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 turns out to depend on the first in a way we did not expect — and it flips completely once you go above €500.

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.

Expensive cards are roughly three to four times more likely to deliver a 50% gain inside two months than cards under €100. 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 stops improving above €100. There is no extra edge in buying a €1,000 card over a €150 one — if anything the €1000+ bracket is the worst of the expensive brackets at reaching +100%. 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. The result is not what we expected:

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 31 days instead of 94. 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.

At €500–1000 it inverts, hard. The cards that delivered the gain sold at one fifth the rate of the ones that did not (3.0 sales a month versus 16.5), on a book a third as deep, and would take 82 days to clear versus 36. Read that again, because it is the whole point of this article: in that bracket, the thing that made the price go up is the same thing that makes it hard to sell. A book with nine copies in it moves violently on a single purchase. There is nobody on the other side when you want to be the one selling.

Above €1,000 the distinction stops mattering because everything is illiquid — 4.5 versus 7.5 sales a month, both taking around 47 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 today — and the pattern 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.

Uta is the cautionary tale. On paper it is up 73% — nearly €1,500 per copy. In practice there is one copy listed on the entire market and half a sale a month. The "price" is whatever that single remaining seller is asking, and if you were holding one and listed it, you would be waiting months for one specific collector to appear. King is worse: up 58%, and at one sale a month its offer book needs 150 days to clear.

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 17-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 we just said those cards take 82 days to clear their 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. The two work together in this bracket and only in this bracket.
• Over €500, treat a big gain as a warning about the exit. Check the book depth specifically. Nine copies listed and three sales a month is a great chart and a terrible market. Ask yourself whether you are willing to hold for three months, because that is the realistic timeline.
• 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. 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. The €300–500 bracket is omitted from the liquidity table because only two cards in it regularly hit +50%, which is too few to report; the €1000+ "often" row rests on nine cards and is included only because it shows no difference — we would not quote it as evidence of an effect. 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. 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.