When it comes to investing in sports cards—whether to flip or to hold for the long haul—the best decision you can make is to invest in a card pricing software.
If you can’t see the history of a card, you have no idea if you’re buying at historic highs or lows. Sure, it’s easy to comp a card in eBay, but that doesn’t tell you if the card is up 30% over the past month, or if you’re nearing historic lows.
My favorite card pricing software is Card Ladder.
I’ve used it every day for three years. When I’m looking for cards to invest in, I always have eBay up on one screen and Card Ladder up on the other.
How long would it take you to manually plot the sales of Anthony Edward’s Green Prizm PSA 9s over the past two years? In Card Ladder, I can see it immediately:
Now, I can start to look at trends on this card in order to predict a good price to enter, exit, as well as time frames.
Let me show you my 5-step framework for finding great value cards to buy on eBay:
#1. Which Players Do You Think Will Gain Value?
Now, there are 100 frameworks for figuring out which players should gain in value (In fact, I wrote a whole book about this), but I’ll keep it simple here.
Who do you think will go from:
- Starter to All-Star
- All-Star to Superstar
- Superstar to MVP
Using your sports knowledge, who fits one of these?
Let’s use Anthony Edwards as an example.
- He’s exciting
- He’s cool / personable
- He’s on a good team
- He’s young
- He’s talked about as a potential “face of the league”
- He could be an MVP candidate
He’s already a superstar, but could he enter the very upper echelon of players? Absolutely
Now, a rookie collector/investor will stop there and go buy his cards.
After buying and selling thousands of cards on eBay, I’m here to tell you that’s not enough. That’s like trying to play darts blindfolded.
You’ve got one piece of data: that you think the player could get better.
Real investors who do real profit on real volume layer several pieces of data. Otherwise, you’ll lose more than you win, I guarantee it.
Let me show you what I do using Card Ladder.
#2. Identify the Overall Trend
First, let’s look at the overall trend from the past 12 months for Ant’s Green Prizm PSA 9 rookie:
Clearly downward, right?
Of course, he had a little bit of a lift in May 2025 (when they beat the Lakers first round), but then it dropped back. It started above $100 and now we’re in the $65 or so range.
And since we want to buy cards at low, not highs, we like the downward trend!
#3. Identify the Highs and Lows
If you have experience with trading Forex or other assets, then you’ll be familiar with Support and Resistance lines.
Essentially, these are highs (Resistance) and lows (Support) that the market as a whole decides where the pricing on this card should generally be.
For example, over the past 12 months, it’s almost like the market decided as a whole:
“Hey, this card shouldn’t go below $60.”
Besides a few outliers, you’ll notice a bunch of times that pricing hit around $60 but then bounced back up!
Then, look at the highs. We see a bunch of sales in that $100 to $105 range before bouncing back down. In theory, you could say $120 is a high, but those look like outliers to me, and I prefer to be cautious.
So, we’ve got a pricing channel here—$60 to $100!
Can you imagine trying to get these data points without a software? It would take you an hour or more per card rather than 30 seconds.
(Note – this type of price history works best on cards with lots of volume. That’s why I usually start by looking at a players Prizm rookies, or Topps Chrome for baseball, and then I can look at lower volume cards after)
#4. Explain the Highs and Lows
Now, I want to know if it’s reasonable to expect my card to bounce back to the high that I want.
A bad example of this would Tyrese Haliburton. After his run to the Finals, his PSA 10 Silver Prizm rookie more than doubled:
Do I expect that to happen again? Absolutely not. Even if he hadn’t torn his Achilles, it felt pretty flukey that his team made it there. If I invest in Haliburton hoping for those $400 highs again, that’s a losing strategy.
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So let’s look at Edwards again:
- High #1 – Start of the season hype!
- Low – Dog days of the season
- High #2 – Beat the Lakers in the playoffs!
All of that is totally reasonable and explainable, meaning that there aren’t strange anomalies in the market that I can’t account for.
#5. Pinpoint Entry, Exit, and Profit
So, let’s look back at our pricing channel:
It seems pretty clear that we want to get into this card for around $60! In fact, that little arrow on the chart is my purchase.
I won the card at $57 on a Buy It Now listing on eBay (after doing the aforementioned research in Card Ladder). With tax and shipping, I was into the card for $65.
I immediately turned around and listed the card for $100, which is the top of the pricing channel. I feel comfortable listing it there because we’ve hit that price point many times before. As we ramp up to the season, there’s a good chance that the market swings up and at least one person buys the card.
(You may be reading all this after the fact, but I’m leaving it here as a way to show you my thought process).
Calculate My Profit
Let’s say that I sell the card for $100. With eBay fees, I’d take home around $87.
So, that’s $22 profit on a $65 purchase, which comes out to a 34% return in around 3-4 months! Pretty great, right?
On cards in this price range, I’m good with 30%. As you add zeroes, I’m fine with less profit. For example, 15% profit on a $1,000 card is terrific.
Scaling Your Flipping
On the other hand, a $22 profit isn’t making you rich. It’s not yet a legitimate side hustle.
If you want to make $2k per month, you’d have to sell 91 cards at $22 profit (and that’s not even counting the inevitable losers).
The point is, the name of the game is volume.
And to do that, you absolutely cannot do it without a card pricing software. You need to spend 30 seconds looking at price history, not 1 hour piecing together your own data.
There literally aren’t enough hours in a day.
Just the pricing charts make Card Ladder much more valuable than the $20/mo it costs.
However, they also have:
- Watch Lists
- Price Alerts
- Personal Inventory with Value Estimates
- Overall Player and Market Indices
- Card Comparison Charts
And much more.
Grab your free 7-Day trial and see why the card flipping pros use this tool every day to fuel their businesses.
I am an affiliate of Card Ladder and I make a small commission, at no extra cost to you. As always, everything I recommend on this site is a tool I personally use and would recommend to a family member.
