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On a recent episode of “The Ramsey Show,” a 27-year-old caller named Lisa told Dave Ramsey that her 35-year-old husband puts about 80% of his pay into Pokémon cards and calls the roughly $33,000 he has accumulated a “portfolio.” Ramsey answered from his address book. “I’ve met … tens of thousands of millionaires, and I’ve met hundreds of billionaires, and not a single Pokémon billionaire have I run into. Not a one,” he said. “Except maybe the guy that invented the whole thing.” The clip was posted to the show’s highlights channel on Oct. 5; the call itself aired in September.
Ramsey: Not a Portfolio but a Habit
The household details matter because they explain why the number is so large. Lisa said the couple keeps separate accounts, that her husband’s employer covers their housing, utilities, car, and gas, and that he has been buying for about two years. With someone else paying the fixed costs, the cards are where most of his money goes: $33,000 over roughly 24 months is about $1,375 a month. Ramsey, who recently told another caller to hold on to the cash rather than pay off a house, was blunt about the label. “It’s not an investment, and it’s not a portfolio. It’s a habit,” he said.
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He then widened it to the whole category. “The chances of you being in the collectibles business and actually making good money, whether it’s baseball cards, Pokémon cards, gold coins, rare coins, art … most people simply break even at best,” Ramsey said. “Beanie Babies are not an investment for your kids’ college fund. That’s a statement I made 30 years ago, and it has been proven to be very true.”
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The Calls Keep Coming
It is at least the third Pokémon call to reach the show in about 20 months, and the answer hasn’t changed. In January 2025, a caller named Kyle said he had hidden about $26,000 of debt from his wife, most of it from Pokémon cards he meant to flip; she filed for divorce, and Ramsey told him he had damaged “the same part of the brain” as an affair. In July 2026, a caller named Todd had a $13,426 credit card balance at 21% from cards he meant to flip, which Ramsey called “$13,426 of stupid.” On this tape, co-host George Kamel also referred back to an earlier caller, an 18-year-old with about $600,000 of cards. He has said versions of it for years, most recently about car debt.
Story Continues
The collectors’ responses also came up on the tape. Kamel, summarizing the argument he hears from card buyers, put it this way: “Look at the track record of Pokémon over time, and it’s better than the S&P 500.” That is testable, so Barchart tested it against a published index with a stated methodology and a downloadable history: the CardTrack 100, a value-weighted index of the 100 most valuable Pokémon cards, based at 100 on Sept. 1, 2021.
Over the husband’s two years, the cards win, and not narrowly. The index stood at 86.00 on Oct. 1, 2024, and at 245.79 on Oct. 15, 2026, a 186% gain. The S&P 500, measured by the SPY ETF’s (SPY) price on Barchart, went from $568.62 to $771.79 over the same dates, a 36% gain before dividends. Over five years, the cards still win, but by less: the index is up 146% from its September 2021 base, while the S&P 500 E-mini futures contract went from a 4,521.25 settlement on Sept. 1, 2021, to 7,791 on Oct. 15, 2026, a gain of 72%.
Caveats Eclipse Raw Numbers
Two caveats cut the finding down to size. First, the index is survivorship by construction: it holds whichever 100 cards are most valuable at each monthly re-ranking, prices them raw and near-mint rather than graded, and ignores grading fees, marketplace fees, and dealer spreads. Seventy-eight of the hundred are vintage cards from 1999 to 2010. A $33,000 collection assembled from retail product over two years is not that basket. Second, timing. The same index read 83.43 in September 2024, three years after its launch and 17% below where it started, and CardTrack puts its worst drawdown at 27% between September 2021 and January 2024. A buyer at the top of the 2021 boom waited three years to break even; Lisa’s husband bought near the low two years in.
Ramsey’s point was never that the chart goes down. It was about who gets rich, and on that the numbers side with him. The Pokémon Company, which prints the cards, reported net sales of 411 billion yen, about $2.9 billion, for the fiscal year ended February 2025, per figures in Japan’s official gazette reported by industry analyst Serkan Toto; its corporate site counts over 85 billion cards produced in total, roughly 10 billion of them in the year to March 2026. The index measures the price of the rarest hundred; the gazette measures where the money from the other 85 billion went. “Except maybe the guy that invented the whole thing” turns out to be the most defensible line on the tape.
On the date of publication, Caleb Naysmith did not directly have a position in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on Barchart.com
