Private Equity Has Entered the Collectible Space

In 2021, grading, marketplaces, price data, vaulting, and local card shops were mostly separate businesses. Today, much of the card industry sits inside a handful of private-capital-backed groups. Fanatics manufactures cards and owns a marketplace and a vault; Collectors owns PSA; and eBay owns TCGplayer and Goldin. Institutional money has also started moving into physical card stores, one of the last areas of the hobby that still allows the buying and selling of cardboard to be treated like an actual hobby.¹²³⁴⁵

Some of that money pouring into the industry is from private equity. Some from family offices, venture investors or strategic corporate buyers. Whoever the investor is, the plan is the same: build scale, run every location the same way and own more of the collector's business. The money is going to the companies that get paid each time a card is graded, stored, priced, bought, sold or traded.

Who owns card grading now?

Two private-capital groups own almost all of it. An investor group led by Nat Turner, D1 Capital Partners and Cohen Private Ventures took Collectors Universe, the parent of PSA, private in 2021 in a transaction Houlihan Lokey put at approximately $853 million. Collectors later acquired SGC and Beckett. Its own brands page now lists Card Ladder, PSA Vault and financial services for collectible assets.¹

Using 2025 grading volume as a benchmark, the brands now under Collectors accounted for roughly 80% of major card grading. PSA alone graded 19.26 million cards that year, with SGC at 1.42 million and Beckett at 824,000. CGC accounted for another 18% of the market. Its parent company, Certified Collectibles Group, has been majority owned by Blackstone since July 2021.²³

In September 2026, PSA graded 2.46 million of the 3.52 million cards GemRate counted, with SGC adding 46,000 and CGC grading 962,000. GemRate left Beckett out of its September count.⁶

That concentration matters because the grade helps set the price. The Alonzo Mourning rookie at the top of this story has sold for around $45 in a PSA 10 this year and around $15 in a PSA 9.⁷ PSA has graded 347 of them as 10s.⁸ On a modern chase card the same jump runs to thousands of dollars, as our look at the PSA 10 premium found. The company that assigns the grade has more say over a card's price than any shipper or payment processor.

A card can be graded, valued through affiliated data, stored in the company's vault and then listed on eBay from that vault without returning to the collector's hands.¹ In December 2025, Congressman Pat Ryan's office asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Collectors' grading consolidation and specifically pointed to the combination of grading capacity, pricing analytics and transaction infrastructure.⁹ A request is not a finding.

A proposed class action filed in April 2026 asks a federal court to make Collectors sell SGC and Beckett. Collectors wants the suit dismissed or sent to arbitration, with a hearing set for Dec. 11.¹⁰

Fanatics and eBay built the same chain around the card

Fanatics announced each step itself: long-term trading-card rights, Topps in 2022, PWCC Marketplace and its vault in 2023, and the marketplace folded into Fanatics Collect in 2024. It also operates Fanatics Live, where cards can be sold through live breaks.⁴

eBay took another route. It bought TCGplayer for up to $295 million, then acquired Goldin in 2024 while selling its vault business to PSA and entering a commercial integration with Collectors, all three announced by eBay and Collectors together in April 2024. The resulting system makes it easier to move a card from grading to storage to sale without leaving the connected platforms.⁵

Each of these steps makes sense. Collectors want one account, sellers want a fast sale and investors want prices they can trust. A company that removes the handoffs between grading, storage and sale gives all three what they want. It also keeps the fees that independent businesses used to collect at each step.

The local card shop is next

Card shops stayed independent longer because they're hard to scale. Inventory, buying habits and customers change from one shop to the next. The best shops also work as a clubhouse and an appraisal desk for their town.

In June 2026, Shamrock Capital led an investment in CardsHQ and merged it with Sports Card Investor. The combined company now includes physical retail, ecommerce, live breaking, content, pricing data through Market Movers, collection tracking and technology. Shamrock, announcing the deal in June 2026, called CardsHQ a multi-channel collectibles platform, and the investment is funding additional stores in major U.S. markets.¹¹

CardsHQ's next store is a 12,905-square-foot space at Baldwin Commons outside Detroit, set to open late this year.¹²

CardVault by Tom Brady is building from the other direction. It opened its 19th store, in downtown Indianapolis, on Sept. 27, six weeks after Palo Alto and 11 days after Los Angeles. The chain has also brought in a strategic investor group that includes major figures from sports, entertainment and institutional finance. Co-founder Chris Costa pitched The Toy Book a standardized experience: a collector who uses its grading, trade or sales process in one city can expect the same process in another.¹³

So far both chains are opening their own stores rather than buying independent shops and putting one sign above the door. A chain with money behind it doesn't need to buy them. It can open in the strongest markets, get better inventory, advertise nationally, build breaking studios and data tools, then make the independent shop compete with a business that earns money from several parts of a collector's spending at once.

The shop is valuable because it is inefficient

Much of what makes a great card shop worth visiting is what a roll-up would try to remove.

A local owner knows which customer collects obscure 1990s inserts. He remembers that a kid has been saving for a particular player. He might hold a card for somebody until Friday. A box can sit untouched for five years and suddenly become the most interesting thing in the store.

A chain would call that bad inventory management, even though it's the reason collectors drive across town.

A scaled retailer sees the same room through a different set of numbers: inventory turns, gross margin, labor utilization, trade-in spread, grading submissions, break revenue, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost and lifetime value.

The enshittification problem

Cory Doctorow coined "enshittification" to describe the way platforms become worse as operators gradually extract more value from the people using them. The term was named the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year.¹⁴

The same pattern appears in physical businesses when scale becomes the product.

Krispy Kreme is a simple example. JAB acquired the company for about $1.35 billion in 2016. Krispy Kreme now describes, in its 10-K, a capital-efficient hub-and-spoke system in which centralized Hot Light shops and factories produce doughnuts for smaller "Fresh Shops" that have no manufacturing capability, along with thousands of other delivery points.¹⁵ A Fresh Shop sells the same doughnut, but nobody there watches them come off the line.

The point is not to shit on Krispy Kreme (which has gotten worse). It is about what consolidation does to businesses whose value includes something difficult to put into a spreadsheet.

Veterinary medicine has been rolled up aggressively enough that the Federal Trade Commission in June 2022 imposed special restrictions on JAB Consumer Partners after finding that additional acquisitions could reduce competition in already concentrated regional markets.¹⁶ A 2026 study of private-equity-owned dental practices in Health Services Research, Nasseh and colleagues, found that, after acquisition, list charges rose 3.3% and the mix of care shifted away from diagnostic and preventive services toward higher-reimbursement restorative, specialty and surgical procedures.¹⁷

Vets, dentists and card shops share the same incentive once they're owned as a portfolio. The owner can measure what earns the most and move money toward it. The useful things that don't earn are the first to go.

In cards, that means the free advice, the weird inventory, the relationship with the owner, the trade night that is not really trying to sell you anything, and the kid who walks out with a handful of commons because somebody behind the counter remembers being ten.

Card game sellers already went through one roll-up

In August 2024, a group of trading-card-game merchants answered the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice request for information on roll-ups with comments about TCGplayer's acquisition of ChannelFireball and BinderPOS, followed shortly by eBay's acquisition of TCGplayer. The merchants alleged that the sequence eliminated marketplace alternatives, gave the combined platform control over important seller infrastructure and left sellers with fewer practical places to go. Those are allegations from market participants rather than government findings, and they are a useful early warning from a collectible market that has already gone through a roll-up.¹⁸

Doctorow's point is that no company decides one morning to make its product worse. It gets worse one sensible decision at a time, in four steps:

1. The process gets easier, more consistent and more professional. Nobody objects because nothing has been taken away yet.
2. More of the customer relationship moves onto the platform, where the account, the history and the habit now live.
3. The transactions, services and fees attached to each customer go up, each one defensible on its own.
4. The business is run to pull value out of the relationship instead of keeping the reason it existed.

What gets optimized away

A national chain will probably be cleaner than the average local store, with consistent prices, an easy grading drop-off, searchable inventory, trained staff and insured high-end cards that can move between stores. Parents who know nothing about cards may feel more comfortable walking in.

It can also get less interesting. Odd inventory moves to a central warehouse, prices move toward the comps and buying follows a formula. Shelf space goes to products that sell on schedule while employees follow policy instead of making calls. Trade night turns into an event on the calendar, breaking into a revenue line and grading into an upsell. The store's videos bring customers in. Once inside, they get steered to the data product, the marketplace and the break room.

CardsHQ already runs that way, with retail, ecommerce, media, live breaking, pricing data and collection tracking under one company.¹¹ That's a good business. It's a different relationship with a collector than an owner-run store that makes money when somebody buys a card.

Consolidation is probably good for card prices

Big investors bring trust, marketing and distribution. PSA's scale makes a graded card easy to trade anywhere, while vaults let owners hold an expensive card without shipping it. National chains put cards in busy malls. Better data and bigger marketplaces make cards easier to price and sell.

The companies doing the consolidating don't need a Caitlin Clark rookie or a Charizard to go up. They get paid to grade it, store it, finance it, price it and sell it. We made a similar case about autographs and scarcity.

Investors want card shops for the same reason once a shop feeds the rest of the business. The store brings in customers and inventory for everything else the company sells.

What happens to the hobby?

The independent card shop will not disappear. The better ones may become more valuable precisely because they remain independent.

But chains will win on convenience, capital, inventory depth, technology and consistency. The independent shop has to win somewhere else: taste, trust, local knowledge, strange inventory, community and the feeling that not every interaction has been designed by somebody optimizing lifetime value.

As cards themselves become more institutional and there is continued consolidation around their grading, data, trading and custody, we may see more value placed on the places that still allow buying cardboard to feel like a hobby. As that premium grows, ironically, do not be surprised to see more and more capital flowing into these spaces and the nature of these places to change.

If you have a good independent shop near you, give it your business this holiday season, whether that's your next box, your grading drop-off or your trade-night table. Then watch Dec. 11, when a judge hears Collectors' request to throw out the antitrust suit over SGC and Beckett.