The $1.6 Billion Investor Betting Pokemon Cards Beat the Stock Market

Peter Levin spends his days as co-founder and managing director of Griffin Gaming Partners, a venture capital firm that Business Standard reports oversees more than $1.6 billion in gaming investments. Away from the office, Fortune profiled him this week as the owner of roughly 500,000 trading cards, including about 100,000 Pokemon cards and more than 25,000 comic books. He treats the collection as a real part of his portfolio, not a hobby he keeps separate from his job.

The case he makes for that is built on returns, not nostalgia. According to Fortune, Pokemon cards gained 3,821 percent in value between 2004 and 2025, compared with 483 percent for the S&P 500 over the same stretch. Levin frames that gap as the reason to treat cards as a genuine asset class rather than a side collection, especially with the global trading card market now estimated at $50 billion a year.

Individual sales back up the scale he is talking about. A Pikachu Illustrator card sold for $5.275 million in 2021 and changed hands again in February 2026 for about $16.5 million, a card that passed through Logan Paul's collection along the way. A first edition Charizard sold for $369,000 in 2020. Those are outlier prices for a tiny number of graded cards, but they are the reference points Levin points to when he argues the ceiling for this hobby keeps rising.

His stated reason for calling this a hedge is macroeconomic. Fortune reports Levin pointing to the United States' roughly $40 trillion national debt and 10 year Treasury yields approaching 5 percent as the backdrop for wanting assets outside the usual stock and bond mix. "If you can combine your passion with an investment strategy, why not?" he told Fortune. He also credits the hobby's staying power to something an index fund does not have: "There's a stickiness to it. There's a community to it."

Business Standard covered the more colorful version of the same pitch: Levin's prediction that Pokemon cards could work as an actual currency if the existing economic system ever collapsed. His reasoning leans on the franchise's global reach and on standardized grading from companies like PSA, which gives a stack of cards the kind of agreed upon pricing a barter economy would need. The article also notes a supply side wrinkle worth knowing: The Pokemon Company printed an estimated 10 billion cards last year, and it is scarcity created by grading and scalper activity, not a limited print run, that keeps the rare pulls valuable.

None of this comes from an index that tracks the hobby the way the S&P 500 tracks stocks, and Levin's numbers describe his own portfolio and his own six and seven figure comparisons, not a guarantee for a binder of commons and mid tier holos. A 55 year old fund manager who just attended his 31st Comic-Con has both the capital and the market access an average collector does not.

What the story is actually worth to a regular collector is less about chasing a $16 million Pikachu and more about what it signals: money that is used to running spreadsheets on gaming startups is now running the same spreadsheets on cardboard. That kind of attention tends to show up first in liquidity and pricing confidence for the graded, well known cards long before it touches the bulk of a set, which is worth keeping in mind the next time a headline calls the whole hobby an investment.