✨ Every Hobby is about Money.

Last week, a very different kind of reel started to circulate on instagram that piqued our interest.

In a world of founder journey clips and passion chasing, this was the anti-motivational narrative. A story of a candle maker from the west coast that opens with the line “let me de-influence from you from taking a hobby and turning it into a business.”

You should give it a watch…

In 90 seconds, the clip takes you through the journey of Clara Infante - an artist based in Spain who built a sculptural candle brand from the ground up that optically had all the measurements of success. But still, it left her empty as the thing she loved that was originally an escape had become administrative and somewhat soulless. In her own words, “there isn’t a faster way to stop enjoying work…”

Hobbies are a weird thing, especially as you get older.

As your responsibilities increase, it gets particularly hard to find downtime, and even harder to make enough money to truly enjoy that downtime in the way society expects. So you start to think about it differently… you see money being made on the thing you care about the most by people who you think don’t care as much. You start to consider about monetizing it. And then, it’s something completely different and the ability to see profit creeps in on the love you had for it. The peace that “hobby”  once provided is, today, harder than ever to protect - especially when the numbers are thrown in our face non stop. 

In trading cards in particular, there’s a certain romance baked into the language. People still literally call it “The Hobby” - capital T, capital H - as if the word alone keeps it preserved in a shoebox under the bed, immune to whatever happens in Crypto or the S&P. It’s a comforting myth, and one that works in local card shops, trade nights, and even at the biggest shows in the country.

But if you listen closely - not just to what people are saying, but how they say it - it’s obvious that this isn’t a “hobby” in the classical sense at all. It’s a market. A market dressed in nostalgia, but built on commerce. And whether the people in it want to admit it or not, money is the organizing principle.

This week in Shiny Thing$, we’re taking a look at one of the oldest, most popular, and most money-centric hobbies in the world, and we’re probably going to make a few people in the space angry.

But the truth tends to do that…

The Demographic Reality: Who’s Actually in the Room

Walk the floor at The National (the largest sports collectibles convention in the U.S.) and you’ll see the profile that data confirms: the bulk of serious participants are in their late-30s to mid-50s. They’re not kids ripping packs on allowance money. They’re professionals with careers - lawyers, teachers, tech workers, contractors, real estate agents - who will drop thousands on cards in an afternoon without checking their bank app.

Fanatics, which now controls the largest sports card manufacturer (Topps), has quietly built its growth forecasts around this reality. Internal decks from 2023 hinted that core high-value collectors and commercial vendors were their target revenue drivers - not casual fans. The reality that the company continues to move closer to an IPO requires real growth - not just in terms of audience, but in terms of spending power of that audience. The average ticket price for transactions at major shows often exceeds $500.

Even on the content side, the influencers who dominate “The Hobby” aren’t kids with binders; they’re men in their 30s and 40s livestreaming “breaks” where a single spot in a case rip might cost $1,000+. A 12-year-old can watch, but the buying power is concentrated in the hands of adults who treat cards as inventory.

The Conversation Is Currency

Here’s a quick experiment: stand at any dealer table for ten minutes and count the number of times you hear the word “comps.” The conversation on price will outpace “rookie” or “autograph” or the standard vernacular a regular person would expect by a margin of ten to one. Comparable recent sales are essentially the ticker symbols of The Hobby.

On Instagram Lives, the chat scrolls in a blur of “Overvalued” or “Check eBay” or suggested a certain breaker got a loaded case (full of high value cards) to boost the sales of that product for the manufacturer. At trade nights, people pull out their phones mid-negotiation to verify what a particular card did at Goldin last week. Even casual Facebook groups and reddit posts revolve around price checks and “What’s this worth?” posts.

You almost never hear, “I’ve always loved the design of this set,” or, “This player means a lot to me.” That sentiment exists, but it’s secondary to the transaction. In a pure hobby, joy is the primary currency. In The Hobby, the currency is the currency.

It’s a reflex: the market price is the conversation.

The Size of the Stakes

The trading card industry isn’t quaint. It’s a multibillion-dollar market with institutional money, global reach, and stakes high enough to change lives. In 2024, the global sports trading card market was estimated at over $13 billion annually, and is projected to pass $20 billion by 2034.

This July alone, a record $308 million was spent online on cards over more than 5.5 million transactions.

Some past individual transactions are staggering:

• A 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle PSA 9 sold for $5.2M in 2021, then an SGC graded 9.5 hit $12.6M in 2022 - at the time, the most expensive sports card sale in history. A PSA 10 example today is considered to be a $20M - $40M card if it were to come to market.

• In 2021, a 1/1 2018 Panini National Treasures Luka Doncic Logoman auto sold for $4.6M. That’s more than most people’s lifetime earnings.

• Even “modern” cards, fresh out of packs, can command absurd numbers. A 2020 Panini Prizm Black 1/1 Anthony Edwards rookie sold for $1.2M before he had even played a playoff game.

• This year, 3 individual Caitlin Clark WNBA cards sold for over $300,000 - a figure that is materially higher than any single WNBA salary for the 2024/2025 season.

Markets this big behave like… markets. Prices spike on performance - a 40-point playoff game from a young star can move a card 50% overnight. They collapse on injury or scandal. This is not the emotional ebb and flow of a weekend pastime. It’s capital allocation in real time.

The Myth of the Pure Hobby

The claim that “this is just for fun” falls apart the moment the potential payoff becomes life-changing. If you bought a raw 2000 Playoff Contenders Tom Brady rookie auto in 2005 for $1,500 and watched it climb past $500,000 during the pandemic boom, you’re not thinking about it like a hobby anymore.

That’s not cynicism - it’s human nature. No one pretends a garage poker game is “just about fun” when the buy-in goes from $5 to $5,000. At scale, money reshapes behavior:

• Scarcity becomes strategy: In a true hobby, owning something rare is about pride. In The Hobby, it’s about controlling supply to affect price.

• Condition becomes capital: A PSA 9 might be “good enough” for personal satisfaction, but the premium on a PSA 10 can be 4–5x, so perfection turns into a financial imperative.

• Trading becomes liquidation: “Trading” once meant swapping for something you liked more. Now it’s a vehicle to realize gains, consolidate into “blue chips,” or rebalance a portfolio.

We’ve seen this across other “passions” that crossed the financial rubicon: sneaker collecting, vintage watches, wine, art… all of it. Once there’s a legitimate chance your pastime can cover a mortgage, the pastime gets financialized. And when the participants, language, and infrastructure all mimic those of a financial market, calling it a “hobby” becomes a misdirection. It’s still fun, but it’s fun on a balance sheet.

This shift has ripple effects:

• Pricing Out Nostalgia: That 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie you dreamed of as a kid? You’re now competing with hedge fund managers and celebrity investors. It’s not nostalgia that determines who owns it… it’s capital.

• Gatekeeping Through Capital: Shows, online breaks, and the clubs/discords/channels that provided entertainment increasingly require minimum buy-ins that exclude casual participants.

• Volatility as a Feature: In some circles, a player’s injury tanking their card value is discussed with the same glee as a short squeeze in equities. That’s one of the super weird nuances of the market, but a real one.

For a new entrant - someone walking into a card shop after 20 years away - the learning curve isn’t about sets and checklists. It’s about price action, grading fees, auction platforms, and liquidity windows. The skill set is closer to that of a day trader than a weekend hobbyist.

The Cultural Parallel

The card market isn’t unique here. Comic books went through this in the ’90s, sneakers in the 2010s, and watches in the last five years. What begins as passion gets systematized once enough money floods in: authentication services, marketplaces, grading scales, indices, even derivatives. As much as we will lean on our entry here at Rally being before the boom, there is no question that we benefited from the financialization of the hobby landscape.

And the nostalgia that fuels it? It doesn’t disappear - it just gets packaged and sold alongside the investment thesis.

PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) was once just a grading service for condition purists, but it’s now a cornerstone of the market’s financial infrastructure. Its the bloomberg terminal and underwriter for collectors. Cards in PSA slabs move in price like equities. Their pop reports are market data. Without PSA and its competitors, The Hobby’s growth (and bottom line) wouldn’t be possible at this scale.

The Takeaway

If you’re in The Hobby, you’re in a market. You can love the cards, the players, and the chase, but the structure around you is built for capital flows. And to make the thesis of this entire newsletter clear - that’s not inherently bad.

Markets create liquidity, efficiency, and opportunity.

But the myth of the “pure” hobby… the one untouched by profit motive… is long gone. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe nostalgia is more fun when it comes with a ticker.

Because at the end of the day, The Hobby didn’t lose its innocence. It priced it.

And sometimes, the price is too good to pass up.

Until next week…