Burn It All Down.

Shiny Thing$ #229: Burn It All Down

^{Rob Petrozzo, for Rally}

^{· · · · · · · ·}

This is an optimistic post  (I want to start there, because the title would lead you to believe otherwise).

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ll take the short-attention-span route this week and begin with the conclusion: right now, it’s very easy to mistake noise for signal and throw money at bad ideas. So maybe it’s time to proactively pull the rug on the worst bets. 

The numbers in the collectibles space are out of control lately, even in the face of some intense macro headwinds. For the top tier items, however, the prices make more sense than ever - you’re getting a hard asset with an incredible story and rarity that can’t be manufactured. Those items deserve to sell at a premium. 

But on the low end and the ultra-speculative end, the prices are akin to high school bullies: all puffed up, blocking the doorway projecting strength, casting just enough fear to control the room. But with bullies, it’s almost always a front. When that pressure inevitably deflates and the veil falls, what’s left is the foundation that was there all along - the best stuff. But now it’s free to grow, unobstructed, in the direction it was always heading.

But right now, the “bad stuff” is all over the place, and can be broken down into 3 unique categories...

Starting with a microcosm of the collectibles market in Q1 2026:

This is a game-worn jersey for a bench player on a one-year $1.27M contract that played 34 seconds and may not return to the team next season. It takes a buyer in a very specific category to purchase this for $5,376. 

This is the “Buy Anything” category.

Not everyone follows sports or is into sports memorabilia, so I’ll give you an analogy for the sale of the Knicks jersey above: That purchase is the equivalent of a $5,000 cup of coffee at a local bodega - there are better ways to spend $5K and much safer options in terms of debut items. But it was available, and it was in an auction with some other great stuff, and someone said “I’ll take this one, who cares!” 

Mohamed Diawara’s jersey is a bully in the context of collectible asset prices. Weak yet-to-be-tested product with a ridiculously strong headline price. Everyone knows it’s bullsh*t, but we let it go about its business because we don’t care enough to get in the way. It doesn’t affect my day, as insane as it looks. “To each their own,” and if somehow Diawara turns into the next Michael Jordan, I will gladly send out an apology newlsetter.  

But thats not the only sale over the past couple of weeks that needs second look… 

The espresso machine used in the dugout by Italy’s nation baseball team during the World Baseball Classic (which got instagram-famous earlier this month) sold for $16K last week. 

This is the “I Need it Now” category.

I don’t view this sale as entirely irrational, but it’s certainly not disciplined either. It sits in that narrow band where the price is high enough to feel indulgent, but not so crazy that it requires an investment thesis to justify it - especially relative to its current conversational liquidity. I would assume the buyer is someone who just LOVES the entertainment value of it, and maybe had a little Italian pride pushing them to hit the “bid” button a bit harder than he or she planned. 

These are the type of unique 1-of-1 objects inflated by timing, and a couple of bidders was probably already in a spending mood and stumbled onto something unique. No one believes this espresso machine is “worth” $16,000 in any traditional sense, and no one buying it is underwriting a future return. But the public narrative density (a rare mix of sports culture, humor, and virality) is whats actually being purchased. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if that espresso machine is getting used every day in someone’s home, giving it a value that goes beyond the sum of its parts and the story it told. Wanting it turned to needing it, and now you GOT it. 

The last category of craziness has been building for some time, and last week it planted its flag… 

Kon Knueppel, a promising NBA rookie, albeit one that most casual sports fans have never heard of, saw his rookie debut-worn jersey sell for $243,200 at auction via Sotheby’s. That was on the heels of his 1-of-1 Signed Rookie Card (Graded a PSA 7 out of 10) selling for $396,500.

This is the “I Don’t Wanna Miss Out” category.

The $396K paid for that card puts him well above any sale of any card from any other athlete in his 2025 draft class, and above the high-watermark card sales for 95% of active players in the league. The $243K paid for the jersey puts him into the list of the top 20 most expensive NBA jerseys EVER publicly sold. That list is dominated by names like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, LeBron James, and Wilt Chamberlain. And now, a 20 year old Charlotte Hornets rookie thats averaging 19 points and 5 rebonds in 70 total games in the league. 

This is the moment when logic shifts from valuation to velocity and discipline gives way to pattern recognition across an entire class of collectibles (or in this case, a collectible “investment”). We’re right in the middle of that moment. Whoever is buying up the top-end examples of unproven rookies at the dollar-value of the median US home price is buying because they’ve seen this exact setup before. They watched an unproven entity with collective attention get hot, then watched prices run, and they were caught sitting on the sidelines while everyone else made quick money. 

Regardless of how far ahead the premium-to-current-reality is, these purchases are still being made for the best pieces available. As each comes off the market, the people who are chasing that velocity realize that the rarest and most important examples are getting harder to find, and may eventually be gone forever. We’re seeing that happen right now with Jordan and Kobe items - so even though the price is outlandish, maybe the acquisition isn’t. 

Time will tell.

Titling this week’s stream of consciousness “Burn it all down” isn’t an indictment of these (borderline insane) results - it’s the sum of those three archetypes colliding at once. 

Right now, the bully is in the schoolyard, setting the tone and making everyone fall in line. But he’ll get whats coming to him. And in that moment when the ecosystem collapses, theres always a quick bounce back and a reset by the best-of-the-best that were there the whole time. 

That said, we don’t need to force meaning onto a market that’s clearly being driven by momentum and scale. Even though some days I just want this reset to happen already, it’s not something worth fearing or overanalyzing. 

I got a phone call from a friend one morning this week with a very abstract thesis around a specific stock telling me to buy it. I knew nothing about it. I explained that with all this volatility and oil prices going nuts and a war and all the other craziness that maybe I would just sit it out. The call ended in a “trust me, just buy it” with no data and no real info. So I did it. The stock is up 26%. I wasn’t gonna miss out. I’m part of the problem. 

If you want to buy a $5,000 benchwarmer jersey because you just don’t care, do it. If it’s a chase, if it’s FOMO, that’s fine too. That’s part of the cycle. 

Because when it settles (and it will) what’s left is quality - the stuff that gets saved and protected, even when the world is on fire. 

· · · · · · ·

Until Next Week…