About Cardboard Assets

Cardboard Assets is a financial-grade analysis platform for trading cards. Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering treated as the asset class they've quietly become.

Steven Fiorillo

Founder, Cardboard Assets · Founder, Fiorillo Media Company LLC · MBA

I've published over 1,440 articles on Seeking Alpha covering equities, fintech, dividend income strategy, and alternative-asset markets. Per TipRanks I've held a ~78% success rate over my published track record and ranked top-20 in their financial blogger leaderboard. I run Clear Alpha on Substack, post breakdowns to YouTube, and on X.

Cardboard Assets exists because nobody else was treating trading cards with the financial rigor the asset class deserves. Every era, every booster box, and every flagship card we cover gets benchmarked against the S&P 500 Total Return. The Grading Profit Optimizer answers a question collectors actually ask: should I send this card to be graded? — with the math exposed.

Mission

Treat cardboard as an asset class. Honest accounting, exposed math, S&P 500 benchmarking on every basket and every individual product. Numbers reported plainly with comparators alongside. No hype words, no defensive asterisks.

Data sources & licensing

  • Card identities + images: Pokémon TCG API, Scryfall, TCGdex — all public, unauthenticated, used per their published terms.
  • Sealed prices: PriceCharting median sold comps, manually transcribed and disclosed via the Sealed History Disclosure footer on every chart that references this data.
  • Population data: Public PSA POP Report and recent eBay sold listings, hand-curated for our 16 flagship cards. Commercial integration with GemRate is in active discussion.
  • S&P 500 Total Return benchmark: Yahoo Finance ^SP500TR via FRED-mirrored daily series. Static CSV pre-2015 to extend history back to 1988.

Contact

Email [email protected] for partnership inquiries, data corrections, or coverage requests.

Cardboard Assets is operated by Fiorillo Media Company LLC. Privacy · Terms · Disclaimer