Ken Goldin: making a million from a child’s hobby

Ken Goldin’s career began when, aged 12, he swapped his toy cars for a baseball-card collection. He turned the hobby into a multimillion-dollar business – and now the market is going wild.

Ken Goldin
(Image credit: © Patrick Semansky/AP/Shutterstock)

Ken Goldin has been selling sports trading cards and other memorabilia for four decades and his company, Goldin Auctions, is known by some as “the Sotheby’s of sports”. But even he has been taken aback by the sector’s red-hot boom this year. “There’s never been a time like this in the history of the business,” he told CNN Business in February, shortly after a card of basketball star Michael Jordan, as a rookie player, sold for a record $738,000, having more than tripled in price in a matter of weeks. Since then, things have become even crazier. Goldin reckons his “little company running on 2002 software” is on course to make $500m in sales this year. “I would bet that for every person who wanted a Jordan rookie card in 2019, there’s 100 [now].”

Rummaging around in the loft

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.