The Tape
The hobby is juggling two stories at once today: a legal fight that could reshape who controls grading, and a fresh wave of rookie-driven demand as the NBA tips off and MLB’s postseason grinds on. Grading capacity is still the macro backdrop (PSA, Beckett and SGC have all throttled submissions at some point this year), but the more interesting story for investors is how fast Collectors Holdings is trying to make its antitrust problem go away in court. Vintage blue-chips, meanwhile, keep doing what they do: showing up at auction and drawing serious bidding regardless of what’s happening in the grading queue.
Top Stories
Collectors Holdings goes on offense in its antitrust case. The company that owns PSA, SGC and Beckett filed renewed motions on September 21 asking a federal judge to send most of the proposed class action to individual arbitration and to dismiss what’s left of the claims. The underlying suit, Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, was filed in April in the Central District of California and accuses the company of illegally cementing its grip on the grading market through its 2024 SGC acquisition and its late-2025 Beckett deal. Plaintiffs amended their complaint in August, adding two new named plaintiffs and new state unfair-competition claims. A hearing on Collectors’ motions is set for December 11 before Judge John W. Holcomb. This is the one grading story with real structural stakes for the whole category, since a forced divestiture of SGC or Beckett would be the biggest shake-up the grading business has seen in years. (Source: Value Added Resource, Sept. 21 filing coverage; Athlon Sports; Bloomberg Law)
New NBA season reignites rookie-card demand. With the 2026-27 season underway, early hobby attention has swung hard toward this year’s rookie class, with Cooper Flagg and Kon Knueppel singled out as the fastest-rising names in basketball cards. Flagg’s rookie-season Topps Now card reportedly set a new print-run record for the product line, a reasonable proxy for how much collector interest a single rookie season can generate right out of the gate. (Source: Sports Collectors Digest, Oct. 2026 coverage; Topps)
Vintage keeps proving the thesis. Robert Edward Auctions’ October sale is headlined by a T206 example tied to the Ty Cobb “Cobb back” variant, one of the most storied subsets in the entire hobby, and it’s drawing the kind of attention that reinforces why high-grade pre-war material keeps acting like a different asset class than the rest of the market. (Source: Sports Collectors Daily, Oct. 8)
Movers Desk
- NBA rookies: Flagg and Knueppel are the names collectors are chasing early in the 2026-27 season, with broader hoops rookie-card interest trending up alongside them. (Sports Collectors Digest)
- MLB postseason: With October baseball underway, expect the usual seasonal bump in attention for current playoff performers’ rookie and postseason-highlight cards, a pattern that repeats every fall regardless of final matchups.
- Modern memorabilia: A run of Michael Jordan 1998 Upper Deck jersey-autograph cards, limited to just a couple dozen copies per design, hit the auction block in early October, a reminder that peak-era Jordan memorabilia still pulls serious bidder attention outside the rookie-card conversation. (Sports Collectors Daily, Oct. 8)
- Vintage strength: REA’s Cobb-back T206 headliner is the clearest signal this week that scarce, well-documented pre-war cards remain in a different demand tier than the broader market.
Grading Desk
PSA’s backlog keeps shrinking but hasn’t cleared the bar for reopening its paused Value-tier services. A large capital investment announced in mid-May triggered a submissions surge that PSA itself cited when it paused Value, Value Bulk, Value Plus and Value Max tiers on June 2. The backlog peaked near 14 million cards in early June, was reported at roughly 12 million at the end of June, and third-party trackers now estimate it’s down to roughly 9 million as of early October (an independent estimate, not a confirmed PSA figure). PSA has tied reopening informally to the queue falling to around 5 million, which would put a realistic reopening window somewhere between late this year and early 2027 if current progress holds.
Beckett went through its own version of this in the back half of the year: it paused its lower-cost Base and Standard online tiers in early August, citing submissions growth north of 100% and TCG volume growth well above that year over year, then reopened those tiers roughly six weeks later. Beckett now operates under Collectors’ ownership alongside PSA and SGC, with its own general manager and brand identity, but it’s increasingly sharing infrastructure with its sister companies, including counterfeit and bad-actor detection data.
SGC is the more interesting long-term story inside the Collectors family. After reportedly planning to scale SGC down into a smaller “boutique” operation, Collectors now says it’s investing in facility expansion, staff and technology to grow SGC’s capacity and cut its turnaround time, which has stretched to around 40 business days as vintage submissions (which take longer to grade) have climbed. Collectors is also planning a cross-brand “pop report hygiene” initiative this year aimed at cleaning up duplicate population-report entries created when the same card gets resubmitted and re-slabbed, a data-quality fix that matters a lot to anyone using population reports to gauge real scarcity.
Catalyst Calendar
- Oct. 14: 2026 Topps Update Baseball and Donruss Optic NWSL hit shelves
- Oct. 15: 2026 Topps Chrome Formula 1 releases
- Oct. 21: 2026 Topps Heritage Football, 2026 Panini Obsidian Football and Topps Holiday Baseball (advent calendars, mega boxes, tins) release
- Oct. 23: 2026 Topps Holiday Football, 2025-26 Panini Select Basketball and Topps Stadium Club WWE release
- Ongoing: MLB postseason and the opening weeks of the 2026-27 NBA season continue to drive current-player demand
- Dec. 11: Hearing on Collectors Holdings’ motions to compel arbitration and dismiss claims in the Rasmussen antitrust case, the next real checkpoint in a suit that could eventually force a divestiture of SGC or Beckett
- Watch window: Late Q4 2026 into Q1 2027 is the rough timeframe analysts are watching for PSA’s Value-tier services to reopen, contingent on backlog progress
Deal Desk
Collectors Holdings is quietly rewiring how its three grading brands work together. Beckett is adopting shared imaging processes and joining the PSA/SGC counterfeit-information-sharing network, submission tooling is being explored to let Beckett customers borrow PSA’s existing set data, and a label redesign aimed at reconciling BGS and BAS inconsistencies is in the works. None of this changes grading standards or subgrades, but it’s a clear signal that Collectors is building shared infrastructure across its portfolio rather than running three fully separate businesses.
On the capital side, Fanatics’ trading card business closed a large new funding round late last month that pushed its valuation sharply higher, a reminder that institutional money is still finding its way into this category even as the grading side of the business deals with legal and operational headaches. For the VC and institutional audience watching this space, the gap between “grading infrastructure is strained” and “capital keeps flowing into collectibles platforms” is worth sitting with.
The auction landscape also continues to get more competitive and more frequent, with Robert Edward Auctions, Goldin and Heritage all running overlapping high-end sales this month, a sign that supply of great material is keeping pace with (or being pulled forward by) strong collector demand.
Bottom Line
The grading industry’s structural story and the collecting market’s demand story are increasingly decoupled, and that’s probably the most important thing for Aristocrat-style investors to sit with today. PSA, Beckett and SGC are all working through capacity and legal overhang that won’t resolve quickly, the December 11 hearing being the next real marker. None of that has slowed demand for what actually matters long-term: scarce, well-documented vintage material and this year’s most compelling rookie class are both pulling serious attention regardless of how long a card sits in a grading queue. If anything, a messier grading environment is one more argument for sourcing condition-verified, already-graded blue-chip cards rather than betting on submission timelines.
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