eTopps Football Value Tracking

One of the great things about eTopps is that you have a pretty solid idea of what your cards are worth.  At least, you do for the cards that are in port.  Since the IPOs from the first week are just now starting to hit portfolios, please follow along with me as I track the value of what I purchase throughout the football season.  I will maintain a worksheet of the cards I purchase, updated weekly, at the top of my blog.  For comparison’s sake, I’ll also keep tabs on what I didn’t buy.    I will list the current best price for immediate sale from cardtarget.com as the current “value” of the card.

Along the way, I will likely sell or trade some of these cards, and will update the worksheet to reflect those changes. 

Week 1 Summary:

Since this is the first week of running this report, let me walk through it for those of you not familiar with eTopps.  Here is a quick primer of the basics.  Last week, the first offering of 2011 football was posted.  There were 3 cards you could request for purchase: Tom Brady for $5, Titus Young for $5 and AJ Green for $6.  I chose to purchase the Brady and Green and passed on the Young.  Cards were allocated this week (Brady was not allocated until today, which was very frustrating- but I won’t complain since I got one and not everyone did.  In fact, the feeling is the Brady card was sold out in about 10 minutes).  Once cards are allocated to your portfolio, eTopps states the value of the card as the average of the 10 most recent sales of the card on eBay (not including the highest and lowest price sale).  There is also a site called cardtarget.com that coordinates directly with eTopps where you can purchase/sell eTopps cards, but using an instant purchase/sale method.  To me this is a better indicator of the current value of the card. Here is where I am so far:

I've listed the cards that were offered this week as well as last week, but since they have not yet been allocated, I've left off the values.  After one week, my portfolio is up 90% over the cost of IPO!  I could sell my Brady card and have a $10 profit.  Of course, that would take all the fun out of it, so I will decline the opportunity to quit while I am ahead.  The Green is slightly down to IPO, but unless he really tanks, his card should stay close to IPO cost.  And even though the best offer for this card on cardtarget.com is $5.89, the best sale price is $6.35. In other words, to purchase this card, so far getting it at IPO was the cheaper option.  It looks like I was wise to pass on Young since this card is already $1.05 under IPO.  

The Brady card significantly put me in the black this first day of its availability on the secondary market, and should stay there though the season.  It will be interesting to document the peaks and valleys of these cards along the way.  Interesting to me anyway- some of you likely got bored two sentences into this post and bailed.