The Tape
The hobby closed out September on a split screen. Modern basketball just posted its biggest week ever at auction, vintage baseball keeps quietly setting price marks of its own, and platforms are fighting harder than ever to keep sellers from walking. Meanwhile the structural story nobody can ignore: the company that now controls roughly 80% of card grading volume is fending off a stack of lawsuits that go well beyond routine hobby grumbling. Call it a market that’s never been more liquid at the top and never had more legal smoke around the machinery underneath it.
Top Stories
PSA’s parent company is now fighting a three-front legal war, and one of the suits just got a lot scarier. Collectors Holdings, which owns PSA, Beckett/BGS and SGC, is defending an amended antitrust complaint (Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings) that accuses it of gutting SGC’s competitiveness after acquiring it, plus a separate personal suit (Lichtman v. Collectors Universe) alleging the company undergrades outside submissions and blocks competitor crossovers to protect insider-held cards. But the one to watch is Funk v. Collectors Universe, filed July 28, 2026 in Maryland federal court: a 188-page complaint invoking federal RICO claims, alleging PSA markets subjective “eye appeal” grading as objective, manipulates population reports to preserve scarcity on high-value cards, and profits from a vertically integrated stack that includes its own pricing data arm and vault/lending services. The RICO framing seeks treble damages. Collectors has pushed back hard in court filings, calling the antitrust theory a “rudimentary logical fallacy,” and a hearing on its motions to dismiss or compel arbitration in the Rasmussen case was held September 11 before Judge John W. Holcomb in California’s Central District; no ruling has been reported as of this writing. None of this is proven, and Collectors disputes it all, but the sheer volume of litigation aimed at one company controlling most of the industry’s grading volume is itself a story CardVestr will keep tracking closely.
Modern basketball just had its biggest auction week on record. Two major sales closed out the week of September 25 with combined proceeds pushing toward eight figures. The headline: a one-of-one Cooper Flagg rookie patch autograph, graded a dual PSA 10, became the most expensive card ever sold featuring a single basketball player, edging out reported six-figure season-ticket and cash counteroffers from competing bidders before Fanatics Collect closed the sale in-house. Two other rookie patch cards from the same debut-patch concept, covering Dylan Harper and Kon Knueppel, also cleared multi-million-dollar territory in the same window. Separately, a one-of-a-kind Kobe Bryant/LeBron James dual-autograph Exquisite card sold for a comparable sum through a rival auction house. The takeaway for investors: the rookie patch category, only introduced industry-wide in 2021, has now fully arrived as a blue-chip modern subsector, not just a hype play.
CollX says it’s profitable, and that matters more than the headline suggests. The scan-and-value app turned full marketplace disclosed it has crossed into profitability on an eight-figure revenue base, with several million users and roughly a million-plus card scans processed daily as of this month, per Technical.ly’s reporting. That’s a meaningful data point for CardVestr’s thesis: tool and platform companies that solve a real collector workflow problem (valuation, inventory, cross-platform selling) are proving out sustainable business models faster than pure marketplace plays. Watch for CollX’s expansion into dealer software and agentic negotiation tools as the next test of that thesis.
Movers Desk
Modern baseball is repricing fast on in-season performance. Pete Crow-Armstrong’s rookie autograph has surged roughly 400% since early August on an MVP-caliber run, while Cal Raleigh’s rookie refractor has fallen an estimated 60% after a steep power decline from last year’s pace, both figures per The Hobby Wire’s September market tracking.
On the football side, Kyler Murray’s Silver Prizm rookie has climbed about 23% after he locked down a new starting job, while JJ McCarthy’s rookie cards are down roughly 52% amid a rough stretch, and rookie cover-athlete Fernando Mendoza’s cards have also slid sharply following struggles this preseason. In basketball, Luka Dončić’s card market has been flat for roughly three months, which some traders read as a potential entry point if a new ownership group invests aggressively in the roster around him. All figures per The Hobby Wire, dated September 2026.
Grading Desk
PSA’s backlog keeps shrinking but the finish line keeps moving. The tracker showed roughly 9 million cards as of September 22, 2026, down from about 9.9 million two weeks earlier and down sharply from the July 28 peak near 12.4 million, according to Card Grading News’ reading of PSA’s own public tracker. That’s real progress, but PSA has said Value and Bulk tiers stay paused until the backlog falls under a 5-million-card threshold, meaning the company is still roughly 4 million cards above its own reopening bar with no firm date attached.
PSA has been restructuring around the pause rather than just waiting it out. On September 14 it launched a new Standard service tier sitting below its Express options, with a considerably longer turnaround window than premium tiers, and simultaneously renamed its Regular tier to Priority and Walk-Through to Premier. A day later, PSA opened a new grading facility in Frankfurt, Germany, giving European collectors a direct submission point for the first time.
Competitively, the pause continues to hand oxygen to alternatives. CGC, now the largest independently owned major grader following SGC’s move toward a more boutique positioning post-acquisition, raised prices across its service tiers earlier this year, with lower-volume bulk pricing up modestly and higher-tier standard service up more steeply, moves industry outlets read as a sign CGC is leaning into stronger demand rather than just passing along costs. Collectors Holdings, PSA’s parent, now controls an estimated 80% of total card grading volume industry-wide once SGC and Beckett/BGS are counted, per PreGradeCards’ July 2026 analysis, a concentration level that sits at the center of the legal fights covered above.
Catalyst Calendar
- Ongoing: Ruling watch on Collectors Holdings’ motions to dismiss/compel arbitration in Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, argued September 11 before Judge Holcomb; outcome could reshape how the antitrust claims proceed.
- Ongoing: Funk v. Collectors Universe RICO suit (filed July 28, Maryland federal court) remains in early stages; Collectors has not yet formally responded to the allegations.
- Watch: PSA’s next backlog tracker update; the company has said Value/Bulk tiers stay closed until the count drops under 5 million, currently roughly 4 million cards away.
- This week: Topps Holiday Baseball preorders opened September 21, part of a packed late-September release slate alongside Definitive and Pristine Basketball.
- Ahead: Continued fall auction calendar activity from major houses following the record-setting week of September 25.
Deal Desk
Fanatics Collect eliminated seller fees entirely for collectors who take payouts in FanCash rather than cash, an announcement made at the National Sports Collectors Convention this summer. Sellers choosing that route now keep the full sale price with no commission or processing fee, a move the company’s own leadership has acknowledged is a short-term revenue tradeoff in exchange for keeping money circulating inside the Fanatics ecosystem (Fanatics Collect, Fanatics.com, Topps and event ticketing). The program currently applies only to U.S. sellers, and vault storage and fulfillment fees still apply.
Fanatics also rolled out Topps Instant Packs, a digital-first individual-pack purchasing model layered onto its platform alongside recent Chrome Black Basketball product, aimed at curbing scalper markup by keeping pack inventory inside its own marketplace rather than the secondary market. Disclosure around pack odds is still an area outlets have flagged as needing improvement.
On the tools side, CollX’s move into Card Dealer Pro, inventory software now used by several thousand professional sellers, signals platforms are increasingly competing on the back-office and workflow layer, not just the marketplace front end, which lines up with where CardVestr has consistently found the most durable value creation in this space.
Bottom Line
The through-line today isn’t any single sale or lawsuit, it’s concentration risk meeting a market at all-time highs. Grading volume has consolidated into one company’s hands to a degree that’s now drawing federal-court-level scrutiny, right as the cards graded by that same company are setting records at auction. Those two facts sit in tension: a legal outcome that forces divestiture or changes grading practices could ripple through population reports and, by extension, the values built on top of them. None of the allegations are proven, and Collectors is contesting all of it, but investors underwriting grade-dependent assets should treat the litigation calendar as a real catalyst, not background noise. On the platform side, the story is healthier: fee structures are becoming a genuine competitive battleground, and tool companies solving real collector problems are proving they can be profitable businesses, not just growth stories. That’s the differentiation CardVestr’s Aristocrat Strategy is built to find.
Leave a comment