While collecting trading cards is a fun pastime that many can trace back to their youth, today a good card collection isn’t just child’s play as a recent boom in the industry has this old-school hobby exploding. —
This resurgence is captured in a new documentary, appropriately titled “The Hobby,” which looks at the passion behind collecting. And for those with the right cards, these collections can create small fortunes.
“I love this hobby. It’s something that I partake in and I wanted to give a love letter to the hobby,” said Morgan Jon Fox, the director of “The Hobby,” which will be released on digital platforms Feb. 16.
“It’s a behind-the-scenes comprehensive look at the wild, high-stakes world of trading cards, while also dissecting the differences between marketability, the finances of trading cards and the traditional collector,” said Fox, who got into trading cards as a young boy in the ’90s, collecting baseball and other sports cards.
The 89-minute film follows buyers, sellers, card shop owners, graders, online streamers, auctioneers and others who are passionate about these collections, which is highly accessible and covers all sorts of interests.
“There’s definitely a little bit of everything for anyone who collects these little pieces of cardboard,” Fox said. “There are cards for almost anything that anyone is into at this point.”
Fox credits the recent resurgence in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic when people stuck at home began checking their garages, closets or storage units to find old trading cards, ranging from sports cards and Pokémon cards to Garbage Pail Kids cards and others.
“The trading card world had the hugest boom, we’re talking about astronomical values that came into people’s collections,” Fox said.
Now hedge funds, celebrities, entrepreneurs and billionaires add sports, Pokémon and other cards to their collections and portfolios, Fox added.
And it can be a smart investment….
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