Who am I?

👍

❤️

Community

collectorsmd

6 h

Daily Reflection: How “Survivorship Bias” Can Warp Collecting

Published March 09, 2026 | By Conor M, Director Of Partnerships, Collectors MD

The other day I came across a cute video of a kid at a card show asking an influencer if he could borrow $10. The kid promised to pay the influencer back after he invested in cards. Fast forward a bit, and it turns out the kid succeeded. He doubled his money and repaid the influencer with 10% interest.

That influencer, to his credit, let the kid keep the money. It was a sweet gesture, and it performed very well on YouTube. At the time I write this the video has nearly 700K likes, and it was posted about a month ago.

There are a few things to unpack here, but the big one is survivorship bias and how social media algorithms constantly push the winners to the top while burying the countless losses no one ever talks about. And that makes sense. We all want to see the one-of-one pull or someone make a 500% profit from a smart flip.

The stories that rise to the top are almost always the wins. The massive flips. The miracle pulls. The overnight successes. What we rarely see are the hidden losses; the boxes that went cold, the cards that never rebounded, or the moments when the gamble simply didn’t pay off. Over time, that distorted highlight reel can start to reshape what we believe to be the norm.

During WWII, the planes that returned from battle were the only ones engineers could study, so the visible bullet holes told an incomplete story. The aircrafts that never made it back carried the damage that mattered most. When it comes to collecting or investing, the same distortion happens. We see the wins that survived long enough to be shared, while the losses quietly disappear from view.

This can quietly distort how we interpret success. The more experienced you are in collecting (and in life), the easier survivorship bias is to spot. But if you’re young and impressionable, this can be a big problem.

My news feed recently has been pushing stories about Logan Paul’s $16.5M Pokémon card sale and Kevin O’Leary’s new diamond-encrusted necklace that contains a Jordan & Kobe Dual Logoman card Mr. Wonderful himself values at $20M. When headlines like that pop up in my feed, the FOMO sets in and before I know it I’m on eBay browsing cards, trying to convince myself there’s a “deal” waiting to be found.

Survivorship bias alone is misleading enough. But when you mix that in with the typical collector mindset, breaker hype, and the frictionless nature of buying, you have a recipe for disaster.

For those of you who don’t know what the collector mindset is, let me fill you in with my own. My inner monologue usually goes something like this: “If that guy [on social media] can do it, I can probably do it better. I see patterns that no one else sees, so this one CANNOT FAIL”. But man, those Ja Morant cards really didn’t pan out the way I thought they would. Maybe there’s still hope?

Grabbing the right card at the right time is an awesome feeling when you get it right, but it can feel excruciatingly painful when you get it wrong. Our brains are wired to chase that awesome feeling and find ways to justify those failures. The “if only”. The “maybe it will come back”. Or the old classic: “you can’t win ‘em all”.

What makes matters even worse is that losses hurt twice as much as gains, according to decades of behavioral economic theory. For more, check out the works of Daniel Kahneman or Richard Thaler. So even if we do somehow get back to even, our brains still don’t feel fully satisfied.

To put this in real terms, to feel “whole” after a $200 loss, we need to somehow find a way to flip that into a $200 gain. WTF?! That can be a hugely damaging cycle if you don’t see the writing on the wall early and take the appropriate steps to address it.

Somewhere along the way, the numbers stop making sense.

My advice for addressing the madness is pretty basic: slow down, take breaks, and don’t bury your losers. Keep them visible. Make your biggest loss the background of your phone. Get creative. There is no shame. We’ve all been there.

So the next time you see a video or read an article about a grail pull or a monster flip, take a minute to remind yourself that you aren’t seeing the L’s it took to get them there. You’re only seeing the W’s.

Survivorship bias is everywhere, and if you’re going to collect with intention, it’s a crucial concept to understand.

#CollectorsMD
When the only stories we see are the winners, it becomes dangerously easy to forget how many losses it took to get there.

—
Follow us on Instagram: @collectorsmd
Subscribe to our Newsletter & Support Group
Join The Conversation On Mantel
Read More Daily Reflections