{ "url": "https://www.moonstonehq.com/articles/nothing-moves-together", "slug": "nothing-moves-together", "title": "Nothing Moves Together: A Year of Weekly Prices Finds No Pokémon Market Factor", "summary": "Take 741 cards that started above $5 and carry a complete year of weekly tape. The average pair of them moves with a correlation of 0.026, and the median card shares 2.8% of its week-to-week variance with the market it sits in. Yet the equal-weight index of those same 741 cards rose 41.0% and fell in only four weeks out of fifty-one. Both facts are true at once, and together they describe an asset almost nobody is holding correctly.", "section": "Data forensics", "published": "2026-09-03", "readMinutes": 9, "publisher": "moonstone", "findings": [ { "value": "0.026", "measures": "average pairwise weekly correlation", "basis": "68,635 pairs across 371 sampled cards, 51 weeks" }, { "value": "2.8%", "measures": "median card's R-squared against its own market", "basis": "82.7% of the 741 sit below 10%" }, { "value": "+41.0%", "measures": "equal-weight index, Sept 1 2025 to Aug 24 2026", "basis": "down in 4 weeks out of 51" }, { "value": "85.0%", "measures": "of the 741 cards ended the year higher", "basis": "16.1% of them doubled" } ], "tables": [ { "title": "Co-movement at three horizons, same 741 cards", "columns": [ "Return horizon", "Periods", "Average pairwise correlation", "Median R-squared vs index", "Cards under 10% R-squared" ], "rows": [ { "Return horizon": "1 week", "Periods": "51", "Average pairwise correlation": "0.026", "Median R-squared vs index": "2.8%", "Cards under 10% R-squared": "82.7%" }, { "Return horizon": "2 weeks", "Periods": "25", "Average pairwise correlation": "0.043", "Median R-squared vs index": "6.0%", "Cards under 10% R-squared": "63.1%" }, { "Return horizon": "4 weeks", "Periods": "12", "Average pairwise correlation": "0.068", "Median R-squared vs index": "10.8%", "Cards under 10% R-squared": "47.8%" } ] }, { "title": "One-year returns across the 741 cards, September 1 2025 to August 24 2026", "columns": [ "Percentile", "52-week return" ], "rows": [ { "Percentile": "5th", "52-week return": "-20.7%" }, { "Percentile": "10th", "52-week return": "-7.0%" }, { "Percentile": "25th", "52-week return": "+10.1%" }, { "Percentile": "Median", "52-week return": "+38.0%" }, { "Percentile": "75th", "52-week return": "+78.3%" }, { "Percentile": "90th", "52-week return": "+132.3%" }, { "Percentile": "95th", "52-week return": "+176.7%" } ] }, { "title": "Sort by first-half return, then look at what happened next", "columns": [ "Quintile", "Cards", "Sept to Feb median", "March to Aug median" ], "rows": [ { "Quintile": "1 (worst)", "Cards": "148", "Sept to Feb median": "-14.3%", "March to Aug median": "+10.8%" }, { "Quintile": "2", "Cards": "148", "Sept to Feb median": "-0.1%", "March to Aug median": "+14.8%" }, { "Quintile": "3", "Cards": "148", "Sept to Feb median": "+9.3%", "March to Aug median": "+24.3%" }, { "Quintile": "4", "Cards": "148", "Sept to Feb median": "+23.9%", "March to Aug median": "+25.4%" }, { "Quintile": "5 (best)", "Cards": "149", "Sept to Feb median": "+52.7%", "March to Aug median": "+30.7%" } ] } ], "charts": [ { "title": "Equal-weight index of the 741 card cohort, twelve roughly monthly points across the grid", "unit": null, "note": "September 1, 2025 = 100. Forward-filled weekly market prices, not sold medians. The twelve plotted grid weeks sit about four and a half weeks apart so that each falls in a different month of the window; labels name that month, and they are not first Mondays.", "points": [ { "label": "Sep 2025", "value": 100, "basis": null }, { "label": "Oct 2025", "value": 107.81, "basis": null }, { "label": "Nov 2025", "value": 108.27, "basis": null }, { "label": "Dec 2025", "value": 108.74, "basis": null }, { "label": "Jan 2026", "value": 109.65, "basis": null }, { "label": "Feb 2026", "value": 110.34, "basis": null }, { "label": "Mar 2026", "value": 113.18, "basis": null }, { "label": "Apr 2026", "value": 118.05, "basis": null }, { "label": "May 2026", "value": 123.36, "basis": null }, { "label": "Jun 2026", "value": 130.62, "basis": null }, { "label": "Jul 2026", "value": 134.98, "basis": null }, { "label": "Aug 2026", "value": 139.24, "basis": null } ] } ], "sections": [ "What a market factor would look like, and what we found instead", "The flat weeks, in both directions", "The index nobody could have traded", "The spread is the whole game", "Momentum exists in the cheap end, and only there" ], "method": [ "Source: the moonstone price-history cache, read September 2, 2026, holding provider weekly market-price series for 7,039 TCGplayer products with points as recent as August 31, 2026. Panel construction: a common Monday grid of 52 dates from September 1, 2025 to August 24, 2026; each series resampled by carrying the last observation at or before each grid date forward; a card qualifies only if it has an observation on or before the first grid date and a final observation on or after August 10, 2026, giving 2,452 complete series. Cohorts are gated on the price at the FIRST grid date, never the last, to avoid selecting winners. Returns are natural log changes. The index is the equal-weight mean of cohort log returns each week, compounded; per-card R-squared and beta come from an ordinary least squares fit against a LEAVE-ONE-OUT index, so a card never appears in its own benchmark. Average pairwise correlation is computed over every second card in the cohort (371 of 741, 68,635 pairs) for tractability, on standardized return vectors. The bar chart plots twelve grid weeks spaced about four and a half weeks apart, one falling in each month of the window, and labels each bar with the month that week falls in; those are not first Mondays, and the corresponding first-Monday series runs 100.00, 106.46, 107.87, 108.61, 109.27, 109.00, 111.93, 116.64, 121.54, 128.73, 134.98, 139.24 for anyone who wants it. Known biases, stated rather than buried: these are TCGplayer market prices for the flagship printing of each product, which are derived from asks and update on their own cadence; the median card is flat in 23.5% of its weeks and 30.3% of all card-weeks are flat; flat weeks bias measured correlation DOWN by diluting real co-movement and UP because they are synchronized across cards (pairwise correlation of the flat indicator is 0.114), and the net measured effect is that restricting to weeks where both cards moved raises the average pairwise correlation from 0.026 to 0.035. The four-week figures are the more conservative read and they are also small. The cohort is not the market. It is skewed toward SM and SWSH-era secondary product because that is where our history cache is deepest, it contains no vintage and little current-year chase product, and 186 of the 741 do not resolve to a named card in our catalog, so they are counted but not nameable, including nine of the ten worst performers. No significance tests are reported and none are implied. Not financial advice." ], "terms": "Figures are moonstone's own recorded measurements, dated as published. Quote them with the population stated beside them. The article at `url` is the human form of this file." }