The Daily Data - 4/12/21 - Squeeze?
Uncovering the REAL bottleneck of the Cool Cats Master Challenge
Quick housekeeping - Today is the LAST DAY that the tools on the Google Sheet and “The Daily Data” will be available to free subscribers. Make sure to upgrade to premium to maintain access! Also, I have updated the “Circulating Count” tool with Rel. 24 (pre-order), Rel. 27 (future stress test?), Holo Icon, and Rel. 28 (rebound). Top Shot did not provide official data for release 24, so I used averages based on evaluate.market and OTM data. Lastly, if you missed the first two editions of The Daily Data, here are the links: Compare Commons and Circulating Count.
The hot news of the weekend is centered around the Holo Icon drop, the legendary pack requirements, and the Certified Ballers showcase contest. There is definitely a lot to dive into here, which I plan on doing that later this week, but today I am going to walk people through the “Current Challenges” tool. I am going to show how we can use this tool to help predict who the REAL bottleneck will be for the Cool Cats Master Challenge.
Before we begin, it’s important to understand what a challenge bottleneck means, and how we can use it in our favor if we identify it early. I think a common assumption that people make is that the most expensive moment from a challenge will end up being the most “needed” moment (the bottleneck) towards the end of the challenge. The thought process is that people are more likely to wait to spend their money until the last possible moment.
During the Seeing Stars 2 challenge, Anthony Davis was the fourth most expensive moment for most of the challenge, but he ended up being the bottleneck on the final day. Here is a nice chart from Own The Moment that illustrates this (left side is entire challenge set, right side is Anthony Davis)
The reason Davis was the bottleneck, is because even though he wasn’t the most expensive, he was the player that the most people needed who were close to finishing the challenge. Luckily, OTM provides some great charts that help show this, so identifying AD last week was pretty simple.
Enter the Cool Cats Master Challenge (CCM), which is a 4-part (maybe more) challenge that has already spanned more than 3 months and does not have a set end date. This is the most complex challenge that Top Shot has ever created, so it’s important to do more than a cursory level overview for this one. Don’t worry I got you!
REAL Mint Count
We know that the goal is to find the most needed moment, but in order to do that we have to find the starting point. Using the mint count shown on the TS website is flawed, because it doesn’t account for numerous challenge dynamics. Let’s use Devin Booker as an example:
5000 (Starting Mint Count on TS Website)
- 425 moments in unopened packs
- 381 moments owned by people with more than 1 (duplicates)
- 1606 moments owned by people who have already collected 19/19 for the CCM
- 605 moments owned by people who have already collected 14+/19 for the CCM
= 2364 REAL Mint Count
Here is the full list of Cool Cats moments in ascending order of Real Mint Count. You can see that even though the numbers don’t match the TS website, the moments are still pretty aligned with whichever grouping they were released in.
Now that we have our starting point from a supply standpoint, let’s talk about how to determine what our demand is.
Needed vs. Listed
As I mentioned above, OTM does a great job breaking down how many of each player are needed in every tier of challenge completion. By clicking on their CCM link, we can quickly see that almost a third of the people who have collected 18 of the 19 Cool Cats moments still need Karl-Anthony Towns. I think it is best to use 14+/19 as a conservative metric to describe people who are likely to complete the CCM. This describes a group of collectors who have completed/collected 2 challenges, and have gone out of their way to purchase/pack 2 additional cool cats. Here is what the “Needed” chart looks like for every player with “% Needed” being a function of REAL Mint.
We immediately can see a couple of different things from this chart. First, since they are all at the bottom, Cool Cats 2 is the challenge that most CCM collectors have completed. If you are holding on to some CC2s and you don’t plan on completing the CCM, I would probably look to move on soon. The second thing that pops out is how profound the Luka Doncic bottleneck appears. This makes sense because he has the lowest Mint Count and is the most expensive, so people aren’t exactly chomping at the bit to pony up almost $2,000 for this one yet.
In order to really understand where the demand squeeze is going to happen, we also have to account for the number of moments listed for sale. When we do this, we want to make sure we exclude outlier listings such as the #2090 RJ Barrett listed for $250,000. I went with an arbitrary cutoff of 2.5X the current Lowest Ask, and counted up all of the current listings on the MP that fall under this mark for each moment. This helps us identify the supply that is within range during the late-challenge runup. Here is the chart sorted by squeeze percent (Need/List).
Once again, Luka really jumps off the page with a 300% squeeze percentage. When the squeeze number is over 100% this means that if all the people who are tracking to complete the challenge (14+/19) were to purchase that moment today, some would need to cross over the 2.5X Lowest Ask mark to do it. That’s some serious runup potential, but we know that’s not exactly how it’s going to work as we come to the end of a challenge.
Accounting for Undercutters
While these large squeeze numbers look good on paper, we know that as challenges come to an end people will try and offload their straggler moments if they don’t plan on completing. In addition, we can safely assume that everyone who owns a duplicate of one of these moments, will probably try and list it for sale before the challenge completes. Let’s see what the squeeze looks like if all current duplicates are listed under the 2.5X Lowest Ask mark.
These numbers help paint a better picture of how the market will react, but it still doesn’t account for people holding just one of these moments who want to hop in on the runup at the last minute. Maybe these people haven’t really been paying attention to the challenge or TS in a while, but when they see their moment running up, they will want to have a piece of the action.
I made an educated guess that the challenge rewards will be harder for people to give up on than the commons. I used a value equal to 4% of the Real Mint count for the rewards and 12% for the commons to help factor in these additional undercutters. I’ll admit that I completely made up these two numbers, but regardless of the assumption used, the results would all generally be the same. Here is the final chart accounting for all of the different assumptions.
Should I go and buy every Jokic Cool Cat?
While the numbers for Luka and Jokic look great in a vacuum, it’s really important to factor in a number of things before you decide on making an investment. Insert obligatory “I’m not your financial advisor, just your buddy pal, so use this for informational purposes only” statement here.
We have no idea when the Cool Cats Master Challenge will be announced. (Remember per the blog post, there are still 10 more cool cats that need to be distributed before the CCM is finalized)
Any of the remaining 10 cool cats could introduce a bottleneck even larger than what we already have with Luka and Jokic.
Prices can and will continue to fluctuate between now and the end of the challenge (ie. Jokic moving from $190 to $140 after the Holo Icon challenge announcement yesterday)
Since the Master Challenge could still be more than two months away, what potential “opportunity cost” are you losing out on by tying up your funds here. February 12th, 2021 seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?
For those of you who are a premium subscriber, you will have access to this chart for all future challenges. This will help you track how these squeeze percentages move daily.
If you are sticking on as a free subscriber, please be aware that this is the last daily email you will receive, moving forward all free content will be sent out weekly.