I can speak from experience - for a while, I was struck by the eBay bug and was buying and selling various toys on that website as a side hobby. What you say is true - for every big win you get, you're going to take losses or barely break even on four or five others. Buying shit up and overspending is easy. Trying to get rid of it? Not so much.
Ik I already sperged about pokemon tcg earlier in the thread, but this brings up another topic relating to it. For those who don't know collectibles specifically tcg's and even more specifically pokemon tcg has been blowing up this last year (I'm talking 600% increase in prices no joke). This has led to a lot of the people in the scene trying to treat pokemon cards as stonks, but really the only comparable card in that category is charizard. Every card will naturally increase in price over time, but that would require you to hold it for a significant amount of time(like 5 plus years) to see a significant return normally.
Of course man children can't comprehend this and try to flip cards on the regular. They don't understand the concept of holding long term, and since they only bought the card for the stonks and not out of genuine interest they feel a pressure to sell it shortly after buying it(typically within the first 6 months). Depending on the card and market they either loose money or straight up can't find a buyer, seeing as most flippers are man children they typically only buy cards with a high popularity and not neccesarily high rarity, though occasionally you see them buying some random Japanese promo no one really cares about but is actually genuinely rare and so has some perceived value. Inevitably they get stuck with the hot potatoe and have to sell low and eat their losses.
This happens a lot with the modern sealed market, dudes buy a booster box as an " investment piece". This wouldn't be such a bad idea if literally half the people buying boxes weren't doing the exact same thing, and the boxes actually were limited and not printed to oblivion.
There are people who are successful in selling cards, but its typically people with an actual strategy outside of stonks, or those who had a genuine interest and just accumulated an excess of valuable cards by pure accident. Full disclosure I do sell cards, but mostly as a method to acquire other cards I like. #1 rule in collectibles buy what you like, as soon as you start treating it as pure stonks you loose your connection to the market and get salty if you can't actually sell your stonk cards.
Actually a great example of this type of behavior is in mtg, theres a YouTube channel called alpha investments, he's probably the most successful public figure in the mtg market. The dude gets letters all the time from people about how they were investing in sealed product, but had to sell it all before getting any serious stonks because they didn't have the capital to hold $100 booster boxes more than 3 years
. Or alternatively the magic cards they've sunk $50,000 into over the last 5 years have collapsed to a cumulative $10,000 because wizards reprinted them(magic cards value mostly comes from playability no one gives a fuck how rare a card is if its ass in the game).
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