Parallels, Graders, and How PSA's Submission Pause Might Affect the Market

But all that being said, what I've been focusing on mostly are about three things, I would say.

Parallels, vintage versus modern, and then different graders and how that interplay works out in terms of value.

Starting with the parallels, to summarize what I've been talking about over the past three weeks or so, I started with Victor Webanyama's 2023 Prism, and I looked at all 83 of the different parallels.

All the sales for all the parallels, all 83 of those for all the graders for Victor Webb and Yama.

It encompasses, what, about two and a half years at this point? Actually, probably about a year and a half.

Some of the sales were late 2024, if I recall, December time period.

And then January 2025 is where most of them hit.

Now, the first question you might be asking is, why are you looking at the parallels? What does it really matter? And for me, this harkens back to something that I've been going over for probably three to six months, where I've been speaking about the fact that there are millions and millions of cards out there.

What Slabnomics is supposed to be helping you to do is to choose the right cards if profit is your main motivator.

If you're a collector, this isn't the type of podcast for you.

Not because I don't care about collecting, but because what I am trying to help you do is to meet the end of realizing the most profit for yourself.

And that's going to be able to support you in your outside life, non-sports card and non-TCG collecting, but also in collecting.

It's going to really empower you to be able to make a better collection because you're going to be getting money from other sources.

So, yes, it is about making money.

But at the end of the day, making money is not any kind of end in and of itself.

It's a means to an end.

So where we put that money is always the question that I bring up as well.

So a little philosophical tangent there.

But it's all to say that looking at 83 different parallels for Victor Webenyama really complicates the picture.

Because even if I say I think Victor Webenyama is going to be an absolute legend, he's going to become famous.

on the God tier with LeBron James and Michael Jordan is going to surpass any other of his peers that he's currently playing with.

Even if I say all of that, I look and then say, well, there are hundreds of different Victor Webanyama rookies that I can even look at.

Which of those are going to be the best investment? That line of thinking then leads me down the path of, well, let's look at his prism, which I would say is his staple or his flagship rookie card.

And let's take a peek and see which of those parallels are going to be the ones that have been most profitable over the last year and a half or so.

Not to bore you with all the details of how I engineered all of this, but one critical thing I want to point out when going through this exercise was that not all of these sales were at the same time.