The Soto Trade Impact on Card Values
Juan Soto was just traded from the Padres to the Yankees. And, as usual, big news means big changes in card values.
There have been several big stories this baseball offseason, and one of them came to a conclusion yesterday as 3x All-Star Juan Soto was traded to the New York Yankess in a massive seven player deal.
As is usually the case when big news breaks, card values shift almost immediately.
Here’s a chart showing the average sale price of Soto’s 2018 Topps Update and 2018 Topps Chrome Update cards over the past seven days.1 I’ve added a pink line to highlight when the trade news officially broke.
As of the time I’m writing this, over the past 7 day period, the average sale price of Soto’s Topps card is up 37.5% and the sale price of his Chrome card is up 65%. That’s quite the jump. It appears there was a little build up on the 5th already, as the rumors heated up, and then the big jump after the news hit.
It wasn’t just the average sales price that jumped, it was the sales volume as well. Here’s a look at the total sales in dollars for December 1 through the 6th when the trade was announced.
On the 6th, there were 48 recorded sales of the Topps Update card and 24 recorded sales of the Topps Chrome Update. In the rest of December up to that point, there were 28 recorded sales of those cards combined.
That’s….a really big jump.
Charts are always fun for a geek like me, but this is really just basic stuff for the most part: big news means a spike in hype and a spike in hype means more buyers willing to pay more.