Alternative assets get compared to Bitcoin because Bitcoin is the benchmark for “something that did not exist as an investment twenty years ago.” By that measure, one of the better-performing alternatives of the last half-decade has been a stack of printed cardboard.
The index
CardTrack runs a trading card market index called the CardTrack 100. It is a valuable basket of the hundred most valuable trading cards across Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, One Piece, and Lorcana. It re-ranks those chain-linked cards monthly. Thus, the line reflects the actual top hundred at each point in time rather than today’s basket projected backward. History before 2026 is monthly, from PriceCharting sales; the recent daily detail is live TCGplayer near-mint pricing.
On 17 September 2026, the index printed an all-time high of 132.6. Its rolling 30-day return is +15.9 percent, and its one-year return is +36.6%. The maximum drawdown in the series was 30.2%, from December 2021 to November 2024. It’s worth reading twice: the “boom” everyone remembers from 2021 led to a three-year bear market that only fully recovered this year.
The five-year comparison
The site rebases each benchmark to the same $10,000 start in September 2021 and runs to July 2026. Market data for the benchmarks comes from Yahoo Finance.
- Gold: +132.5 percent, $10,000 to $23,254
- Pokémon top 100: +118.8 percent, $10,000 to $21,879
- S&P 100: +85.3 percent, $10,000 to $18,532
- Bitcoin: +37.1 percent, $10,000 to $13,712
- Magic top 100: −3.3 percent, $10,000 to $9,673
- Yu-Gi-Oh top 100: −61.1 percent, $10,000 to $3,890
Two things stand out. First, the window starts in September 2021, near Bitcoin’s prior cycle peak. So, nothing is inflating Bitcoin’s number. Second, “trading cards” is not one asset. Pokémon’s own top-100 sub-index sits at 276, up 176 percent from base; Yu-Gi-Oh’s sits at 38. Anyone who bought “cards” in 2021 as a category got very different outcomes depending on which game they bought.
What is actually in the basket
Graded vintage and a handful of modern chase cards dominate the Pokémon constituents. The Skyridge Charizard from 2003 is about $8,606 raw and $102,000 as a PSA 10. The Dragon Frontiers gold-star Charizard is $6,280 raw and $384,000 as a PSA 10. A 1999 Base Set Charizard is $550 raw and $29,995 graded perfect. The structural feature of this market is that a graded, perfect copy of a card is often worth 10 to 50 times the raw one. Besides, there is a fixed and shrinking supply of perfect copies.
The caveats a crypto reader will recognize
Liquidity is thin at the top. A $384,000 card trades a few times a year, so the index is marked to sparse sales, and the daily detail comes from asking prices rather than executed trades. There is no custody solution beyond a safe, no derivative market, and the grading companies are a single point of failure for the “perfect copy” premium. The index page carries a “not investment advice” line, and it means it.
But as a data series, it is unusually clean for a collectible: one methodology, one basket rule, five years of monthly history, and a live daily print. For anyone who has argued that Bitcoin is “digital collectibles,” the physical collectibles have had the better five years.
