Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Fortune profiles a collector using his 500,000 unpriced cards as a debt-crisis hedge
The 3,821% Pokemon return Fortune cites for 2004 to 2025 compounds to about 19% a year. It belongs to the category. Peter Levin told the magazine he has no estimate of what his half million cards are worth.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Fortune opens its piece on a U.S. national debt above $40 trillion, stalling wage growth, stagnant job growth and rising grocery prices, and a 10-year Treasury yield nearing 5%.
- Its subject is Peter Levin, 55, co-founder and managing director at Griffin Gaming Partners, who has been collecting cards since he was four years old.
- Levin's holdings run to half a million trading cards, about 100,000 of them Pokemon, plus more than 25,000 comic books and a Dodgers crossover on a One Piece card.
- Levin told the Hollywood Reporter that Pokemon cards could become a global currency in the aftermath of an apocalypse, then told Fortune he was joking about the post-apocalyptic part.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The piece cannot be read as evidence that allocators are rotating into collectibles: the headline sells a venture capital hedge against a debt crisis, while the collector in the same copy says he would have sold already if he were in it for the money.
- constraint The 500,000 cards carry no published valuation, so nobody can say how much 10-year exposure they offset or how the position would size against a bond book.
- decision Anyone copying the position has to pick between the category and this particular book, because four-fifths of Levin's card count sits outside the Pokemon market that produced the return figure.
Annualise the return and it gets smaller. A 3,821% gain over the 21 years from 2004 to 2025 is 39.2 times the starting stake, or about 19.1 percent a year [6][15]. The S&P 500's 483% over the same stretch is 5.8 times, about 8.8 percent a year [6][16]. Ten points a year of spread, and 6.7 times the terminal money [17][19]. Fortune sourced both to Washington Post data, and both price Pokemon cards as a category [6].
Sizing a hedge takes two prices: what the position is worth now, and what it is worth after the yield has moved. Fortune reports Levin does not have an estimate of the worth of the 500,000-card collection, and he told the magazine, "None of my good stuff is kept at home" [7][8].
His stated reason for holding is a demand story, and interest rates do not enter into it. "Once that generation who collected and played as kids have gotten to a place in life where they have disposable income, you know they're going to make a determination," he said [10]. That generational embrace, he told Fortune, is what separates trading cards from earlier alternative assets like NFTs [22]. He said of cards: "There's a stickiness to it. There's a community to it" [11].
The Pokemon figure covers a fifth of what he owns by count. About 100,000 of the 500,000 cards are Pokemon; the other 400,000 are baseball, basketball and collab cards, one of them a Dodgers crossover on a One Piece card [12][18].
Fortune's article attributes the half million cards to Levin himself, a personal collection and not a Griffin Gaming Partners fund position [21]. The firm detail in the piece is internal competition. "We have a cohort within Griffin that competes every other week," he said, alongside Magic the Gathering get-togethers [14].
The cohort-income claim could be right, in which case the category compounds on its own buyers, whatever the bond market does [10]. Or the 3,821% has already been earned and anyone arriving now is paying for it, in which case a 10-year near 5% is a competing yield [2][6]. As evidence about where allocators think the bond market is heading, this account is one man's lifelong collection and one magazine's opening paragraph [1][3][4].
What to watch
- Where the 10-year Treasury yield settles from the near-5% level Fortune uses as the premise of its framing.
- Whether the cohort with disposable income that Levin describes keeps bidding, since the account names it as the source of demand.