You Are Up 50%. Can You Actually Sell? We Measured Both Halves of the Trade

Every price analysis in this hobby — ours included — stops at the same place. The card went up 50%. Congratulations. What none of them tell you is the part that decides whether that 50% ever reaches your bank account: how long you then sit there with the card listed, waiting for somebody to buy it.

A gain you cannot exit is a number on a screen. So we measured both halves of the trade. First: if you buy a card today, how likely is it to reach +50%, and how long does that take? Second: once it gets there and you list it, how long until it actually sells?

The answer to the second question depends on the first, but mostly under €100, and not in the way the price tag suggests.

Half one: how often does a card reach +50%?

We took every card with a price on every day from 22 April to 13 July 2026, treated each of those days as a hypothetical purchase, and asked whether the card reached +50% (and +100%) within the following 60 days. Prices are the cheapest listed NM English copy, smoothed over 7 days so a single cheap listing vanishing for a day does not count as a 50% gain.

Cards at €100–300 were three and a half times more likely to deliver a 50% gain inside two months than cards under €100, and cards above €500 about two and a half times. That is the single clearest result in the dataset, and it matches what the character popularity study found from a different angle: the top of the market moves, the bulk of it does not.

Notice also that the rate does not keep improving with price. €100–300 is the best bracket, and €300–500 is barely better than buying under €100. The chance of doubling is highest at €100–300 and €500–1000 (7–8%) and falls back below 3% above €1,000. Whatever you are paying for at the very top, it is not a better chance of appreciation.

Half two: the exit nobody measures

Now the part that matters. For each card we took two numbers from the last 30 days: how many copies actually sold (detected sales, roughly 280,000 of them across the catalogue), and how many copies are currently listed. Divide one by the other and you get days to clear the book — how long the entire current queue of listings would take to sell at the recent rate. It is the closest thing to an honest answer to "if I list this today, what am I joining the back of?"

Then we split every card by whether it was one that regularly reached +50% in half one. Without EB02, this is what it shows:

Below €100, a rising price is a liquidity signal. The cards that regularly gained 50% sold three times as fast as the ones that did not, and cleared their offer book in 34 days instead of 91. Demand pushed the price up and demand is still there when you want out. This is the happy case, and it is where most collectors actually operate.

Between €100 and €300 the effect disappears entirely — 37.8 sales a month versus 41.3, which is noise. Price movement tells you nothing about your exit in this band.

Above €300 there are too few cards that regularly gained to split them out. Outside EB02, only two cards at €300–500, four at €500–1000 and four above €1,000 hit +50% on at least half their entry dates. So the table shows only the cards that did not. Those are more liquid than you might expect up to €1,000: around 24–30 sales a month, with the whole book clearing in about a month.

The first version of this article reported that at €500–1000 the relationship inverted, with gaining cards selling at a fifth of the rate. That came almost entirely from EB02 SSP Leaders: thin books of a few copies that jumped on single purchases. It is a real risk for those cards, but not a rule for the bracket.

Above €1,000 everything is slower: 10 sales a month on a book of 17, taking 40 days to clear. At that level you are not trading, you are holding an asset and hoping for a specific buyer.

What this looks like in real cards

Take the same period — 15 June to 11 September — and the difference is easy to see in individual cards. These all gained, but they are not the same trade at all:

Robin and Mihawk are real trades. You could have bought them, and 160-odd sales a month means you can leave with your gain inside a fortnight.

The Chopper Manga is the cautionary tale. On paper it is up 68%, about €1,800 per copy. In practice it sells seven or eight times a month against 17 copies listed, so a new listing joins a queue more than two months long. The Zoro DON!! more than doubled, and still needs 60 days to clear. The €27,000 Luffy Manga has five copies on the entire market: its "price" is whatever those five sellers are asking.

The Luffy OP11-118 row is the important counter-example, because it stops this from being a lazy rule. It is a €1,400 card doing 39.5 sales a month with a 15-day book. Expensive and liquid absolutely exists — you just have to check, rather than assume the price tag implies a market.

Half three: so you listed it. Now what?

Days-to-clear-book is a modelled number. We can also measure the real thing, because we record when a listing appears and when it disappears. Matching the two gives the actual lifetime of an offer: how long a specific seller's copy sat before somebody took it.

Taking every listing first seen between 1 and 15 August and following it to 11 September — so every one had at least four weeks to sell — 46.4% sold, at a median of 8 days. Among the ones that sold, a quarter went within 3 days and a quarter took longer than 14.

The sweet spot is unambiguous: €15–40 is the most liquid part of the market. More than half of those listings sold, and over a third went within a week. Cheap cards are the slow ones — only 6% of sub-€5 listings sold inside seven days, because nobody is in a hurry and sellers price them lazily.

There is one apparent contradiction worth being straight about. Expensive listings that sell, sell fast — a median of 3 days at €500–1000 — while a card like the Chopper Manga takes 68 days to clear its book. Both are true, and the reason is selection. We match a listing to its sale by seller and exact price, so this only captures copies that sold without the seller ever cutting the price. It measures correctly-priced listings. The ones that sat, got marked down and eventually moved are invisible to it, and at the top of the market those are the majority. Price a €700 card correctly and it goes in days; price it hopefully and you are in the nearly 60% that did not sell at all.

What to actually do with this

• Decide your exit before you buy, not after. Open the card page and look at detected sales per month next to the number of copies listed. Under roughly five sales a month, you do not have a position you can leave quickly at any price.
• Under €100, let the price trend guide you. A card that has been climbing is also the card that will sell fastest when you list it. This is the only bracket where we could show the two going together.
• Over €500, check the exit card by card. A big gain there does not predict a bad exit on its own, but individual cards can be very thin: five copies listed and five sales a month is a great chart and a difficult market. Be most careful with EB02 SSPs, where this was the norm. Ask yourself whether you are willing to hold for two or three months.
• If you want liquidity, buy €15–40. It is the only bracket where the majority of listings sell, and a third clear within a week.
• When you do list, price it right the first time. The data says a correctly-priced copy moves in days at almost any value. Optimistic pricing does not get you a higher exit, it gets you no exit.

The offer-book depth and sales velocity behind all of this sit on every card page, and they are what the Scarcity and Sales Velocity components of the Long-Term score are built from. If you want the cards where both halves line up, that is what Sell Signals and Portfolio alerts are for.

Methodology: 577,550 daily price rows covering 4,648 products from 22 April to 11 September 2026, and 279,769 detected sales from 14 June to 11 September 2026. Since the 16 September correction, every table except listing lifetimes excludes cards from Anime 25th Collection (EB02). The offer books in the liquidity and example tables were re-read on 16 September. Prices are the cheapest listed NM English copy on CardMarket in EUR, smoothed over 7 days. The +50% test pools every entry date from 22 April to 13 July with a 60-day follow-up window, so the same card contributes many overlapping observations — the percentages are shares of card-days, and the real confidence intervals are wider than the card counts suggest. "Often hit +50%" rows are omitted from the liquidity table above €300 because, without EB02, only two, four and four cards qualify — too few to report. Listing lifetimes match a new listing to a later sale by product, seller and exact price, which undercounts copies that sold after a price cut. We keep listing records for 30 days, so the original 1–15 August cohort could not be re-run without EB02. On the 17–24 August cohort, EB02 was 1.5% of new listings and removing it moved no price band by more than two percentage points, so the lifetime table is unchanged. Offer counts above €100 are unaffected by TCGGO's 50-offer page cap; below €100 roughly a quarter of cards hit it, so their books are deeper than shown. We only began storing daily book depth this week, so the depth figures here are a current snapshot rather than a historical average — a future version of this article will be able to measure it properly over time. Excludes fees and shipping. Historical analysis, not financial advice.