ProfPokeQuant

I think I just found something the Pokémon card market hasn't caught onto yet. Some booster packs now have a calculated expected return of over 200%. Here's the math. A few months ago, I wrote a post about calculating the expected value of opening every Pokémon booster pack using pull rates, recent sales, and PSA grading data. One set stood out: Fates Collide. At the time, a pack cost about $44, and its contents were worth $36.47 on average if you sold or graded each hit optimally. An 83% expected return. Better than a lottery ticket, but still a losing proposition. But something has changed. Graded Pokémon card prices have skyrocketed, while sealed pack prices haven't kept up. Today, the math looks completely different: • Pack price: $44.88 • Expected value: $107.57 • Expected return: 240% So where does all that EV come from? Take Mew Holo #29. A PSA 10 is now worth around $3,000, up 743% in the past year. But unlike the ultra-rare chase cards, you pull Mew about once every 34 packs. Obviously, not every copy gets a PSA 10. So I weight each possible grade by its historical PSA frequency, subtract grading costs, and account for the probability of pulling the card. The result? Mew alone contributes $18.16 of EV to every Fates Collide pack. Lugia BREAK adds another $9.46. I repeat this process for every card in the set. Interestingly, despite the 240% expected return, there's still a 76% chance of getting back less than 25% of your money. Most packs lose money. A handful of enormous hits pull the average way up. And Fates Collide isn't alone anymore. Several other sets now have positive modeled EV too. The prices of individual graded cards are moving faster than the sealed packs containing them. I've made the entire pack EV tool free on Cardboard Terminal if you want to check it out: cardboardterminal.app/packs

This is one of the craziest examples I’ve seen of an auction slipping under the radar. This PSA 10 Gengar sold 50+ times this week. Almost every sale was around ~$405. Then one auction ended at: $207.50. Same card. Same grade. Same week. It even had eBay Authenticity Guarantee. So what was different? The seller. Most of the other copies were being sold by PSA, an account with 750,000+ reviews. This one came from a small seller with just 72. It slipped through at 49% below the going rate. That’s exactly what I built Deal Finder for. Most platforms' algorithms surface what they think you’ll click. Deal Finder surfaces what looks mispriced. This helps buyers find great deals. And it helps sellers, big and small, get more eyes on their auctions. If you want an algorithm built to surface deals: cardboardterminal.app/deal-f…

There are a lot of knobs you can turn when buying and selling cards for profit. Take this Mew, for example. I bought it at auction on August 29 for $1,275. The prior sales before that were: $1,625 $2,025 $1,500 $1,800 Last night, just 8 days later, I sold it for $1,499. That’s a $224 gross profit in a little over a week. You might look at those earlier sales and think: Why not hold out for more? That’s where the knobs come in. This card was already in the PSA Vault. So when I bought it, there was no waiting weeks for shipping before I could relist it. This let me turn the time knob way down. But to take full advantage of that, I also need to turn the sale price knob down. If I priced it too high, I’d give back some of the main advantage of the trade: speed. When there are thousands of auctions ending below market every day, fast turnaround has real value. This wasn’t one of the 20–30%+ flips I’ve posted about recently. It was an 18% gross flip, and roughly 6% after fees. More modest. But it was also done in only 8 days. Same game. Different knobs. I built Deal-Finder as a tool for myself to find mispriced auctions like this. But I've just made it free for everyone if you want to try it yourself: cardboardterminal.app/deal-f…