Trading Cards as an Alternative Asset: What the Fractional Platforms Won't Tell You About Liquidity

TL;DR: Collectable Sports Assets LLC, the SEC-registered platform that let accredited and retail investors buy fractional shares of vintage trading cards, halted secondary trading in 2024 and issued zero new offerings in 2024 or 2025. According to the company's own Form 1-K annual report filed with the SEC, the shutdown came down to "cost considerations." Not fraud. Not a market crash. Just the plain economics of running a stock-exchange-style marketplace for cardboard. If you were pitched fractional card ownership as liquid, IPO-style access to a hot alternative asset, the fine print tells a different story.

The pitch versus the filing

I've sat through enough pitch decks to recognize the pattern: take an asset class with genuine price appreciation, wrap it in a securities structure, and market it as "Wall Street for X." Fractional trading card platforms did this well. Collectable, PWCC Marketplace, and later entrants built the case that a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle or a Kobe Bryant rookie card was a store of value you could buy a slice of, the same way you'd buy a share of an ETF.

The pitch wasn't wrong about the underlying appreciation. It was wrong about the liquidity. Collectable registered its offerings with the SEC under Regulation A+, the same exemption crowdfunding platforms use to sell equity to non-accredited investors in amounts up to $75 million a year. That registration gave the platform real legitimacy: real filings, real disclosure obligations, which is exactly why its 2025 Form 1-K is worth reading closely. The company halted secondary trading in 2024. It didn't bring a single new card offering to market in 2024 or 2025. A structure sold on the promise of a functioning secondary market simply stopped running one.

That's the contrarian angle here. The risk in fractional card investing isn't primarily that the card turns out to be fake or that the market for Mantles collapses. It's that the trading infrastructure built on top of a genuinely appreciating asset can fail on its own, for reasons that have nothing to do with the card sitting in the vault. You can be right about Michael Jordan memorabilia and still lose access to your capital because the company running the marketplace decided the secondary market cost too much to operate.

What the cards themselves are actually worth

None of this means the underlying asset is soft. 2025 was, by dollar volume, one of the strongest years on record for graded trading cards at the top end. Sports Illustrated's year-end hobby recap put a Kobe Bryant/Michael Jordan dual-autograph Logoman card at a $12.9 million sale, surpassing the $12.6 million paid for a 1952 Topps Mantle back in 2022. A Jordan/LeBron James dual-auto Logoman sold for $10 million about a month later. That's real, verifiable price discovery at the auction-house level, not platform marketing copy, and it's the reason the asset class keeps drawing new capital even as the platform layer around it struggles.

The table below lays out the spread between the marketing narrative and what the filings and reporting actually show.

Data point	Number	Source
Collectable secondary trading status	Halted in 2024, "due to cost considerations"	SEC EDGAR, Collectable Sports Assets LLC Form 1-K
New Collectable offerings, 2024–2025	Zero	SEC EDGAR, Form 1-K
Kobe/Jordan dual-auto Logoman sale, 2025	$12.9 million	Sports Illustrated, 2025 Hobby Year in Review
Prior record (1952 Topps Mantle, 2022)	$12.6 million	Sports Illustrated
PSA fraud interceptions, 2025	~$200 million in projected fraudulent collectibles, up 45.3% year over year	PSA 2025 Fraud Report, via Sports Collectors Digest
Pokémon/TCG share of counterfeit cases	56.3% of cases, with counterfeit volume up 125% year over year	PSA 2025 Fraud Report
Grading arbitrage example: 1986 Fleer Jordan #57	PSA 8 grade: $6,000–$7,000. PSA 10 grade: $185,000–$200,000+	Federal indictment reporting, KIRO 7 News, Jan. 2026
Grading market concentration	Collectors Holdings controls PSA, SGC, and Beckett, roughly 80% of grading volume	Congressional press release and antitrust reporting

How fractional ownership actually works, in plain terms

Strip away the branding and a fractional card platform works like this: the company buys a physical card, has it graded by a third party, and places it in a vault. It then files a securities offering (usually Reg A+) and sells shares in that specific card, or in a fund holding several cards, to investors. You don't own the card. You own a security backed by the card, issued by the company, subject to the company's disclosure rules and the company's decision about whether and how to run a trading venue for those shares.

That last point is the one most marketing materials gloss over. The card's value can go up because Michael Jordan memorabilia is on a historic run. Your shares' liquidity depends entirely on whether the platform keeps a secondary market open, staffed, and funded. Collectable's own 2025 filing shows those are two separate risks, and the second one materialized independent of the first. Investors who bought in expecting to trade in and out the way they would with a brokerage account found themselves holding a security with no venue to sell it on.

Grading adds a third layer. A card's population report number and grade, assigned by PSA, SGC, Beckett, or PCGS, drives most of its price. Dalmore Group and similar broker-dealers that underwrite these offerings rely on that grade as the anchor for valuation. If the grade is wrong, inflated, or fraudulently obtained, the security built on top of it is mispriced from day one, whether you hold the whole card or a fraction of it. That's not a hypothetical concern in this market. It's the subject of an active federal case, which I'll walk through below.

The case that shows how the grading spread gets exploited

The 1986 Fleer Michael Jordan #57 rookie card is a clean illustration of why grading matters so much more than most new entrants expect. In a PSA 8 holder, that card trades in the $6,000 to $7,000 range. In a PSA 10 holder, the top grade reserved for cards with essentially no visible flaws, the same card is worth $185,000 to $200,000 or more. That's not a rounding difference. It's a roughly 27-to-30x multiple for two grade points on an identical piece of cardboard.

A spread that wide is an invitation. In January 2026, federal prosecutors secured a wire fraud conviction in United States v. Curcio, tied to more than $2 million in sales involving misrepresented card grades. The defendant sold cards represented as top-grade PSA 10s that didn't hold up to the claim, exploiting exactly the kind of price gap the Fleer Jordan example shows. It's a useful case study precisely because it's not exotic. It's the most mainstream card in the hobby, graded by the most established authenticator, and the fraud still got through until federal prosecutors caught it years into the scheme.

What makes this relevant to a fractional investor rather than just a collector is scale. A single collector who gets defrauded on one card loses the price of that card. A platform that sells fractional shares in a card with a fraudulent or disputed grade spreads that same loss across every investor holding a piece of it, and unwinding the claim after the fact, through a securities structure with a broker-dealer and a transfer agent in the middle, is considerably harder than a simple buyer-seller dispute.

Layer on top of that PSA's own 2025 fraud report, reported by Sports Collectors Digest, which put projected fraudulent collectibles intercepted at roughly $200 million for the year, a 45.3% increase over the year before. Pokémon and other trading-card-game products accounted for 56.3% of counterfeit cases, with counterfeit volume in that category up 125% year over year. Grading errors and outright fraud aren't tail risks in this market. They're a growing, measured line item.

The consolidation problem nobody put in the pitch deck

There's a structural risk sitting underneath all of this that applies whether you hold a physical card or a fractional share: Collectors Holdings, the parent company led by CEO Nat Turner, now controls PSA (acquired in 2021), SGC (acquired February 2024), and Beckett (acquisition announced December 2025). That's roughly 80% of grading volume sitting inside one corporate parent.

Vertical integration on that scale has drawn direct political and legal pushback. Rep. Pat Ryan filed an FTC complaint over the concentration, and a federal class action in Los Angeles has raised self-dealing and conflict-of-interest claims tied to the consolidation. The concern is straightforward: when one company owns the authentication layer that sets a card's price and has commercial incentives across grading, marketplace operations, and collectibles more broadly, the independence of the grade itself becomes a legitimate question. If you're relying on a PSA 10 to justify a $200,000 valuation, you're also relying on PSA's independence from the commercial pressures of its own parent company. That's worth sitting with before you treat a grade as a hard fact.

What I'd actually tell a client asking about this

I'm not going to tell you trading cards are a bad asset. The Sports Illustrated sales data is real, and the top of this market has genuinely appreciated. What I will say, plainly: if a platform is selling you fractional shares and describing the experience as similar to trading public equities, ask three questions before you wire money.

• Is there an active, functioning secondary market right now, or only a stated plan to open one. Check the platform's own SEC filings, specifically the Form 1-K for Reg A+ issuers, not its marketing page.
• Who graded the underlying card, and does that grading company have a financial relationship with the platform, the marketplace, or a shared parent company.
• What happens to your capital if the platform halts trading the way Collectable did. Is there a stated redemption mechanism, or are you simply holding an illiquid security indefinitely.

If you want direct exposure to the appreciation without the platform-liquidity risk, buying a graded card outright through an established marketplace like Fanatics Collect or PWCC and holding it yourself removes the securities-structure risk entirely. You take on storage, insurance, and eventual resale liquidity risk instead. That's a different trade-off, and in most cases a more transparent one, because you control the exit rather than a platform's board deciding whether running a trading venue still pencils out.

For accredited investors specifically, the calculus is a little different. You have access to private secondary markets and direct negotiation with auction houses like Heritage Auctions and Goldin that retail buyers often don't use as effectively. That access is itself a reason to be skeptical of paying a platform for fractional structuring you may not need. If you have the capital to buy a five- or six-figure card outright, ask whether the fractional wrapper is solving a real problem for you or just collecting a fee for a liquidity promise it may not keep.

The bottom line on risk

Three risks compound here, and none of them are hypothetical. Platform liquidity risk is documented in Collectable's own SEC filing. Grading fraud risk is documented in a 2026 federal conviction and PSA's own $200 million interception figure. Market consolidation risk is documented in an active FTC complaint and federal class action against Collectors Holdings. Any one of these would be a reasonable caveat in a pitch deck. Together, they describe a market still working out its basic infrastructure: authentication independence, trading venues, and fraud enforcement, while marketing itself to investors as a mature asset class.

That doesn't mean avoid it. It means underwrite the platform and the grading chain with the same rigor you'd apply to the card itself, and size any position accordingly.

Author Disclosure: Jeff Barnes, MBA has no personal position in any company, fund, or platform named in this article. Angel Investors Network has no current commercial relationship with any party mentioned. AIN provides marketing and education services, not investment advice. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.