Owning a 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan rookie card has been one of the Holy Grail cards of the modern era in sports collectibles. Jordan’s rookie cards have been topped in price by some of the extremely low population superstars of today, but the reality is that owning a Michael Jordan rookie is both attainable and comes with major pride for collectors. On the flip-side of this, sports card investors have been getting burned in 2021 after prices reached a zenith in all sports cards.

It was just on July 1 that Collectors Dashboard issued a full view of the high grade examples — Have Michael Jordan Rookie Card Prices Bottomed Out?

Make no mistake here. Our role is not to call bottoms and tops in asset prices. Wall Street analysts cannot get their calls right on public stock prices about 90% of the time, so making predictions about the alternative asset class of collectibles is a guessing game with many variables.

One issue which is not deniable is that investors still compete against collectors for an exact same asset, and those investors want to make money rather than lose money. Many of the die-hard collectors may not ever want to sell their prized asset.

One major issue that has hurt Michael Jordan and other key rookie card prices is the classic supply-demand issue in economics. There are thousands of rookie Michael Jordan out there, but how many people are able to, even if they would if they could, fork over $20,000 or even over $100,000 for any of these cards?

Jordan’s rookie card variations have always been in high demand and its prices proved it. What was seen in prices from before the pandemic back in 2019 through the peak of the pandemic in early 2021 was nothing short of a mania while other sports cards and collectibles were soaring.

After sports card prices reached their zenith in early 2021, Jordan rookie card prices were worse than a correction. In stock market terms, it was a market crash.

As Collectors Dashboard evaluates collectibles as an alternative asset class, we use the same metrics to evaluate high-end collectibles in the same manner as if they were a stock or bond or property. They cost basically the same as many traditional investments, so why not use supply-demand and the emotions of the moment inside of wondering if an asset has upside or whether the risk-reward is balanced or negative.

In the case of Michael Jordan rookie cards, a PSA 8, 9 or 10 commanded such high prices over the last year that they could cost more than many cars and homes. This was a period where collectors with passion to own a MJ-rookie were competing directly against investors who simply wanted to make quick money by selling quickly for a profit.

According to a tweet from Ken Goldin of Goldin Auctions, there was a massive supply of Michael Jordan rookie cards on the market that had to be absorbed even in the pristine PSA 10 grades. His take was that about 40 of the cards at the perfect PSA 10 were being put for sale in auctions and private transactions into and after the early 2021 card mania — and that supply has now been absorbed (sold).

It cannot be said enough that card buyers can never expect that they are going to be guaranteed a profit. There are no guaranteed profits in stocks, bonds or real estate. So how could buyers of collectibles expect guaranteed profits? This was learned the hard way by countless sports card buyers in 2021.

Here are some of the data points we ran on July 1, and we have updated some of the sales price figure to reflect the newer data. For the sake of simple evaluation and appraisal, Collectors Dashboard is valuating the auction universe that has been seen from 2020 into 2021 and noticed that the price correction was slowing and appears to have even recovered in more recent trading.

The 1986 Fleer card of Michael Jordan is the defacto rookie card despite some earlier issues. The red border is easily chipped, and this makes the cards much harder to keep in a way that the cards will grade in a pristine and Gem-Mint PSA 10. in fact, many cards straight from the pack would not have come out as a PSA 10. Many of the cards also have centering issues.

This “Jordan Rookie” has a massive population that is rapidly approaching 22,000 total graded cards in all grades combined from the PSA population report alone. While a PSA 10 will still command a sale price in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, there are “only” 318 examples at that grade and the prices are too high for most collectors and collectibles investors to buy. If Ken Goldin was given 40 cards to sell at the PSA 10 level (about 13% of the supply or float), this is millions of dollars that has to be paid out by card buyers before the supply of cards for sale is mostly absorbed. The graded examples by other whole-point and non-qualified grades are as follows:

• PSA 7 has 3,634 graded examples
• PSA 8 has 7,996 graded examples
• PSA 9 has 2,788 graded examples
• PSA 10 has 318 graded examples

With nearly 8,000 Jordan rookie examples graded at PSA 8, that is the grade we will focus on for a so-called primary market because there are multiple auctions and sales at this grade that now occur each and every week. In an effort to try to smooth out the highest and lowest sales of the PSA 8 examples on any given day, it is important to take the average of a day’s sales rather than trying to cheery pick individual sales that were higher or lower than normal and trying to figure out if odd bids or subjective card grading had a role.

For instance, the July 1, 2021 at the PSA 8 grades had already been tallied with a range of $7,200 to $8,000 per PSA 8 example from PWCC Auctions and Probstein123 on eBay for a daily count of $7,600 for this purpose. That is also despite card sales of $8,610 and $9,840 from Goldin Auctions on June 29. Another PSA 8 more recently sold for $9,400.00 in auction format on eBay through seller ‘hoodyscollectibles.’

The peak of the Michael Jordan Fleer rookies at the PSA 8 level was in February 2021 when prices went above $20,000 — to levels above $28,000 in “Auction” formats and at least two PWCC Vault auctions seeing prices above the $30,000 level. Those prices have routinely dropped to under $10,000 at the current level and the Jordan rookies have a range of about $7,200 to $8,000 in most PSA 8 sales.

This would give an entire market capitalization for the PSA 8 universe without qualifiers of $63.97 million at $8,000 per card and $59.97 million at $7,500 per card.

The zenith for PSA 9 graded examples was briefly above $80,000 in February and a range of $22,000 to $23,000 for most sales within the last 10 days. The zenith for Gem-Mint PSA 10 graded examples very briefly went above $600,000 and then above $700,000 at the absolute zenith for one auction, and a range of $180,100 to $295,200 has been seen in the last 30-day period.

Going much further back in time on the PSA 8 grades, the price had routinely stayed under $2,000 through early 2019 until rising to a range that was generally $4,000 to $7,000 in 2020 before blasting into the stratosphere at the end of 2020 and into the February 2021 highs above $20,000 and ultimately (and briefly) above the $30,000 level.

The PSA price charts for the PSA 8 level were still weak as of July 1, 2021 but were stabilizing compared to what had been seen after the February 2021 zenith into late May when the prices started reaching under $9,000 per card. The PSA 9 examples have seen some prices under $20,000 but after a fair look at those cards the 9 grades appeared to not be as strong as the 9 grades selling closer to $23,000 in late June 2021.

Calling out any bottom in traditional asset classes is hard enough, and calling an absolute bottom in sports card and collectibles prices may be a futile effort. Collectors Dashboard does not issue any line-in-the-sand price calls as if card prices followed the same Wall Street analyst price targets on stocks. That said, the rate of decline had been slowing and some of the prices seem to have stabilized at some slightly lower levels in June into July. This is also ahead of the National Sports Collectibles Convention in late July.

One issue which may still act as an overhang in the supply is that there are still many cards for sale in the Buy It Now category where sellers are “off-market” and just hoping for a significantly higher price. There is also a massive backlog of cards at the grading houses which are in-line to be graded among all major stars — and that means more unknown supply issues that card buyers of all sorts will keep in mind.

Unrealistic above-market price hopes and expectations may still suggest that the sports card market capitulation has not been universal from those who were buying cards before, during and right after the February 2021 price zenith. As we have warned, there is no reason to ever just bank on the last sale price before any purchase or sale. It is also important to consider that the sports card market has crashed before.