Site operator
Pokémon Demand Lab is operated by CHAPTERONE PRESS LTD, company number 16775136, with its registered office at 128 City Road, London, United Kingdom, EC1V 2NX. The website is free for use.
Research tool, not financial advice
Scores, prices, sentiment, forecasts and recommendations are estimates for research. They are not guarantees, valuations, offers or financial advice. Check the exact card, condition, sold evidence, fees and seller before acting.
Data limitations
External sources can be delayed, incomplete, corrected or unavailable. Demand Lab labels missing evidence and keeps the last saved snapshot where appropriate. A catalogue match does not prove authenticity or condition.
Open Research Search
The research search checks only fixed, public endpoints operated by Demand Lab, TCGdex, Bluesky, Reddit, Wikimedia and GitHub. It does not use paid APIs, visitor account cookies, personal access tokens or arbitrary user-supplied fetch URLs. Reddit results are limited to recent public posts, filtered for card relevance and treated as optional because the source may rate-limit requests. Results are discovery leads and cannot enter Advisor recommendations, grading decisions or model training until the existing identity and evidence gates verify them.
Recommendation ranks
Home ranks current collector attention using free public signals. AI Advisor uses public prices, grading value, sales activity, market trends and risk checks. A tested machine-learning model may contribute later after enough real results are available. These are independent research rankings, not official market rankings.
Market index
The Demand Lab Pokémon Card Index is an independent research index, not an official Pokémon or investment-market benchmark. Its historical base follows an equal-weight basket of 2,317 continuously observed raw card variants across ten sets, starting at 100 on 8 February 2024. The daily pulse adds a reproducible date-seeded random screen of up to 10,000 canonical English catalogue records, while usable live-price checks are counted separately. The basket uses public TCGCSV TCGplayer market-price archives. Extreme one-off movements are limited before averaging so a small number of cards cannot dominate the result.
Graded-market value methodology
The homepage figure is Demand Lab's independent modelled estimate for graded Pokémon cards across major grading companies. The model uses a 38–52 million slab population range, public grade- and era-based sold-price bands of $105–$152 per card, and a 5% deduction for possible crossovers, reholders, label corrections and duplicate population records. This produces a central estimate of $5.7bn and a wider $3.8bn–$7.5bn range as of 8 August 2026.
Population inputs are checked against the PSA Population Report and GemRate. Price bands use public sold-price guides including PriceCharting. The Pokémon Company's printed-card total is used only as a reasonableness check; it is not treated as market value.
No official or audited market capitalisation exists for physical Pokémon cards, so the range should be read as a research estimate rather than a precise valuation. Raw cards and sealed products are excluded because their surviving supply, condition and ownership cannot be counted reliably.
Data sources and credits
Card catalogue records and artwork use a resilient source chain: TCGdex, the Pokémon TCG API, and APITCG's open Pokémon dataset. Raw market prices and the index history use public data from TCGCSV and TCGplayer market-price fields. Historical price research may also use the MIT-licensed TCGdex price-history repository. Public collector discussion comes from the Bluesky public API; Collector Search may also return recent Reddit public RSS posts as optional research leads. Wider attention signals may use Wikimedia Pageviews; local text scoring uses VADER. Exchange-rate references use the Bank of England or the site's named free exchange-rate source. External providers own and control their data and services.
Source register
Demand Lab is powered by real public data, free APIs and open information from sources around the world. Free access does not guarantee that a source will remain available, complete or unchanged.
Intellectual property and affiliation
All card images, character artwork, names, logos and related marks are copyright or trademarks of their respective owners. They are displayed for identification, commentary and collector-market research. Catalogue records are supplied through the MIT-licensed TCGdex database.
Pokémon Demand Lab is an independent research website. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to Marvel, DC Comics, Lucasfilm, Star Wars, Nintendo, Creatures Inc., The Pokémon Company, or their respective parent companies and licensors.
Acceptable use
Do not attempt to bypass the private portfolio gate, overload data providers or use the site to publish unlawful, deceptive or infringing material.