Plaything or smart investment?
Kiwi kids who learned to catch’em all may be sitting on a goldmine today.
Achildhood past-time from the 1990s can now mean big business, with Poke´mon trading cards selling for tens of thousands of dollars.
Aucklander Sam Joyce Maggs has been trading and collecting Poke´ mon cards for the past five years.
The cards are partly a wise investment for the future and partly a way to fulfil a passion for childhood nostalgia, he says.
He has a collection, which if sold could get him a deposit on a house, and he recently sold a single card for $2200.
In the past two years, since the launch of the global phenomenon Poke´mon Go, the value of the cards jumped as many people were hit with a dose of nostalgia, Maggs said.
Sales for the little pieces of cardboard are frequent, with Trade Me reporting around 1300 sales a month.
Earlier this month in the United States a pack of “Poke´mon 1999 1st edition limited print base set unopened booster box” sold for $87,000.
The trading card game was a schoolyard phenomenon in the mid1990s and early 2000s.
However most Kiwis from that generation binned their Poke´mon cards or put them in storage with other pieces of childhood memorabilia, Maggs said.
Some popular cards have doubled in value since the introduction of Poke´mon Go, he said.
“A classic charizard would have been $50 to $70, then it moved to $100 to $150. It inflated things a little bit. For cardboard it’s crazy.”
Since the release of the mobile game, Maggs estimates he has sold about 5000 cards. His best sale came a few months ago when he sold a mint Ho-Oh for $2200.
“I bought that for $180. When I got it from my friend it was in mint condition.”
He advised Kiwis to look in their storage, there might be a few hundred dollars just waiting.
Poke´mon, a billion-dollar company, is based on a Japanese cartoon which also spans dozens of video games and other merchandise.
Trade Me spokeswoman Millie Silvester agreed with Maggs, saying there was a resurgence for the cards when the Poke´mon Go phone app was released in 2016
“In the past month we’ve seen over 1700 searches for Poke´mon cards on Trade Me and we typically see about 1300 sales every month.”
But it seemed Kiwis were slow on the uptake.
Mercer chief investment officer Philip Houghton Brown said the majority of investments at Mercer were shares and bonds, and alternative investments probably accounted for 10 per cent.
Things such as art work and trading cards were more of a private investment that would be less than 1 per cent of investments.
“I have heard of people investing in collectable cards, but it’s a very specialist area.”
In the past five years he had noticed a trend of traditional investors moving to alternative investments in a bid to diversify assets and reduce the impact of fluctuation
“I think there has been a shift towards non-traditional assets in the past five to 10 years.”
The rarest Poke´mon card to go on sale, the “Pikachu Illustrator”, of which there are only six in the world sold, for $85,000 in 2016.