"Everybody Eats Right Now": WAX Collect CEO Rich Vinhais on the Strongest Card Market in History, and Why That Is the Reason for Caution

NEW YORK, August 10, 2026. Rich Vinhais, CEO of WAX Collect, the InsurTech and specialty MGU focused exclusively on luxury assets and collectibles, today published "Everybody Eats Right Now," a long-form analysis of the trading card market. Vinhais wrote it after the WAX team spent five days at the 2026 National Sports Collectors Convention in Rosemont, Illinois.

The piece makes two arguments at once. The hobby has never been healthier. And the same mechanics that made it this healthy are why a correction, when it comes, will not look like the ten percent dip most people picture.

"The hobby has never been stronger," Vinhais writes. "That is not the argument against caution. That is the reason for it."

What WAX saw at The National

The National set its fourth straight attendance record: about 130,000 people over five days, 600 dealer tables and 500,000 square feet of convention floor. WAX leadership and its customer success team walked the hall and the after-hours scene around it, meeting dealers, partners, platform founders and collectors.

Three observations from the week anchor the article:

• Demand is outrunning supply. One dealer told Vinhais his biggest problem is not selling cards. It is sourcing enough of them.

• The show never closes. Every night the hotel lobby and business center became a second convention, with hundreds of people transacting past midnight.

• New money talks margin. A Formula One collectibles gathering in the same hotel roughly doubled its attendance in a year, and the conversation at its tables was spreads and comps, not cars and drivers.

WAX's own data points the same way. A growing share of clients who came to WAX for watches, art and handbags are now adding cards to their schedules. "They are not switching. They are widening," Vinhais writes, calling it the most bullish structural signal he can point to.

The argument: liquidity is not demand

The article opens with the case for awe. eBay sold $1.36 billion in sports card singles in the first half of 2026, the first time it has crossed a billion dollars in a single half. The major authenticators graded 26.8 million cards in 2025. Institutional capital has moved from buying cards to buying the infrastructure underneath them.

Then it follows the plumbing. Buying a card used to come with friction: list it, wait, pay a fee, ship it. Vinhais argues that each layer of that friction has been removed, by instant buybacks, by vaulting, and by lending against cards and sealed boxes. Each removal made the market more liquid, more efficient and more fragile.

"Every card in this market can find a bid," he writes. "Not every card can find an owner."

A worked example in the piece shows how sentiment, buyback levels, leverage and delayed grading supply could compound into a decline near 61 percent. Vinhais is explicit that this is not a forecast. It is an illustration of why the number is not ten. He draws the comparison to the watch market after 2022, where prices corrected sharply and the category itself came through intact.

He also says he wants a correction, an ordinary and survivable one, because that is how a market matures.

What the policies show

WAX Collect insures businesses across the hobby, including inventory, shipping and commercial coverage for dealers, shops, breakers and auction houses. Vinhais writes that the pattern in that book works as a leading indicator.

• The operators with staying power are insured, every one of them.

• Most entrants from the last three years are self-insuring, treating coverage as a tax on profit.

• Most losses happen when the item is out of the owner's hands: in transit, at a show, or out for authentication.

"The winners of this cycle will not be the sharpest buyers," Vinhais writes. "They will be the ones who built companies."

Guidance for three audiences

The article closes with advice for each group entering the market.

• Collectors: buy what you know, weigh when you buy as carefully as what you buy, value your collection at completed sales, and do not borrow against cardboard.

• Operators: ask whether you could carry your current inventory for eighteen months without selling a card. Bad collectibles rarely end a business. Bad capital structure does.

• Investors: diligence the operating discipline, not the category. The category will be fine.

Read the article

"Everybody Eats Right Now" is available in full on LinkedIn: Everybody Eats Right Now, by Richard Vinhais.