08/15/2026
Had a great time at the Knoxville Show today! Lots of buying, selling, and a few big trades. Some key takeaways from setting up a small 80 table show in a growing sports card market:
1) Pricing every single card in my value boxes and showcases with price tags made a huge difference
2) $10-$40 cards are the sweet spot for a lot of collectors. Rookies, autos, relics, and numbered stuff of stars in that range was king today.
3) We did a huge amount of business in our dollar boxes…we always do but today felt different. There were a ton of new people in the hobby coming and building their collections out. That’s pretty healthy for the hobby.
4) Not intentionally looking for things to buy and trade with the soul purpose of grading was freeing. That made me buy smarter and honestly I felt like my trades were most definitely for cool rare stuff or iconic cards.
5) The young flippers in the hobby are incredibly smart and talented sales people. I had one kid maybe 12 years old go table to table until he got the highest number he could get for a card…and he routinely bought low and sold high all day. My guess is he made about $500 in flips over the course of the day. That was impressive.
6) Nothing beats ripping a pack from back in the day. Nothing. One dude had a box of Topps Finest 🏈 from 1995 and had it open for people to buy loose packs. My guy made a killing all day. That was his whole table basically. 90s wax packs. I felt like I was going to card store in the 90s.
7) Collect what you like always wins. My favorite pickups of the day were my Jalen Brunsons and a Jeter Star Date insert from ex2001. Mind you I picked up a Superfractor auto of an NBA Star and a Gold Vinyl auto of an NFL Hall of Famer today.
Pickups in the comments!
