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Money on fire over Pokemon cards
Traditional investors worried about government debt might buy gold, move into defensive stocks or hide under their desks staring at Treasury yields. Peter Levin has another option available: approximately 500,000 trading cards.
The 55-year-old co-founder and managing director of Griffin Gaming Partners owns about 100,000 Pokémon cards plus hundreds of thousands of sports and other trading cards, along with more than 25,000 comic books. Fortune framed Levin’s enormous collection as an alternative investment play amid concerns about rising U.S. debt, although Levin is very clear that he actually loves collecting the stuff and is not simply operating the world’s most colorful hedge fund.
Peter Levin Has Half A Million Pieces Of Cardboard As Collateral
Half a million cards is difficult to visualize.
If you looked at one card every second without sleeping, eating or wondering why you had agreed to this exercise, it would take nearly six straight days to get through the collection once.
Levin has been collecting since he was four.
His stash spans Pokémon, baseball, basketball and crossover products, and he apparently has no idea what the entire thing is worth. The valuable material is not exactly sitting in a binder underneath his bed either. Levin told Fortune that none of his “good stuff” is kept at home.
Reasonable.
At some point, “card collection” stops describing the situation and “private cardboard reserve” becomes more accurate.
Levin’s actual investment thesis is also more sophisticated than simply assuming Charizard will save him from the national debt. He believes grading, authentication, online marketplaces and auction infrastructure have transformed nostalgia into something much closer to a recognizable alternative asset class.
That market has become difficult to dismiss as kids’ stuff.
He Thinks Pokémon Could Survive Basically Anything
Levin took the argument to its logical extreme during a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying he believed Pokémon cards could become a global currency if civilization suffered an apocalypse.
He later clarified that the apocalypse part was a joke (which is probably good to establish before anyone starts swapping a Blastoise for canned food).
The underlying point was serious. Pokémon is recognized across countries, generations, and cultures, while the randomness of packs means ordinary collectors can theoretically pull something extremely valuable without already being wealthy.
Levin also argues physical collectibles have something NFTs and other digital assets struggle to replicate: people actually enjoy owning them. That sounds obvious until you remember investors spent several years purchasing JPEGs of cartoon apes.
Griffin Gaming Partners manages about $1.5 billion focused on gaming investments, so Levin is not exactly someone who has never encountered a spreadsheet. His personal strategy just happens to include the same objects many people once traded across elementary-school lunch tables.