Is Everything Becoming an Asset?

A first-edition Pokémon card sold for $16.49 million in February 2026. Not a rare painting, not a piece of property, but a piece of card stock featuring a cartoon mouse, graded and authenticated like a diamond. In the same few months, the amount of money flowing through prediction markets, platforms where people bet on the outcome of real-world events rather than the performance of a company, roughly quintupled. Across an increasingly wide range of everyday objects and activities, from trainers to trading cards to the outcome of football matches, more people are treating them as things to invest in rather than simply things to use or enjoy.

Is this a positive development, a genuine widening of access to markets and asset classes that used to be reserved for the wealthy or the specialist? Or is it a symptom of something less comfortable, where speculation is quietly replacing the patient, long-term saving that used to be the foundation of financial security.

The clearest evidence of this shift comes from prediction markets, which have gone from a niche curiosity to a genuinely large financial industry in under a year. Combined monthly trading volume across the two biggest platforms, Kalshi and Polymarket, rose from under $5 billion in September 2025 to around $24 billion by April 2026, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from The Block. To put that in context, that figure already exceeds the roughly $14 billion wagered each month through every legal sportsbook in the United States combined.

What makes this growth different from a passing fad is where it is happening. In March 2025, Robinhood, an app used primarily for everyday stock trading and saving, partnered with Kalshi to bring prediction markets directly to its 27 million funded brokerage accounts, according to research from TRM Labs. Trading tied to the Super Bowl alone generated more than $1 billion in volume on the platform. Speculation is no longer confined to specialist apps that people seek out deliberately. It now sits inside the same interface people use to manage their everyday savings and investments, a single tab away from a stocks and shares account rather than a separate decision entirely.

Trading cards tell a strikingly similar story, even though the objects themselves could not be more different. What used to be a hobby built on nostalgia and collecting has developed the infrastructure of a formal financial market. Grading services authenticate and rate the condition of individual cards, auction houses track and publish sale prices, and websites like Card Ladder and PriceCharting now function as something close to a stock ticker for cardboard. A first-edition Base Set Charizard in the highest grade condition currently trades for somewhere between $168,000 and $170,000, following a record sale of $550,000 at Heritage Auctions in December 2025. 

Estimates of the total market size vary enormously depending on which analyst you ask, ranging from roughly $9 billion to over $50 billion, which is itself telling. When a market has grown so quickly that even specialists cannot agree on its scale, that is usually a sign something structural has changed rather than simply a hobby growing in popularity.

What links prediction markets and trading cards, despite having nothing else in common, is that both have acquired the tools that used to be exclusive to formal investing. Real-time pricing, authentication, easy resale and published indices used to be the preserve of stocks, bonds and property. Now they exist for football outcomes and cartoon characters too.

Part of the explanation is straightforwardly financial. For much of the past five years, savers in both the UK and US have watched inflation quietly erode the value of money sitting in ordinary savings accounts. According to research from Finder UK, inflation exceeded the average UK cash ISA rate in 51 of the past 60 months, meaning savers lost real value on their money roughly 85 per cent of the time. There have been modest improvements this year, but it follows a long stretch in which keeping money in a savings account felt like a losing proposition.

The behavioural and structural changes matter just as much. Trading cards used to be hard to sell quickly at a fair price, because a buyer could never be fully sure of a card’s condition or whether it was genuine. Grading services solved that by standardising and verifying both, turning cards into something that can be priced, tracked and sold as easily as a share.

Prediction market platforms have made speculation feel as frictionless as checking a savings balance, arriving through apps people already trust rather than requiring a deliberate trip to a specialist platform. 

Price transparency and easy access to formerly niche asset classes represent democratisation, opening up markets and investment behaviour that used to require capital, connections or specialist knowledge most people simply did not have. There is also a more troubling reading, in which the line between considered, long-term investing and short-term speculation has become harder for ordinary users to see, precisely because the platforms offering both now look and feel identical.

A 2026 survey of UK retail investors by J.P. Morgan Personal Investing found that risk appetite has risen meaningfully year on year, with younger investors reporting the highest confidence in future returns of any age group. For a generation with a longer investment horizon than their parents or grandparents, a higher tolerance for risk is not inherently a problem, and early exposure to a wide range of asset classes, whether that is cryptocurrency, prediction markets or alternative collectibles, can be a legitimate part of building financial literacy and long-term wealth. 

A January 2026 survey by OKX found that 40 per cent of Gen Z respondents in the United States planned to increase their crypto trading over the coming year, nearly four times the proportion of baby boomers who said the same, with younger respondents citing far higher trust in these platforms than older generations extend to traditional banks.

This can also be seen as a major warning sign. One 2026 study found that among Gen Z investors participating in crypto, prediction markets or sports betting, roughly seven in ten said they were doing so specifically because they felt behind on their financial goals. 

This suggests that for a meaningful share of younger people, this is not simply enthusiasm for new asset classes or a rational diversification strategy. It looks more like a response to genuine financial pressure, rising housing costs, stagnant wages relative to living costs and a sense that traditional, patient saving is too slow to close a gap that already feels insurmountable. Treated that way, speculation stops being a supplement to saving and starts functioning as a substitute for it, which carries a very different kind of risk. Prediction markets and volatile collectibles do not offer the steady, compounding growth that makes long-term investing effective, and a strategy built around trying to catch up quickly is far more likely to produce large losses than the wealth it is meant to deliver.

For a lot of people, engaging in trading cards or prediction markets are a legitimate and even enjoyable part of a wider financial life. The more important question is what it means when a generation that feels priced out of traditional routes to wealth starts treating speculation as a plausible way to catch up. It is increasingly the accessible option in a way patient investing is not, arriving through the same apps, with the same ease, and often with the same language of opportunity attached. 

Until saving and compounding growth itself feels like it offers a realistic path forward, this trend is unlikely to slow down. The danger for those chasing a shortcut is that the assets most easily reached this way are also among the most volatile, meaning the gap they are trying to close could just as easily widen.

Prediction market: a platform where users buy and sell contracts tied to the outcome of a real-world event, such as an election or a sports result, with the contract’s price moving to reflect the perceived likelihood of that outcome happening.

Real return: the actual growth in the value of money once inflation has been accounted for. A savings account paying 4 per cent interest during a year of 3 per cent inflation delivers a real return of only around 1 per cent.

Liquidity: how easily an asset can be bought or sold without affecting its price. Cash is highly liquid; a house is not. Trading cards and prediction market contracts have become far more liquid in recent years thanks to grading, authentication and resale platforms.

Speculation: taking on financial risk in the hope of a short-term price movement, as distinct from investment, which typically involves a longer time horizon and a focus on an asset’s underlying value or income.

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• “Kalshi and Polymarket trading volumes dramatically increase since mid-2025” — Pew Research Center — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/05/27/trading-volume-on-prediction-markets-has-soared-in-recent-months/
• “How Prediction Markets Scaled to $21B in Monthly Volume in 2026” — TRM Labs — https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/how-prediction-markets-scaled-to-usd-21b-in-monthly-volume-in-2026
• “Investing in Pokémon Cards in 2026: The Complete Guide” — PokéItem — https://www.pokeitem.fr/en/blog/investing-in-pokemon-cards-2026-complete-guide

• “What is the average savings interest rate in the UK?” — Finder UK — https://www.finder.com/uk/savings-accounts/inflation-vs-savings
• “Younger investors are more bullish than older generations for 2026” — J.P. Morgan Personal Investing — https://www.personalinvesting.jpmorgan.com/insights/younger-investors-are-more-bullish
• “Survey reveals Gen Z isn’t waiting for boomers as crypto age gap widens” — TheStreet — https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/personal-finance/survey-reveals-gen-z-isnt-waiting-for-boomers-as-crypto-age-gap-widens
• “Over 70% of Gen Z’s Participate in Crypto, Prediction Markets Since Traditional Wealth Paths Seem Out of Reach” — BitKE — https://bitcoinke.io/2026/03/gen-z-participation-in-crypto-prediction-markets/

Featured Image: Trading cards – https://picryl.com/media/a-guest-readies-his-cards-while-playing-a-trading-card-8dd915