How to Flip a $5 Card Purchase Into a $1,500 Sale? Know and Seek.

Yes, I'm speechless that this happened. Am I surprised? Yes and no. I've said that finding a BIG flip is the luck of "right place, right time." Well, sometimes it's more active. Let me explain.

I recently bought a card for $5 and sold it immediately for $1,500 (I might have underpriced it myself). This was a few weeks ago and I still can’t believe it happened.

I don’t think it belongs on my list of “sneaky” valuable cards because it’s just flat out rare, but I did find it going through the same process.

I’ll get to the card eventually, but here is how it came to be.

To set the stage, there are a million ways to flip sports cards, but I practice two of them, mostly.

The first is great, but limited in opportunity.

The second is better, and how I found this $1,500 treasure.

1. Find the deal before everyone else does

This is mostly about being in the right place at the right time. For me, that usually means COMC, and surveying the “recently added” section in hopes that a seller lists a card for less than the going rate.

This method requires me to be looking at the listings at the very moment the card is listed for sale because good deals don’t last long. I say it’s “lucky” because I’m there at the moment I need to be, but it does require knowledge in order to know if it’s a good buy or not.

This was the basis of my article “The Key to Flipping an $8 Purchase Into $800? Luck, Mostly” where someone listed a 1998-99 24KT Gold #69TG Chauncey Billups #/24 for $7.95. I knew the card was worth more than that, but even better, I was there when it was listed for sale, or else I could have never even known the opportunity existed.

But let’s face it—an $800 card won’t fall in your lap daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly. These were my biggest sales based on dollar amount in 2023. You can see Chauncey was the best by far. It was a special moment.

Without oversimplifying, if you want to flip cards, you need to have cards to flip. Could you find more cards like this if you were on COMC 24/7? Perhaps not $800 cards, but you’d probably find a lot more great deals. But do you have 24 hours per day to do so?

So instead…