Odd Lots - The Baseball Card Bubble Can Tell You A Surprising Amount About How Markets Work

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

There's a good chance that if you were a boy in the early 90s that you were a collector of baseball cards. For a few years, the baseball card industry went from being a niche collectible to a massive industry. It was, for a brief period, a legitimate bubble. On this week's Odd Lots podcast we talk to Dave Jamieson, the author of Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession. Among the topics we discussed include the role that pricing guides had in exacerbating the boom, the way that supply massively expanded to meet the raging demand, and how baseball cards have always been a gateway to various vices.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. So Tracy, we continue with our bubble series this week. Bubbles. Bubbles are just the best, aren't they?

Yeah, they are. And what's amazing is there are so many of them. Should we just stop doing other non-bubble episodes and just do bubbles from here on out? Because we probably could, couldn't we? I would be into that. Plus, you know, new bubbles are being made every day. Yeah, exactly. I think we should seriously consider just doing until we've really run out of bubbles, and that will be never. But today, I'm particularly excited because we're going to be talking about a bubble in which I was an active and enthusiastic participant. Okay, wait. I know you dabbled in trading tech stocks in the late 1990s, and that, of course, was a huge bubble. Is it that?

That's true. No, it's not text docs. So I guess now that I think about it, I guess I have a personality that's sort of drawn to riding bubbles up and then all the way down. But no, it's not text docs. Do you want to take a guess? It's not beany bubbles, is it? Or it's beanie bubbles, beanie babies. That one I was not into.

I'll give you a hint. I was a 12-year-old boy when I was into it in the early 90s. I'm really, I'm trying to figure out whether or not you would have been like trading, I don't know, emerging market debt during the Asian financial crisis or something. No, I was not trading Mexican bonds before they bailout or anything like that. Today we're going to be talking about the baseball card bubble in the early 90s, like many other 12, 13 year old boys. I got super into baseball cards, both the ones that were coming. coming out and historical ones. And maybe if you weren't involved in it, you didn't remember

this. But there was a massive surge in interest for a few years. I think it sort of ended in like the mid to late 90s. People were paying all kinds of money for them. And then it sort of just disappeared and people stopped doing it. Joe, I have to say, I was never into baseball cards, but I'm going to admit something to you really embarrassing right now, which is I used to be into Magic the Gathering. And there was a lot of card collecting in that. I suspect there's some similarities. And I think you'll find in our episode that there's a lot of really interesting finance lessons that this bubble has to teach about other bubbles.

Well, it sounds very cool. Who are we talking to? Today we're going to be talking to Dave Jameson. He is the author of Mint Condition, how baseball cards became an American obsession. and he is a labor reporter at the Huffington Post. Let's bring him in. Dave, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the Odd Lots podcast.

Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for having me. First of all, why did you write a book about the baseball card bubble? We'll get into what it was, but I'm curious what drew you to this story. Were you a baseball card collector at the time? Well, Joe, like you, I am a man of a certain age, we can say. I like yourself, I don't know what year you were you born and I was born in 1978 and so I was 12 years old in 1990 and I was there for the same baseball card frenzy that you were and this was a personal obsession of mine. I would say from age 7 to about 13 and all my friends were crazy for it too and then for whatever reason around age 13 or 14 it disappeared from my life.

And my interest was rekindled when I was around getting close to 30 years old and my parents were selling the house I grew up in. And my mom said, you've got to come get these baseball cards out of the closet because it's full of them. And so that sort of sent me down this rabbit hole of, oh, yeah, whatever happened to baseball cards. So your story is very similar to mine. I mean, I didn't write a book about it or have to get rekindled. but I was born in 1980, so just two years after you, so all the years line up. I think we're going to have to be very careful with this episode, not just trading personal stories about collecting cards,

because we could probably do that for like an hour or two, and it probably wouldn't be very interesting. Wait, okay, so I'm going to come in here. No, we're not going to do that, tracing. Here's my excuse to come in. As someone who knows very little about baseball cards or baseball, for that matter, what is the point of the cards? What are they? How did they come into existence? How did you end up with a shoebox full of them?

Well, the long story, which I will keep short, it goes way back to the 1880s when baseball cards were created basically to market cigarettes. And they were a collectible like any others. And the whole idea was to collect a certain team, a certain set. You know, if you've got numbers one, three, four, and five, you want to find number two in that set. And the original idea was you collect these cards. They look nice. You maybe display them at your house or you pull them out when company is over. But they were always collectibles for years and years. And young boys in particular love these.

There was a lot of baseball card heydays. They were huge in the 1930s. They were huge again in the 1950s. Eventually, however, around the time Joe and I came along, this idea of baseball cards being investments had come along. And there's a lot of backstory there, but I think, as Joe had said earlier, there is a lot to this story that says a lot about bubbles in general in the way they work. Tracy, I'm really glad you asked that question, like, what are baseball cards? Because that's I would have just, like, skipped over that question. But it is actually interesting this idea

that they originally, you know, they've been around for, you know, like 150 years. They're originally marketed, you know, related to tobacco. When I was a kid, the most famous card was, and I still remember, the Honest Wagner T206 card that I think was specifically, like, you bought it and you got it in a pack of tobacco, and I remember there were only six in the world, and I think Wayne Gretzky owned one. Tell us about this card, Dave, because I assume you know all the same lore about it. Yeah, the T-206 Honest Wagner is. is like generally the most valuable card ever. And that's because, in part, because Wagner was a great player for Pittsburgh and a Hall of

Famer, but also because the card itself had this really unique backstory. There was only a limited number of them printed. There's different theories as to why. There was, you know, people think there was this dispute, you know, that Wagner didn't want to be on a tobacco card to market tobacco, so he pulled the rights. Anyway, for whatever reason, there's this mystery as to why. there are not so many of them. And it became this really hallowed card.

And those old cards are really important to understanding the bubble that would come in the 1980s and 90s. We fast forward to the 1970s. Baseball cards have been around a really long time, but it's not really till then that anybody starts thinking of them as something that could be worth money. They've always been collectibles up until now. But there's a group of kind of forward-looking guys at that time who, start realizing that there's a market developing around these old neat cards like the Honus Wagner card.

And these guys, they start traveling the country, trying to buy up collections of baseball cards from people. And they will hit the road and they'll put an ad in the local paper and say, hey, my name's Joe, I'm going to be in Pittsburgh next Tuesday at the Holiday Inn.

If you've got baseball cards, come out, I'll give you some money for them. And people came out, they pulled out whatever was in their attic, and they sold it to these guys for pretty much a song. But that's when a certain group of collectors starts thinking about these things as money and a market starts forming. And it's not long after that that we see a price guide come out. This is a guy named James Beckett, a statistician who was also a big collector, decided that there should be some sort of price guide to help people guide sales and trades.

And so all of a sudden we have this price guide guide that serves almost like a stock ticker telling people what their cards are worth. And these are the sort of things we see kind of priming the pump for the boom that's going to come in the 1980s. Okay. I have questions about the price guide. But before we go there, I mean, I know you both have an affinity for these cards. But as an objective observer, I'm really curious how a single collectible piece of cardboard can be a. assigned a value because like something like a card surely you can counterfeit it right like surely you could make infinite numbers of copies of it how did it become a collectible well you know counterfeiting

isn't all that easy and when it comes to these old uh these old vintage cards you could assign a market value to it because there weren't a whole lot of them actually you know the whole idea of baseball cards was they were supposed to be ephemera they were not supposed to be here forever So people back in the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, you threw them out. And if you didn't, your mom eventually threw them out when you outgrew these things. And so cards were not really meant to stick around for decades and decades. And so people got rid of them. And so those old cards like the Honus Wagner card, they were genuinely scarce.

And, you know, it was always hard to say how many there were out there, of course, and some would always kind of appear out of addicts. But you knew that those old cards were rare cards. and because of their scarcity, they could actually be valuable. Now, that is very different from the cards that were being produced in modern times, okay? And this was a big problem and a big feeder of the bubble was sort of the mentality that people had going into this hobby. People were buying and collecting cards in the 1980s that were being produced at that time, but they were applying kind of this vintage mindset to it. People were collecting, you know, a Don Mattingly rookie card in 1984 and thinking of it kind of in the Honest Wagner terms.

And so you had these baseball card manufacturers that were essentially printing money. You know, they were rolling these cards out. And nobody really thought about how there was no way to know how much was being produced and whether this stuff would ever be scarce. And in fact, it was like printing money and the card makers were printing obscene numbers of them. So before we started the recording, I was talking to Tracy, and I said the two things that I think are going to be very relevant from this episode to understanding bubbles are A, the role that price guides had in priming the pump, and B, the explosion of supply that happened in the 80s and 90s to match demand, which is, of course, something that we see in other bubbles. Supply always ends up swamping the bubble. So you've already hit on both of them. really dive into those. Let's start with the role of the Beckett. You might even say the Beckett

magazine was the Bloomberg terminal of prices. What did it do? How did it? So I remember I would look and I would say, oh, I have this card from, you know, 1987, like a Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card or something, or maybe there's 89. I don't remember. And then every month, I would look and see how much the price had moved up and down, up a nickel, up a quarter, 50 cents, down a bit. How were those prices collected by the magazine on a monthly basis? How reliable were they? And then B, what did, how did the existence of that price guide, the fact that I could look it up, end up changing collector behavior? So the methodology, you may not be surprised to learn, was actually pretty murky. I'm not. Hard to know exactly how they came up with the figures. Originally,

it was based on surveys with dealers and collectors who are kind of in the know. And, you know, in Beckett's defense, you know, early on, I think a lot of people thought of this as a public service, right? Right now, you know, in this day and age, it's very easy for me to know what my Don Mattingly rookie card is actually worth. I can put it on eBay, and in seven days I'm going to have a pretty good handle on what the actual market value is. Back then, you know, it wasn't so easy to know. You know, I think a lot of collectors felt isolated. And so the price guide kind of like gave you a benchmark to go by. But where the price guide was really dangerous was, in my opinion, just generally popularizing this idea of baseball cards as investments, right?

I can say, you know, as a nine-year-olds, you know, we were carrying the Beckett Price Guide around in school in our backpack. Same. And, you know, that was how we made our trades. And it's kind of crazy to think of children as doing that. But, you know, the price guide had helped make even children think of these cards as. commodities, which of course is always kind of, you know, in retrospect was a pretty clear sign of dangers ahead. Canadian women are looking for more.

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Okay, so you have the price guide. You have this narrative that's starting to filter out that baseball cards make sense as an investment. Talk to us about the, I guess, the sort of cottage industry that sprang up around it. Because I'm assuming, as with most bubbles, you did get a whole ecosystem kind of building and feeding up on this baseball card phenomenon. Yeah, absolutely. So for many, many years, for decades, there was only one company really making baseball cards, and that was Tops, the most famous brand. They essentially had a monopoly on this for decades. They had an agreement with the Baseball Players Union and Major League Baseball, and they were structured in a way that basically shut out any competitors. It wasn't until around 1980 that they finally lost an antitrust case on that, which opened the door for other cars. card makers to come in. And they certainly flooded in at that point. It wasn't long before a whole bunch of these new card manufacturers jumped into the fray. And a lot of different groups had kind of their own interests in seeing more product kind of flood into the market. You know,

one was the baseball players union and also Major League Baseball. You know, they had these licensing deals with the card companies. If you ink more deals, you're going to get more money. The league's going to get more money and the player is going to get more money. So they had their own reason to want to see more cards printed. And, you know, dealers had their own part in it too. The more stuff they could sell to people, the better. And of course, you know, the demand for this stuff was surging. So you would think that with all these companies piling in and all of many, many more cards being printed that, you know, people would start to see that something was off here, but the demand just surged so much you had new collectors pouring in.

You know, in the 1980s, it was, I would say, highly unusual if a nine-year-old boy wasn't collecting baseball cards. So, you know, obviously we want to talk about how the, you know, the bubble crashed, because that's important. But before we get to the crash, let's just talk about the crazy stuff that happened. What to you, when you go back and look at that period when it was unusual for a nine-year-old boy not to be collecting cards and all these new entrants came into the market and people started treating cards as money, what are some really fun stories of just like pure over-the-top extravagance that in retrospect we can look back on to say like, geez, this was obviously a bubble waiting to crash? I would point to a few things. You know, one would be the infamous Billy Ripkin error card.

Joe, are you familiar with that? I am indeed familiar with that card. Can you explain it, please? How much of a family podcast is this? Well, it is a family podcast, but basically there was, so Cal Ripkin's younger brother who never really amounted too much, there was that. They called them error cards. Do you want to explain what an error card is, Dave?

Yeah, so an error card is basically when a card was printed and there's a mistake on it somewhere and the manufacturer didn't catch it in time. So the card gets out. You know, usually this is like, you know, the stats are wrong or the guys wearing, you know, an old uniform or something like that. But in Billy Ripkin's case, it was a lot worse. Yeah, they had a, he had like a typical pose was a picture of a baseball player holding a bat on their shoulder, like just sort of holding it up. Right. And he had a foul phrase that is not safe for saying on the air, certainly not safe for nine-year-old boys to read, written on the bottom of his bat. And so as soon as they caught that mistake, they obviously pulled that.

But, of course, everybody wanted the few that were out there. Yeah, so this was a huge embarrassment for the company that printed at Fleer. And they really bungled kind of the response. They didn't know what to do. they tried blotting out the expletive and reprinting it, and then they scribbled it out and others. And it turned out there ended up being like six different versions of this error card, and it kind of only served to feed the frenzy more.

And I mean, I remember this was like the buzz on the playground back then was the Billy Ripkin card. And it was just, you know, you really enjoyed it as this illicit thing as a kid. But what's crazy is how value. those got in a very short time. They were selling for well over $100 in many cases, just because this was a card that had a bat that had an expletive on it. You know, that that was a sign of kind of the weirdness going on that something like that could be fetching so much money. And, you know, for me, it was just kind of little things that, that, you know, you should have

seen that that could have told you what was going on. You know, one being how people were stockpiling cards and not opening them, right? This lake kind of goes against the very idea of collecting. You're supposed to open the packs and, like, see if you got your favorite player and try to assemble your team. People, myself included, were just buying this stuff and, like, putting it in the closet as if it was, like, you know, going to accrue value forever and ever as this, like, unopened artifact.

And, you know, dealers were, dealers told me, like, we were storing this stuff in our basement like it was cardboard gold. Dave, I wanted to ask you about this because, of course, okay, so people are collecting cards because they think they're going to grow in value. But you also have this tinge of gambling there, right? Because you buy a pack of cards and you never know what's going to be inside of it. And one of the, you know, you could in theory hit the jackpot. It's a bit like buying a lottery ticket.

So how much did that feed into the craze? Wait, I got to tell a story here. Sorry, it's a real quick story, but it's exactly what this is about. All right. It's perfect story. So my friends and I actually did this. We bought a box of unopened 1989 Don Ross cards. That's another one of these new ones that came into the market.

And we're like, we're not going to open them. I don't know what we were thinking. But then we're like, well, let's just open one pack just to see if we got the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. Because we're just going to open one pack. And then we're going to leave the other one sealed for like future or whatever. And so we did that. And not only did we get the Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card, we also got the Bobby Baneer rookie card in the same one. So it's totally exactly what you say, Tracy. It was totally that gambling thing. Like, let's just do it won. It's like opening, scratching off a lottery ticket. And incidentally we won. Incidentally lost because we lost. I don't know where that card is now. But you nailed the mentality of the gambling thing is totally what I was thinking.

Isn't it great that you have these cards that started as tobacco advertisements and then slowly taught children how to gamble and make speculative investments? Absolutely. The stories from the 1880s in the press are kind of amazing about, you know, little kids hanging out outside smoke shops, basically badgering people for the cards in their cigarette packs. And, I mean, truly, not joking, it really served to introduce kids to tobacco. So, you know, there is this idea that. that cards were always this kind of wholesome thing. I'm like always trying to poke holes in that kind of nostalgia for these things because they've really, you know, they've always been about money, whether it was the money for the collectors or money for the manufacturers who were rolling them out. I had no idea how dark of a turn this episode was going to take. Let's talk about the crash. So, you know, you talked about the buildup, the price guides, treating them as money, the gambling.

what was the tipping point? When did it all, when was the peak? What year was the peak and what sort of was the sign that it was sort of coming to an end? I think the peak in sales when you actually look at numbers was probably around 1991 or 1992. But most people, and myself included, like to point to 1994 as the year when things started really going down. And that was, of course, the year that there was a baseball strike. You had a big labor dispute between the players and the owners. The season got sidelined.

And so you had that coinciding with people. You had people really disenchanted with the game because of the dispute that was going on, coinciding with people also kind of starting to realize that this stuff is actually just cardboard. And that maybe it was actually way overprinted. So people are really starting to see that because it's inescapable then. I mean, the volume of cards that they were printing and the sheer number of sets that were out there, it was really dizzying. And, you know, one interesting part of this, you know, when you get into monopolies here,

was when all these different card makers were able to come into the market, and look, I'm all for the free market here. But it created a lot of confusion. And you had kids like me, all of a sudden there's like, there's a half dozen companies and there's 30 different sets. You kind of started to lose the common language of collecting, right? Because the whole idea of collecting is that and trading is that we're kind of working with the same cards here, right?

Like if I'm trying to collect the Yankees team that tops rolled out, my buddy down the street needs to be collecting the same set of cards. And so that element got lost and the hobby just got really confusing for kids just because there was frankly like so much crap out there. And so, you know, it was really in the early 90s when that hit a peak and it, unfortunately, for the hobby, really coincided with this labor dispute. And that's when we see, you know, a very precipitous drop off in sales after that. Another interesting dimension here, now that you bring it up in terms of the changing nature of cards from when it went to a monopoly to, you know, sort of the early 90s, if you go back and

look at, you know, those 70s and 80s cards, they're all just kind of on like a rough, fairly cheap cardboard. By the time like 92, 93, the level of sort of like how much was being invested in the design of the car, they were all like super glossy. Some of them had like gold or like, you know, leaf on them to sort of make them pretend like you couldn't counter-proof them. Like it was just, They just became like these sort of like luxury cards in of themselves, this sort of attempt to, I guess, just sort of manufacture collectibility from day one. Like they really just changed. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way of putting it.

And, you know, the company upper deck is kind of the best example of that. This was a company that sprang up in the late 80s out of this idea of cards explicitly being something you collect as investments. They made these really fancy cards on heavy cardboard stock. They had the holograms on them. They sprung for really good photographs. And they, you know, doubled or quadrupled the price of what you would normally expect to pay for a baseball card pack. And people ended up buying them anyway. And a lot of this, you know, and we see signs of it here is that really, in my opinion,

the huge mistake that card makers, you know, commit here is they really start catering to adults, right? You know, tops at one point I found in one of their 10Ks around this time. explicitly said, like, we are, you know, we are making this stuff for adults as well as children. That is really not how you want to be approaching this if you're in this for the long term, because those adults are not going to be around forever. And so that was, I think, a big mistake on their part was starting to cater to people who were older and had disposable income to throw on this when really the lifeblood over the decades was always children, children, children.

Wait, I have a sort of off-the-wall question. If the bubble started to burst or burst around 1994, there was something else that was happening then, which was the rise of the Internet and the rise, I guess, of, you know, transparency. And I think, did eBay exist in 94? I can't remember. But in theory, you had a sort of, yeah, you had an online platform where people could, for instance, talk about the pricing information of baseball cards. Do you think that played into it at all?

It may have, I think, a bigger problem, you know, for the industry when you talk in terms of, of like, evolving technology is just at a time when they were losing kids, you had the internet rise, you had video games become that much more amazing. And so you had all this stuff really starting to compete for children's attention on a much greater level. And it became, I think, harder for, you know, card makers to say to kids, you know, in this day and age, in modern times say, hey, here's a pack of cardboard, you know, go have fun with it. And that, you know, that created a problem that to this day, they're still trying to dig their way out. Yeah, before we go, Dave, I was actually just going to ask you exactly

that. You know, in terms of, you know, a competing thing, video games, Nintendo's and stuff, really sort of probably helped crush my interest in cards because those, you know, playing video games are way more fun. But I was just going to ask you, what is the state of the market today? Are there still, who's still producing cards? It's still primarily tops. They are still around. And to their credit, they're trying to do some inventive stuff now. You know, they are still printing cards and they have them tied to, you know, an online app that functions a lot like fantasy baseball and so kids, you know, have this online element to it. You know, their sales on the baseball card front are still, you know, I would say a fraction

of what they were, you know, many, many years ago back during the boom. So, you know, they still have a lot of work to do if they ever hope to get back to where they were. But, you know, I think they are, you know, to their credit, trying to reach kids again in a way that for a lot of years the card makers had kind of written off and were increasingly only devoted to these these older guys who had who had money to throw around but of course you know they're not going to be around forever and you know i think one of the problems that's going to linger for a long time is that when you lose a generation of collectors with something like this it

becomes harder to to get people back and to get the children of those of those collectors you lost i mean i was just talking with with our producer here zach who was just a few years younger than me. And we were talking about what we were going to talk about here. And he said, oh, I didn't know that there was a baseball card bubble because he was seven years or so, eight years or so younger than me. And so he had completely missed the fat. Of course, he knew about like beanie babies and pogs and that sort of thing. But when you lose a generation of collectors, it was, you know, for a long time, it was, you know, fathers turned their sons onto baseball cards. Older brothers turned their younger brothers onto baseball cards. So, you know, when you have this

big generation that missed out on it. I think you're trying to dig out of a bigger hole. Does that mean there's no chance that the market could ever recover? Because, I mean, we are in the midst of a little bit of a nostalgia boom. And what's more nostalgic, really, than kids collecting cards that depict the players of America's national pastime? I mean, cards have been so resilient for 140-odd years that I think there's no reason they're not going to be around for a really long time. I also think it's important to kind of clarify that there's really two markets here. There's the market of new stuff being made that we're talking about right now,

like companies like tops are producing still each year, that has been, you know, a struggling business for, you know, two decades now. But the separate market, the earlier one we were talking about of vintage cards, of the Honus Wagner's and such, that market has been a bull market for 40, 50 years now. It is still going strong because that stuff is still very rare and because there's a lot of older guys, millionaires, who are willing to throw serious money after that stuff. So that market has remained exceptionally strong. And if you were involved in that early and if you made some smart moves, you know, that could very well have made you a rich person now. But that is a very different market from this overglutted modern market of way overproduced cards.

that me and Joe came up in. Well, Dave, it was absolutely awesome to talk to you. I swear, you know, maybe we should meet for coffee sometime just so we could talk old baseball card stories. Trade cards. But, you know, you talked about trade stories. But I feel really dumb now because I did all the dumb things back then. I was just like everybody else thinking that these. We all did.

I just feel really stupid. That's the problem. But I'm glad to find out that I am not alone and really appreciate you coming on. I learned quite a bit. Look, man, I get an email like every three days from some guy around our age asking me what his cards are worth. And so I'm breaking bad news to people all the time. So you're used to me. We're all in the same boat.

So there's that. Awesome stuff. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, guys. So, Tracy, I kind of want to go on eBay and start buying a bunch of baseball cards now. What happened to your old baseball cards? Do you remember? That's a really good question.

I know my dad has some storage, some boxes in storage somewhere from when I was a kid. So now I kind of got to figure out where those are and go get them. Some of them might be somewhere. They might be recoverable. Yeah. I mean, I think the amazing thing is we all kind of have stories from our childhood of similar things, whether it's baseball cards or, in my case, Magic the Gathering cards, or pogs or beanie babies.

Again, it's just amazing how often this pattern of behavior is repeated throughout history. There's so many relevant lessons here for other things. So obviously we talked about the role of price guides. That's kind of clear. But although it's interesting, too, the idea we should do an episode just on pricing because it's interesting and how prices are derived. because, you know, we got these magazines as kids and it would say, oh, your card is worth $5. But we never questioned how that price was arrived at, whether we could get that price if we actually wanted to sell our cards.

There's all sorts of interesting stuff just with the collection of pricing. Also interesting this idea of like there really being two baseball card markets, the current market that just sort of got overturned and overproduced and that collapsed. and then the true vintage market from when there was actual scarcity and how that has been, as he said, in a two-decade bull market sort of unfazed by the crash in the other part. Yeah, it almost speaks to a truism of bubbles, I guess, which is that as people cotton on to the fact that this is going on and as they start to participate in it, you get that boom in supply and then inevitably the bubble will eventually come crashing down, right? Yeah, I remember before our bubble series, it might have been. even been like a year ago. Remember we talked to that professor at Harvard about his paper on the five or six characteristics of all stock market bubbles. And the premium, and that was one of the things that I really took away from that, the premium that stock investors pay for new issues,

new IPOs versus legacy ones. And then, of course, because investors pay that premium, then the IPO market booms and the supply, you know, swamps demand and that helps to kill it. But that's really sort of definitional. And I think, you know, if we look at even the bubbles that we've talked about in this series, Florida real estate being example, you know, suddenly people just buying the swamp land in the middle of nowhere. The market always finds a way to create the supply when there's adequate demand for it. Yeah. Hey, hey, Joe, what's the secret to riding a bubble successfully? Is this going to be timing? Oh, yeah. That's a good one, actually.

Thank you. I've been saving that one. Speaking of timing, how about we ended here? Yeah, all right, let's do it. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at The Stallwork. And I'm Tracy Alloway. I'm on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. And you can follow Dave Jamison on Twitter at Jamison. and you can follow our producer Sarah Patterson on Twitter at Sarah Pat with two teas.

Thanks for listening. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from heads of state to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts.