If you PC players from a certain college, now is a great time to buy their cards. Once the draft happens all the team collectors and the player collectors will be scooping up the rest of what's out there. I've been taking advantage of the pre-Draft market and buying my favorite college players for fairly cheap. I'm interested to see what teams draft my guys and in what round they're drafted.
One guy I've been tracking is Oregon State wide receiver Brandin Cooks. I think he has potential to be a great wide receiver in the NFL despite his smaller size. I've been charting his 2014 Leaf Metal base prismatic autograph rookie cards for some time now. It's been interesting to see how the market prices vary over time. Below is the graph.
This graph follows the eBay sale prices (sale price plus shipping cost) for all of his base prismatic autograph rookie cards. Thus, I was not tracking any of the shorter printed parallels. The sale price is on the Y-axis, and the date of sale is on the X-axis.
Each blue dot represents a sale on a given day. The red dots represent a moving average of the last ten sales.
This graph reveals a few interesting trends.
First, prices start out fairly high when the product first released in late February 2014. Most of the cards were selling for anywhere between $10 to $15. Over the next two weeks the average price dropped considerably, at which point cards were selling for anywhere between $6 to $10.
This trend is not unexpected. Prices for singles are always high immediately after a product's release as the hard core collectors with deep pockets go on eBay buying binges to nab all the cards they want. Once that event ends, and all the hard core collectors are satisfied, prices tend to drop to more reasonable levels.
But then things start to get interesting about three weeks after the product's release (March 22, 2014 on the graph) -- prices start going back up slowly. This is shown by the slow rise of the red dots.
Why is this?
This is mostly due to the supply of the cards. Two weeks after the product's release, the market was flooded with cards. Just look at all the blue dots around the March 15, 2014 date. The laws of supply and demand state that if the supply curve increases, but the demand curve stays the same, the equilibrium price will drop. This is what happened. Tons of people were breaking Leaf Metal around that time and had started to put the cards up on eBay for sale. With tons of cards for sale, bidders had plenty of options (cards) to bid on.
But starting three weeks after the product's release, and more noticeably after four weeks following the product's release, the supply of the cards available had gone down. Notice how few blue dots there are in April and early May. Less people were opening the product, and less cards were available for purchase on eBay. The laws of supply and demand state that if the supply curve decreases, but the demand curve stays the same, the equilibrium price will go up. This is exactly what happened. With fewer and fewer cards available to buy on eBay, bidders were getting into bidding wars. Other sells would put cards at above-average Buy-It-Now prices and would actually get buyers making that purchase just because there weren't any other options available.
It will be extremely interesting to see how the prices will react once Brandin Cooks is drafted. I imagine that if he is drafted high in the first round, all the people who have been hoarding his autographs will put them up on eBay to sell them to all the team collectors who are PCing their team's draft picks. This would represent both an increase in the supply curve and an increase in the demand curve. This could result in prices going up, or staying about the same since the increase demand will be offset by the increased supply.
On the other hand, if Brandin Cooks is drafted lower than expected, while we still might see a flood of cards return to the market, the demand may remain stagnant. If this happens, prices might go back down.
One final takeaway from this chart is that if you're looking to flip, timing is always key. Buy cards a couple weeks after the product's release once prices have gone down to reasonable levels. Then, sell them later on once the supply has dried up, or right after the draft when demand is likely to spike again.
I'll be updating this chart for at least a month following the draft to see what happens to his prices. I may even continue updating this chart throughout the entire 2014 season to see how his prices react to his performance. This should be interesting to follow.
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