Looking to dip your toes into the rookie cards water, but don’t know where to start?
If you’re a beginner when it comes to sports cards, it can be baffling. The sports card market is today bigger than ever and it’s only going to grow even more.
Many people collect cards for pleasure and entertainment, while others look at it as an investment opportunity.
If you belong to the latter (investment) category, and you’d like to know more about rookie cards, you’re in the right place.
In this article, we’re going to take a look at the best rookie cards to invest in, and everything you need to know about rookie cards.
Keep in mind – personally, I’m more of a person who likes to collect cards. I’ve sold cards before and will do so in the future. In fact, the real end goal for me is to have a great collection that’s pretty much paid for by my sales.
And I absolutely hate the whole ‘talking about cars like they’re an investment’ part of the hobby. However, if you’re going to get that information, I’d rather you get good information here and not a BS ‘Top 10 cards to invest in this week’ article.
I’ll use the term ‘invest’ in this article, but be aware that sports cards are not an investment in my eyes – if you want to invest money, go to a financial planner.
Rant over. Now let’s get back to the rest of the article.
Table of Contents
What are Rookie Cards?
Rookie cards are cards of a player that comes from his first professional season in his/her selected sport.
For example, if a basketball player makes his official debut in the NBA in 2003, then the rookie cards are going to come from that season or year.
Rookie cards are one of the best cards you can invest in because they’re one of a kind. There is only one rookie card and one rookie year, while there might be dozens of other cards released in a player’s career in subsequent years.
These cards tend to be the most valuable cards of a player, but that’s just what generally happens and it’s not a rule – sometimes, you get later cards that are more pricey than rookie cards.
You might find it overwhelming to choose which rookie cards to invest in if you’ve never done it before.
There’s also the fact that nowadays, you’ll find more and more rookie sets for players that didn’t exist before, so there are more cards than ever to invest in.
Which brings us to a question: what are the best rookie cards to invest in?
To answer that question, you’ll have to ask yourself a few things:
- How long are you willing to hold the cards for?
- What type of card do you want?
- How much are you willing to spend on a rookie card?
Let’s take a closer look at all of these aspects.
How Long Do You Want to Hold the Cards For?
One of the first things you need to consider when you’re investing in rookie cards is how long you’re willing to stick to your investment?
As with the stock market, you also have three types of investments with rookie cards:
- Short-term investments
- Long-term investments
- A mixture of the two
Investing in rookie cards can be compared to investing in stocks. With some investments, you’ll need to hold your investments to see the yield returned in the long term.
However, some investments pay dividends almost overnight – but this also means that some rookie cards can be as unpredictable as English weather.
Sports cards are a speculative market that like stocks, change prices depending on the availability of cards, scarcity, and of course, demand. Of course, there’s many MANY differences between stocks and sports cards – no matter what some ‘influencers’ say.
The correlation between sup