Hi folks,
In about two months, I am going to launch a website that will allow users to speculate on Magic cards without actually buying them or shipping packages back and forth. For a small fee, you'll be able to lock in the price of a card that you think is going to go up (or down), and if you guess correctly, you'll be able to cash out for the difference between your locked-in price, and the current price. So the next time Kirblar says "Get your Mindshriekers now," and you want to get in on that action, but every store is already sold out of them, you'll still be able to speculate and possibly make some money out of it.
I think this is a badly needed service in the world of Magic: The Gathering finance. It's going to allow people to speculate on cards easier than ever before, and it will solve the problem of cards being sold out before you have a chance to get in on it. It will also make it much more financially viable to speculate, because your upfront investment will be much smaller, and you won't need to ship cards back and forth.
On top of all that, for the first time ever, you'll be able to speculate that a card is going to decrease in value, by locking in a Buylist Price.
If this service takes off, it could even help to regulate and stabilize the prices of cards in the long term, as artificial shortages should be much less likely.
I'm not going to deal in physical cards starting out, because I don't have the capital to invest in acquiring the necessary stock for that. At first it's going to be purely cash-driven. So keep that in mind.
My company is called MTG Futures. Although I have the domain name reserved (mtgfutures.com), the site isn't in place yet because it's still under construction.
It will be ready in about 2 months though, so if this is something you might be interested in, please PM me with your email address so I can put you on a mailing list, and when the time comes you'll be among the first to know. Or you can also PM me with any other questions you might have.
Thanks guys!