Foil Research
Published work on the structure, pricing and liquidity of collectible asset markets. Every paper states a thesis you can disagree with, and sources every number well enough that you can go and check it.
Papers
Paper 01 · Market structure
Grading, vaulting, transaction data and global distribution are all in place around collectible cards. The one layer nobody has built is the market itself.
Thesis. Collectibles already have every prerequisite of an asset class except a market. The binding constraint is liquidity, not scarcity, and liquidity is something a market is built to provide rather than something an asset has.
19 min read6 exhibits18 references
Paper 02 · Market structure
A round trip through a collectible card costs 20 to 30 per cent. Valuation theory says that cost is not paid at the exit. It is already deducted from what the card is worth today.
Thesis. The discount on collectible assets is a transaction-cost discount, not a scarcity discount. What better market structure creates is therefore the removal of that discount and the extension of access, which is a different and much more defensible claim than superior returns.
9 min read6 exhibits16 references
Paper 03 · Price formation
A retired player's card has no earnings, no guidance and no news flow. It still moves. Three processes set the price, they run at different speeds, and the fastest of them is the one almost no analysis tracks.
Thesis. Certified supply is the fastest-moving and least-watched input into collectible prices. Grading creates new tradeable units without printing a single card, which means supply can expand in response to price in a market everyone treats as fixed.
7 min read4 exhibits5 references
Paper 04 · Case studies
One card, one cycle, one catastrophe. The same demand shock produces opposite outcomes depending on a single variable, and each case ends with the thing a model would not have known in advance.
Thesis. Whether a price move persists depends less on how strong the demand was than on whether supply could respond to it. Read the three episodes in that order and the outcomes stop looking like sentiment and start looking like elasticity.
7 min read5 exhibits5 references
Notes
Shorter pieces on a single question.