Highlights
- $126.8M in tracked Q1 sales — the strongest Q1 since 2022's $164.1M.
- 1986 Fleer Jordan PSA 10 cleared $717K at Heritage in April — a high-water mark for the year.
- Modern football cards returned to within 15% of 2021 highs.
- Founding Era manuscript volume cleared $4.4M, +30% YoY.
- 1933 Goudey #53 Babe Ruth PSA 9 sold at the conservative low estimate, signaling vintage-card price normalization.
What Q1 2025 actually looked like
After the 2022 peak, the 2023 broad correction, and the 2024 partial recovery, Q1 2025 was the first quarter in which the year-over-year comparison did not require a "compared to a difficult prior period" caveat. The market posted $126.8M in tracked sales, sequentially up from Q4 2024's $122.4M, with modest gains across every sub-category we track.
That breadth — gains across every category rather than concentration in one or two — is what makes Q1 2025 instructive. The 2020–2022 surge was concentrated in modern cards and screen-used props. The 2023 correction was concentrated in modern cards (the post-COVID overhang). The 2024 recovery was concentrated in movie/TV memorabilia and political/historical. Q1 2025 was uniformly modest gains across the eight categories. That is what a healthy mid-cycle market looks like.
Modern football cards returned to within 15% of 2021 highs. The Brady Contenders RPA, the Mahomes Immaculate RPA, and the Burrow Contenders RPA all traded in the high-six to low-seven figure range. The cohort of buyers driving these sales is younger than the modern-baseball-card cohort, and the secondary market activity has been characteristically more disciplined — fewer flips, more buy-and-hold.
Vintage cards normalized. The 1933 Goudey #53 Babe Ruth PSA 9 sale at Heritage in April was the data point. It cleared $800,000 — at the auction's conservative low estimate. That was a 2.5x improvement over Heritage's October 2024 sale of a Goudey #54 (also PSA 9) at $325K, suggesting the bid depth has stabilized in the upper PSA 9 tier. It was, however, well below 2022's $1.5M+ ranges for similar examples. The market has reset, and the reset has held.
Founding Era manuscripts continued to outperform. Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson autograph items posted +30% YoY at the comparable-grade level. The driving force is institutional collector activity — universities and family-trust collections completing thematic acquisitions — combined with a documented uptick in estate-driven consignment. We expect this category to continue outperforming through 2026.
Numbers we tracked
| Category | Q1 2025 tracked | YoY change | Median sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trading cards | $54.2M | +8% | $26,500 |
| Sports memorabilia | $21.6M | +5% | $41,800 |
| Movie/TV memorabilia | $16.9M | +18% | $51,200 |
| Comics | $16.3M | +6% | $21,200 |
| Music memorabilia | $11.2M | +4% | $29,400 |
| Political/historical | $6.9M | +30% | $31,800 |
| Autographs | $2.7M | +1% | $10,800 |
| Toys | $1.1M | +9% | $7,500 |
Three things to watch
Authentication-service throughput. PSA reported its turnaround time as 60 days for standard service at the end of Q1. SGC was 35 days. BGS was 70 days. The relative service-level differentials are creating arbitrage opportunities for consignors deciding where to submit, with PSA's brand premium having to outweigh its longer queue. Watch for the differential to compress (back toward PSA) or widen (more SGC/BGS share) through 2025.
The cross-category modern buyer. As discussed in our Q4 2024 letter, a meaningful share of modern memorabilia tracked sales now comes from buyers who hold positions across multiple categories. That cohort is structurally less correlated with single-category cyclical patterns, which should produce smoother volume trajectories than the prior cards-only cycle.
Documentation premium. Items with verifiable provenance documentation are pulling away from items relying on COA alone. The spread is now 15–25% in some categories. We expect this to widen as generative AI introduces more uncertainty into traditional verification methods (especially photograph-based provenance), and as auction houses invest in provenance research as a differentiator.
Methodology note
Tracked sales above the Field Index threshold ($5,000 for cards, $10,000 for memorabilia, $25,000 for documents and props) are sourced from public auction-house catalogs, trade-press reporting, and grading-service population data. Methodology details at /field-index/methodology.