Articles
Investment analysis built on the same live market data that powers every price on this platform — graded sale medians, sealed markets, and thirty years of compounding, with every referenced product linked to its live page.
The Best Pokémon Investments of the Past 30 Years
What three decades of market data says about where the returns actually came from — and the patterns that still matter for the next decade.
The Grade Ladder: What PSA Populations Actually Say About Price
We priced 520 cards across eight eras against the PSA registry itself — how a 10 relates to a 9, a 9 to an 8, and where the population data says a graded card is trading away from fair value.
The Month in Pokémon: Where the Money Went in July 2026
Singles, slabs, and sealed, scored the same way: median moves, winners, and the BW-era rotation nobody was watching. Every figure from dated sold comps and daily price history.
Where Money Went to Die: The Worst Pokémon Investments
Winners get the headlines; losers teach the lessons. Round-trip singles, negative-EV grading submissions, and the sealed products that quietly lagged for a decade — every failure mode, measured.
The Velocity Report: What Actually Sells — and Why the Most-Traded Cards Made the Least Money
Recorded eBay sales across 9,261 cards reveal where the hobby's trading volume concentrates — and an uncomfortable pattern: liquidity and returns have been negatively correlated.
Cute vs. Strong: Which Pokémon Actually Pay?
The market trades Charizard and cuddles Pikachu — we split 200+ tracked Pokémon into the cute camp and the strong camp and scored both on popularity and real investment returns. The winner isn't who you'd guess, and neither is the runner-up's consolation prize.
Ash's Original Team as an Investment Portfolio
Pikachu, Butterfree, Pidgeotto, Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charizard — if you'd bought the Kanto starters' 1999 cards in PSA 10 when nobody wanted them, how would the team have stacked up against the S&P 500 and gold?
The Print Clock: When Pokémon Sets Stop Printing — and How to Read It
Nobody publishes the printing schedule, but the presses leave fingerprints in sealed prices. We reconstructed the print calendar from a decade of documented patterns, then built a status model that reads the market and calibrates perfectly against known truth.
The Launch Curve: What Chase Cards Actually Do After Release Day
Everyone knows the shape — spike, then slide. We measured it: nine sets, a hundred chase cards, day-by-day. The trough isn't days after launch, it's month seven. And there's a day-90 signal that has separated the winners from the sliders every time.
Illustrator Spotlight: Mitsuhiro Arita, the Man Who Painted the Hobby
He painted Base Set Charizard, Pikachu, and the first Pokémon card art ever printed — and he's still working thirty years later. Four hundred cards, a $23,000 index, and a market that prices his name in two completely different ways. Our verdict: selectively bullish.