Just "Average" is Dead.

Shiny Thing$ #233: There’s no demand for Average.

^{Rob Petrozzo, for Rally}

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Last week, I sat on a panel hosted by JPMorgan Chase Private Wealth in collaboration with JOOPITER, the marketplace and specialty auction house founded by Pharrell Williams. I was lucky enough to share the stage with a group that deeply understands investment-grade collectibles and luxury at the highest possible end of the market, but there was one speaker everyone was really there for - celebrity jeweler and designer Lorraine Schwartz.

Schwartz, whose work walks the line between jewelry, art, and cultural artifact, told a story about her close relationship with Elizabeth Taylor and one specific item from her collection that will never be confused for “an average collectible.”

Among Taylor’s most iconic pieces were a pair of chandelier earrings gifted by her husband, Mike Todd. When Taylor’s estate came to auction at Christie's in 2011, Schwartz acquired those earrings for $374,000 - a number that had something to do with the diamonds, but everything to do with the story. They were the true 1-of-1, and were known as Taylor’s favorite earrings. They were THE piece from that particular auction. The “best available,” no question. 

Today, they exist in a different universe. They rarely appear in public, and when they do, it doesn’t go under the radar. They were recently lent to Kim Kardashian for the 2025 Balenciaga couture show in Paris (the earrings got as much press as the show), and their relevance continues to compound every time they make an appearance or a photo/video of Taylor wearing them appears in media.

Schwartz made a simple point: she could recreate those earrings tomorrow with nearly identical stones, and identical design. But it wouldn’t matter, because the value isn’t in the sum of the parts or in the production of something (even extremely) similar. it’s in that specific object. The one with the provenance and the cultural gravity, and the irreplaceable history. 

As she put it “the price has no anchor.”

That’s what happens when something becomes the rarest version of the absolute best example with the best story. There’s no comp, and the market for it will likely always be there - and the buyer pool is only growing (its estimated that from 2020 to today, the amount of millionaires in the US alone has increased by 3 to 4 million people). 

That increase in attention and valuation for the 1-of-1s is not just true for jewelry with a name attached to it…it’s true for everything. 

Over the last 6-12 months, the collectibles market has decisively split in two, which is obvious to anyone paying attention.

→ At the top: a violent surge in prices for best-in-class assets that represent apex examples, and are typically pieces with incredible provenance and cultural weight.

→ In the middle: stagnation. Liquidity exists and eBay sales will tell a story of volume, but momentum and outsized returns just aren’t there. It’s flat. 

Sports cards are the clearest signal. The top end is strong and accelerating. In less than four months of 2026, the market has already recorded nine separate $2M+ sales. For context, the entire calendar year of 2025 saw ten. And across 2023 and 2024 combined there were seven total.

This isn’t normal supply-and-demand behavior. In traditional markets, more inventory satisfies demand and at a certain point cools prices. Here, the opposite is happening. The more top-tier assets transact, the more collectors realize how few of them actually exist and how rarely they come back to market. So even though we’ve seen a massive spike in marquee auctions and private assets available on the market, the pool of buyers that woke up to the threat of never seeing these assets again exploded beyond all semblance of equilibrium. 

Those buyers are NOT waiting, and they’re moving with the type of conviction we have likely never seen at auction. The explosion is cross category, and the pattern is consistent: estimates aren’t being exceeded, they’re being destroyed.

I think part of the reason is that “estimates” have always been a floor for the auction houses to give peace-of-mind to consignors, but now the potential buyers stopped looking at those estimates all together. Pre-auction, these assets are operating outside of the market with some individual buyers employing teams and 3rd party advisors to analyze all variables and essentially come up with a “better” estimate. 

What we’ve seen in the most recent history is a result of money, deep analysis, expanded buyer pool, and best-in-class asset availability all colliding:

➤ Jack Kerouac’s On the Road scroll sold at Christie's for $12.1M, on a $2.5M-$4M estimate.
➤ A United States Declaration of Independence Walsh-15 copy cleared $5M+, more than doubling expectations.
➤ A rare London-stamped Cartier Crash watch just sold via Sotheby's Hong Kong for $2M, a piece that likely caps at ~$500K just a year ago.

And then there’s the private market, where things are moving even faster…

A ’97/98 Upper Deck Game Jersey Autographed Michael Jordan patch card just sold privately via Goldin Auctions for $4.25M - the highest price ever for a Jordan card. Days earlier, Alt acquired a 1997 Kobe Bryant Metal Universe PMG Green card for $3.15M, setting a new record for any Kobe card. That was a 3 day window. 

These deals didn’t wait for the theater of an auction, because those buyers didn’t want to risk losing. That’s the new wrinkle in the high stakes game of asset ownership.

The last piece in the acquisition-at-any-cost environment is a new layer of demand that’s forming… one that looks a lot more like institutional capital than traditional collecting. 

Funds and treasuries are being built around specific categories, and even specific players. There are rumors of a $500M fund dedicated only to Shohei Ohtani, and my opinion is that its true as the pricing is starting to reflect the possibility.

Ohtani’s World Baseball Classic jersey sold for $1.5M earlier this year (a new record, and its not even a Dodgers Jersey) and a 1/1 Gold Logoman Patch Autograph card opened the year at $3M, catapulting Ohtani into rare air amongst the most expensive cards ever sold (a category that contains Mantle, Jordan, Honus Wagner, and a host of other name of players who, unlike Ohtani, do not have a decade left of their career to add to their stats).

Twelve months ago, his record card sale had barely cracked $1M. But now, capital is organizing around the most important assets in the collector space (in this case, the most important assets from a single individual). 

As of today, these “hobby” collectibles have clearly become Assets (capital A). This new organized money and that laser focused attention isn’t chasing average objects. It chases the definitive, much like every other top-tier investor goes after the top-tier asset in any traditional asset class. That’s where the most clout and biggest return live. 

What I’ve always seen in the 8 years building Rally and the decades before that as someone who considered himself a “collector” is that the collectibles market always behaved like a spectrum. There was always a buyer for something at every level - high, low, or middle. But now, the middle is getting squeezed out and it looks more like a barbell: at one end, truly exceptional assets are becoming more scarce, more competitive, and WAY more expensive. At the other end, everything is fighting for relevance and just kinda looks average.

There is still plenty of liquidity for “average,” but there is real demand for “great” (and tbh, increasingly only for great, which is a bit scary). 

Whatever happens, it’s more clear now than it has been to me at any point in this journey at Rally that the best assets will continue to separate in both price, and just as importantly, visibility. They’ll trade less frequently, migrate into longer-term hands, and surface only when it matters. But they’ll get talked about non-stop and when they do pop up on that rare occasion, the pricing won’t look rational.

Because in a market where the best examples are disappearing and the capital chasing them is growing, there’s no longer a clearing price or a concrete definition of “fair market value.”

There’s just a winner…and if we’re keeping it real, real winners don’t want average. 

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Until Next Week…