The trading card market, once seen as a simple kids' hobby, is being reshaped into an alternative asset market that blends scarcity, grading, and intellectual property (IP) narratives.
Trading cards feature popular animation characters such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh, and cards with information on famous baseball and basketball stars. They were originally made for play and collecting, but some rare cards are traded at high prices depending on print run and grading. Recently, they have been treated like quasi-alternative assets.
According to U.S. data analytics website Card Ladder on the 23rd (local time), the Pokémon card price index has surged more than 60 times since 2006 and has risen more than 50% just this year. The Yu-Gi-Oh index, another popular Japanese animation, also jumped more than 60% in a little over three months since mid-January, in step with the early-year release of a new title.
Card Ladder updates valuations by matching all Pokémon cards in circulation to the last execution price transacted each day. The index calculation method is similar to the S&P 500 in the stock market. Setting the initial valuation at a base of 1,000, it reflects all subsequent trading data in real time, showing market trends like a stock index.
On Feb. 16, the rare Pokémon card "Pikachu Illustrator" owned by popular YouTuber Logan Paul sold for a record $16,492,000 (about 24.5 billion won) on U.S. auction platform Goldin. It is the highest price ever for a trading card in a public auction. The record auction prices for wine and whisky are $812,500 (about 1.227 billion won) and $2,724,908 (about 4.03 billion won), respectively. By simple comparison, this single Pokémon card is about 20 times more expensive than the top wine auction price and about six times pricier than the top whisky auction price. It's a symbolic scene showing that trading cards have begun to be treated as collectible assets, beyond a hobby, for only some ultra-rare items.
Cards, once a play culture, are being reappraised as high-priced collectible assets as the memories of the generation that remembers them combine with investor sentiment. In an interview with the U.S. outlet Fast Company, Ryan Hoge, president of the trading card grading firm PSA, said, "As people reach their 30s and 40s and have disposable income, they feel a pull to return to their childhood," adding, "The generation that grew up in the late 1990s is now experiencing that moment with Pokémon."
After the first Pokémon game was released in Japan in 1996 and a craze ensued, the young consumers of that time are now in their late 30s to early 40s. They are the generation that also experienced the mid-2010s videogame boom for Pokémon and the 2016 Pokémon Go fever. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 became an inflection point that explosively expanded the trading card market. As stay-at-home isolation overlapped with stimulus checks, the number of adult collectors who took out their childhood cards again surged. According to U.S. market research firm Circana, consumer expenditure on non-sports trading cards jumped 350% between 2020 and 2025. The release of limited editions for Pokémon's 25th anniversary in 2021 and Logan Paul's live streams opening high-priced cards lit a fire under the trading card market.
As money began to flow into a market previously dismissed as children's play, institutionalization and platformization to accurately assess card value proceeded step by step, similar to other alternative asset markets. The background is that what used to be peer-to-peer marketplace-level card trading evolved into a structure similar to stocks. Grading firm PSA assigns scores from 1 to 10 based on storage condition. The PSA scale effectively serves as a certificate of authenticity in the industry. Even for the same card, those graded 10 versus 9 by PSA can differ in price by several times.
On top of that, platforms such as Card Ladder, eBay, and Goldin are accumulating historical hammer-price data in real time. In 2025, the volume of cards handled by major grading agencies reached 26.8 million, up 32% from 2024. In particular, non-sports trading cards such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh totaled 16.8 million, with grading demand surging 95%.
Experts said card values are determined by a triad of scarcity, preservation state, and IP narrative. The Pikachu Illustrator card that sold for a record 24.5 billion won was a prize card for winners of a contest hosted by a Japanese manga magazine in 1998, with only 39 copies awarded. The combination of its scarcity as a non-retail card, the narrative that original artist Atsuko Nishida drew the illustration herself, and the condition of being the only one among the 39 to receive the top preservation grade of PSA 10 worldwide all aligned.
However, not every card becomes a golden-egg-laying asset. Just as investment concentrates in blue chips in the stock market, polarization is clear in this market, with capital and demand flowing only to a tiny top tier of cards. Moreover, there are concerns that scarcity could be undermined as manufacturers ramp up mass production in step with surging popularity. In 2025 alone, top-graded Pokémon cards at PSA increased by about 6 million in a year.
Cards also have a clear limitation as non-productive assets that do not generate fixed cash flows like stock dividends or real estate rent. Experts said trading cards can offer some diversification benefits in an investment portfolio, but because they are hard to cash out quickly and highly trend-sensitive, they should be approached as a small, high-risk satellite asset. In an interview with the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, Professor Fang Zhao of Northeastern University said, "Trading cards are closer to fine art than traditional financial assets," adding, "Their value comes not from cash flows but from scarcity, cultural appeal, and organic demand."