Research-grade analytics for Pokémon investing.
People spend real money on Pokémon cards and sealed products. We believe they deserve the same research standards, transparency, and methodological rigor investors expect when evaluating any other asset. That principle shapes every metric, score, and article we publish. The foundation under all of it: every card page shows the European Pokémon card price (Cardmarket, EUR) and the US Pokémon card price (TCGplayer market data and PriceCharting sales, USD) side by side, clearly labelled by source and pricing method. Comparing European and US prices is only the first layer — scores, risk analysis, projections and published research are built on top.
We measure the market consequences of narratives. We don't predict them.
From short-cycle markets to long-duration intelligence.
I've been into Pokémon for years, more on the game and Pokémon GO side than the cards, to be honest. My background is finance, mostly building trading bots for markets like Polymarket and forex. When I started looking into Pokémon investing, I noticed the same thing I'd seen elsewhere: a real market with barely any proper data behind it. TCGinvest is my attempt to fill that gap.
Martin's background is quantitative trading: short-cycle crypto markets, oracle arbitrage, and Polymarket bots, work that rewards rigorous testing and unforgiving attention to execution. That discipline compounds even more in a slower market, where most participants bring no rigorous analysis at all and a small edge held patiently can matter for years.
Pokémon TCG fits exactly: a multi-billion-dollar alternative-asset category with thirty years of price history and real cultural demand. Yet despite its size, investors have had limited access to the transparent, quantitative research they take for granted in public markets. TCGinvest is the tool we wanted to use ourselves, the same quantitative discipline pointed at a market where rigorous research has been scarce.
A research platform, not a price tracker.
TCGinvest was built on a simple belief: if people are spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on Pokémon cards and sealed products, they deserve to analyze them like real investments, not make decisions based on opinion or speculation.
Our ambition is simple: to build the most transparent and rigorously documented source of Pokémon TCG investment research. Every card and product on TCGinvest is evaluated using historical market prices, graded-sale history, PSA population data, and market-structure metrics, with every published figure computed from underlying data rather than estimated or guessed.
We don't predict narratives or assign price targets. We measure the market consequences of those narratives, so investors can make decisions based on evidence instead of assumptions.
| Pokémon TCG cards tracked | ~24,500 |
| Sealed products tracked | 700+ |
| Historical price observations | 33M+ |
| PSA population records | 86,000+ |
| Sets covered | 241 |
| Price refresh | Daily |
| Currencies | EUR singles · USD sealed |
- Singles prices: Cardmarket (Near Mint, English listings)
- Historical & graded prices: PriceCharting
- Grading population: PSA Population Report
- Sealed products: TCGplayer data feed + PriceCharting historical series
Cardmarket provides current European (EUR) marketplace pricing; PriceCharting and TCGplayer provide US (USD) sold and market prices. TCGinvest shows both the European (Cardmarket) price and the US (TCGplayer and PriceCharting) price on every card. Each price remains separate, clearly labelled, and is never blended into a single value — and using two unrelated markets also reduces dependence on any single source.
Data is the floor. Intelligence is the moat.
The platform is organised into three concentric layers of increasing analytical depth. Each is necessary; each alone is insufficient.
Daily-refreshed Cardmarket EUR prices, PriceCharting graded comparables, PSA populations, sales counts, listing depth, plus sealed-product pricing from TCGplayer. Most competitors stop here. Commoditising.
Composite scores, sub-score decomposition, era-conditional fundamental ratings, every metric carrying an explicit confidence label. Honest about uncertainty.
Continuous interpretation: market pulse, interpretive alerts, rotational analysis, portfolio benchmarking. The reason serious investors check daily.
Five principles that shape the methodology.
Stated explicitly so readers can evaluate whether the methodology is consistent with their own framework.
Every downstream metric (score, projection, leaderboard) is computed from the cheapest available raw Near-Mint English-language Cardmarket listing. Graded slabs and non-English copies inform context but never the headline number.
Where the data is thin, we say so. Cards with sparse sales evidence carry a low-confidence flag. Projections are presented as ranges with explicit confidence bands rather than point forecasts.
We do not tell users what cards will be worth. We tell them which are structurally strongest by current fundamentals, which categories are rotating, and where confidence is high versus low. The user decides what to do with that.
The product avoids language that promises returns or substitutes hype for analysis.
When scoring weights change, when filters are added, when the approach to a market regime is revised, users see the history. Standard practice in quantitative research; rare in collectible tooling.
Raw markets vs graded slabs.
TCGinvest is built primarily on the raw (ungraded) Near-Mint English-language market. Raw listings reflect what a transaction would actually clear at, today, without the multi-week round-trip of grading. PSA-10 prices are not the price of a card; they are the price of one specific graded outcome, contingent on submission, grading throughput, and gem-rate yield.
Certain high-end collectibles (particularly trophy-tier Gold Stars, shadowless Charizards, Holon-era chase variants) trade primarily as graded slabs because the raw market has effectively disappeared at that price point. These cards remain visible on TCGinvest with a SLAB MARKET FROM €N label, but are deliberately excluded from raw-market investment rankings to preserve scoring integrity. The absence of a raw price is a market-structure signal, not a data gap.
Claims you can audit.
The ranking system is backtested against five years of price history with walk-forward splits and adversarial review; the result is a real but modest ranking edge that holds on data the model never saw, and the full reasoning lives on the methodology page. Day to day, the same discipline runs in public: our market engine posts deal signals to a live ledger and a free Telegram channel, each with its entry price and what the market did next, hits and misses alike.
The discipline behind the numbers.
A research platform is only as honest as its worst data point. TCGinvest publishes the gates and procedures that keep the numbers displayed on every card defensible, so readers can evaluate the quality of the underlying pipeline.
Freshness gates. Every regime label, mover signal, and watchlist alert is evaluated against price data verified within the last 21 days at minimum; alerts specifically require sub-24-hour freshness before firing. Stale data cannot trigger a user-facing notification. Cards whose price hasn't been verified recently are surfaced with an explicit freshness note rather than silently treated as current.
Liquidity floors. Cohort regimes and movers exclude variants with fewer than three verified raw sales in the last 180 days. A single rogue listing on an otherwise illiquid card cannot move our regime label or fire an alert. Trophy-tier cards in particular are treated as observation-only until cross-marketplace sales accumulate.
Contamination quarantine. A write-side database trigger rejects any price update that deviates more than 5× from the smoothed weekly trend. Rejected writes are logged with the source URL for inspection, not silently dropped. The smoothed trend itself is computed from Cardmarket's own 7-day weighted average, which is more conservative than any single scrape.
Trend computation transparency. The “Live NM ask” figure on each card is the Cardmarket lowest Near-Mint English-language ask. The 30-day change percentage compares that figure against Cardmarket's own 30-day average, not against a derived model. We do not smooth, infill, or interpolate price history to make charts look cleaner.
Every published figure on TCGinvest can be traced back to an underlying data source and a documented calculation. Where confidence is low or data is incomplete, we state that explicitly rather than present false precision.
The things we deliberately refuse.
A research platform's voice is defined by what it refuses to say as much as what it says.
- ✕Predict prices or claim to know future values.
- ✕Produce buy / sell signals or trade recommendations.
- ✕Promise returns, guarantee outcomes, or use hype language.
- ✕Anchor portfolio value to PSA-10 multiples.
- ✕Provide regulated financial advice or fiduciary services.
- ✕Display sub-€4 bulk cards in investment ranking surfaces.
Honest about the edges.
The scoring model targets multi-year fundamental quality under normal market conditions. It does not protect against bubble unwinds or severe regime collapses. Individual realised returns vary widely; the tier badge and relative ranking are the load-bearing signals at the card level, not the projection point value. TCGinvest measures markets; it does not promise outcomes. Trading cards are illiquid alternative assets, and every investment decision involves uncertainty.
Full terms in the Terms of Service and methodology detail in our research notes on the Ledger.
Questions, feedback, or partnerships?
Direct line to the operator. Response typically within a working day.