine that you’ve ever read and ever will read:

“Adopt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

I have a favor to ask: if you are enjoying my column, please tell some friends and ask them to check it out and subscribe.  I want to try and get over 300 subscribers by the summer and I don’t have that much to go, so please help a brother out.