🗞️ MNP 002 ::: The Circus is in Town

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“Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture… anything worthwhile has always been appreciated by a minority.”

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Designer Vivienne Westwood said this in an impromptu interview in 1996 on TVAmsterdam.

She was talking about fashion and it was certainly a different era, but those three sentences hold true for all endeavors, and that includes investing in anything. I would argue in 2026 that it actually applies best to investing - whether that investment is a baseball card or a publicly traded stock. The last part of the quote in particular… “appreciated by a minority” is the sticking point.

It's my belief that every single investment you make should be judged with a level of intuitive fortitude. The easy three questions to ask oneself before the money leaves your account:

Did I get here early?
Did I get here late?
Did I accidentally become a follower?

The moment you stop asking yourself those questions (or stop answering them with honesty), you're no longer investing. You're just participating (translation: bag holder).

Every generational investment starts with an unpopular destination, but all the “great ones” reach that point of ubiquitous demand-side participation - it gets REALLY popular, and we all want in. The early believers already got proven right, the new money shows up, the cameras start recording and documenting everything, and the “dumb money” follows. Everyone. Me included, I’ve done it 100 times.

What’s changed drastically over the last 10 years, thanks to social media, is that even those in the driver seat creating the followable “trend” can now easily replace research and conviction with a performance and manufactured momentum.

Thats when a market becomes an unserious place.

And that's where the collectibles market finds itself today.

The crowd is being led into the circus, and the clowns are going to drain your wallets under the big top.

These are the loud, bombastic voices that throw around the word "culture" far too often and far too casually. More often than not, they're also buying the foundational inventory privately, assigning the valuation in a black box, and convincing everyone else that they too can be early - even when the only evidence supporting the price is the price itself.

Some of those people are friends of mine, so I'm probably going to take some heat for this weeks partner letter, but I see where this all going very clearly and wanted to put it on paper while this email list is still relatively small.

So here’s what happened this week…

A super rare Shohei Ohtani card was pulled from a pack that a regular guy bought at a local card store, it showed up on twitter, and sold for $11M within basically 24 hours. 11 MILLION DOLLARS. Overnight, it became the newest attraction under the big top.

My phone is filled with texts from people who don't care about trading cards asking me about it. That's usually the first sign that somethings changed.

For Issue 002, I’ll quickly give you the story, what I think it means for the collectible asset economy, why this market desperately needs to grow up if it wants to be treated like a real asset class, and where I believe the next half decade of patient money will actually be made.

As the saying goes:

“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king - the palace becomes a circus”

So put your favorite baseball card on a diamond chain, and get ready to hear about the real Greatest Show on Earth…

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Monday, August 3rd 2026
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Let me start by saying this isn’t a takedown piece against influencers. It’s about Alpha vs. Beta. For some quick, ultra basic context:

Alpha is making money because you saw something the market didn't.

Beta is making money because the market went up.

Beta usually requires a bit more starting capital, but both are completely valid and rewarding methods of investing in the collectibles market.

This story starts with a text I got in January 2021 that I didn’t realize was alpha…

It came from my friend Jeremy Padawer. Jeremy has always been one of the most connected people in the world of collecting, but he's also just a genuinely good dude. He's always been generous with his time and has never hesitated to give me a heads-up when he saw something coming around the turn before I did.

He told me he had an opportunity and wanted to get on a call with him and a mystery guest. 

So one afternoon, we get on a zoom, and it’s me, him, and Logan Paul - who, love him or hate him, deserves a tremendous amount of credit for literally creating the creator economy we all live in today, and for proving that entertainment / consumer products / collecting / and capitalism can all exist in the same ecosystem.

This was the alpha call. 

Jeremy and Logan had found a Pokémon card so rare and so far under the radar that they believed it would eventually become the most expensive trading card of all time. At the moment, it was available for roughly $2M - $3M. 

They proposed buying it together - we’d each put in about $1M, and then potentially fractionalize it on Rally down the road. I understood the rarity and I understood the scarcity, and I could see Pokémon beginning to explode. What I didn't share was Jeremy and Logan's vision for where the card could ultimately go (more on that in a minute) so after thinking about it for a few days, I passed. To be honest I didn’t even truly “pass” I just kinda ghosted that part of the conversation (the worst thing you can do - I’m working on it). 

In July of 2021, Logan bought the card. He went to social media and announced that he had acquired the only known PSA 10 example of a 1998 Pokemon Illustrator card for an all-in price of around $5M, which was a world record sale for a Pokémon card at the time. 

What I didn’t see happening (which now, in retrospect, was obvious) was the real alpha: Logan was going to single handedly turn that card into a celebrity on its own, and add a premium to it simply by ensuring it was in every conversation for three straight years. 

In April 2022 he set the card into a diamond necklace and wore it during his WrestleMania 38 entrance - the most viewed WrestleMania in history with numbers that surpassed the Super Bowl by every meaningful metric:

2.2 billion social impressions, 1.1 billion video views, and 87 million engagements.

On February 16, 2026, the card sold for $16.5M at Goldin Auctions in a live-streamed event that had become a spectacle in its own right. The most expensive card of any kind, ever sold. 

Beta begs the question "What's expensive?" whereas Alpha asks, "What will deserve to be expensive?" This card obviously deserved to be expensive, and Logan dumped jet fuel on it to ensure it got as high as it could as quickly as possible. And it worked.

That moment and that card was the star of a pop-culture distribution tactic that changed this entire space, permanently…

And that record sale was what I would consider the last great exit before the circus tents went up. Thats the sale that marked the transition from alpha to beta. It became the template for a new class of investors and asset managers who learned they didn't need any differentiated insight or data.

They just needed enough attention to make everyone else believed they had it. 

Fast forward to this week: July 30th 2026.

Sometime in the last week/weeks, a collector in South Florida pulled a 1-of-1 Shohei Ohtani “Dual Gold Logoman Autograph” redemption card from a box of 2026 Topps Chrome Baseball - for anyone who doesn't follow trading cards, companies don't just slip $10 million cards into packs that end up on store shelves. Instead, they insert a “redemption card” into a random pack, which the collector must send back to the manufacturer (along with their identifying information) to receive the actual physical card at a later date.

Before the card had even surfaced, a well known trading card investor who goes by the name “Shyne” publicly posted a $6.5 million bounty on the card, effectively announcing to the market that he intended to own it. An overseas company then one-upped him with a public bounty of $10M.

Then, on July 30th, news drops publicly that the card had been pulled from a pack, and within literally an hour, “Shyne150” (real name Matthew Allen) alongside “Mr. Wonderful” (Shark Tank star Kevin O'Leary) and their Secure Collectibles portfolio company announced they had completed a private purchase for a higher price than the recent $10M bounty - reportedly $11M total, making it the third-highest sports card sale in history.

This is a very serious purchase for a very serious collection…

…likely one of the most valuable collections in the world by an individual (Shyne) that has been moving with very serious conviction for the better part of five years to put together this investment-grade collection of 1-of-1 cards.

I won’t take that away from him or the collection. He’s acquiring the most valuable cards, no question, and I have massive respect for his ability to pull then trigger without hesitation when he sees something that fits his investment thesis. 

But the scenes being created around this fund are ultimately designed for one audience: retail investors. They're the ones most likely to follow the circus, mistake the spectacle for expert diligence, and eventually become the exit liquidity when these assets are packaged and presented as "opportunities." And they will be.

I believe this entire show - the headline purchases, the cards hanging from diamond chains, the spectacle around it, and the reposts from the usual suspects on social - is laying the groundwork to eventually tokenize the collection. That part is fine. In fact, I think tokenization is inevitable, and probably the right outcome for many investment-grade collectibles with a global market.

The problem is everything in between.

A handful of high-net-worth individuals with massive platforms are turning their biased profit-driven opinions into facts, while the retail investor - preoccupied with real life and with almost no credible research to rely on - is relied upon to confuse marketing tactics with an expert take.

In this case, 1-of-1 assets that are impossible to comp and never change hands are being purchased, and immediately marked up on paper without any additional transaction.

Investing, in general, is one of the only industries on the planet where entertainment is routinely mistaken for that domain expertise. Two guys with AOL screen names and a lot of cash telling you they bought something for $1 and it’s already worth $2 just by the nature of them owning it would not fly in real finance without facts. 

But in a market where people are desperate for Alpha, it works.

These aren't Alpha bets though. They're Beta wrapped in exceptional marketing for a very specific less discerning audience.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that. Institutions, family offices, and sophisticated investors often want Beta. They understand exactly what they're buying and have the capital to see meaningful returns on smaller moves. The issue is when Beta gets packaged as early-stage discovery and sold to an audience that will move as a pack and is most likely to mistake wide celebrity-enforced amplification for solid underwriting. All of which is laying the groundwork for the eventual public distribution of these assets, likely sometime next year. By then, the narrative will already be established and the early positions will already be owned and tucked away, and the retail investor will be asked to buy in.

Beta buys the leaderboard, where Alpha underwrites the future.

That's why I don't think the opportunity is in this specific playbook for retail investors. I think it's in doing the opposite.

Attention creates headlines but can't create an asset class - that's my real takeaway. The next wave of “adult” capital won't allocate billions of dollars because someone wore a card around their neck or generated a few billion impressions. They'll allocate because the market finally develops the things real asset classes require: underwriting, governance, data, provenance, liquidity, and some discipline (both on and off camera).

This isn't a takedown of any individual btw. Every emerging market goes through this phase. The circus is simply what happens when attention gets to retail before infrastructure. The be-all / end-all of all of this is “Don’t confuse attention with value,” and thats getting increasingly hard. 

The market has become exceptionally good at pricing attention. It has not, unfortunately, become exceptionally good at pricing historical significance, asset permanence, or real unmanufactured scarcity.

That gap is where the retail investor still has an opportunity to generate Alpha. It requires a finely-tuned “bullshit filter” and then taking calculated risks, not just spending the most money.

In the interim, the narratives for the highest end of the market will continue to compound faster than the underlying assets. Beta buys what everyone already agrees deserves to be valuable. Alpha buys what everyone will eventually agree deserves to be valuable.

The cheat sheet for collectibles:

Every market eventually grows up, and this will too.

The investment-class of collectibles, specifically the trading card market, desperately wants pension funds and institutional capital. So eventually, this market will have to choose whether it wants to be an entertainment business or an asset class.

It can't be both forever. Which brings me back to where we started:

"Anything worthwhile has always been appreciated by a minority."

This isn't really about Shohei Ohtani, Logan Paul, Kevin O'Leary, or any one personality. It's about having an investing framework that survives long after the personalities change.

Minority Conviction → leads to → Mainstream Adoption → leads to → Circus → leads to → Institutionalization.

We're in the Circus stage, currently.

Whether you're chasing alpha or beta, don't confuse attention with value. Price permanence, historical significance, and true scarcity are on the other side of it.

That's where the next generation of alpha will come from.

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FIN
* ISSUE 002 *

That's a wrap on Issue #002.

LAST REMINDER: One subscriber is going to win a genuine Theranos centrifuge machine - my favorite single item in my collection of oddball tech-pieces, but one that I know will now find a loving home. I’ll announce the winner on August 15th.

Until then, follow along on X, and if you've got any material non public info that you wanna share anonymously or just want to talk about life, reply to this email or text me direct anytime: 203-442-6083.

And the usual disclaimer… Nothing in this newsletter is financial advice.

Until next week… a tweet that encapsulates life and investing in a way I’ve never before seen articulated so well:

Every decision could be really simple if we let it be.

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