About
Card Research

Card Research is an independent research initiative studying price dispersion, market consolidation, and information asymmetry in the collectible trading card secondary market.

The project asks how the same card can carry very different prices across marketplaces, conditions, languages, and regions — and how consolidation of grading, marketplaces, and pricing data affects what collectors and vendors can see. Our companion tool, Card Prices, publishes the resulting U.S. and European pricing data for free.

Research Focus
What We Study
Market Consolidation
Collectors Holdings owns PSA, SGC, and Beckett, and its acquisitions are the subject of a pending antitrust class action. eBay owns TCGplayer and Goldin, and has itself been the target of an unsolicited ~$56B bid from GameStop. We study how these overlapping consolidations affect pricing transparency and data access.
Price Discovery
We measure price dispersion for identical cards across TCGplayer, eBay, PriceCharting, and Cardmarket (Europe), by condition, variant, and language. Next: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese marketplaces, and social commerce.
Data Infrastructure
An independent pricing pipeline that runs without privileged API access: ~596K cards across 67 catalogs, ~3.2M priced SKUs, 44M+ sale records, and a cross-platform identity graph linking each listing to one exact card variant.
Academic Publication
An IEEE paper is in preparation: "Toward Pricing Transparency in Collectible Trading Card Secondary Markets: Challenges in Cross-Platform Data Aggregation Under Market Consolidation."
Lead Researcher
Eric Schnelker
Eric Schnelker

Eric Schnelker is a student at Purdue University and holds Bachelor of Science degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Cybersecurity from The University of Tulsa.

A collector and vendor who works the secondary card market firsthand, he builds the pricing infrastructure, data pipelines, and research tools behind both Card Research and Card Prices. He also runs Game Enthusiasts LLC, a St. Louis-based trading card business.