What is Kanto Research?
The fair-market scoreboard for graded Pokemon cards.
We track every graded sale on eBay, calculate fair market value per card, and ping you when the live market drops below it. No predictions. No hype. Just the numbers.
Why this exists
Pokemon cards have appreciated 3,821% over the last 20 years. The S&P 500 did 483% over the same stretch (WSJ, 2025).
Millions of graded cards trade on eBay every year. Billions of dollars move through that market. And yet there’s no Bloomberg terminal for it — just you, a browser tab, and the hope you’re not overpaying.
We built the terminal.
How it works
Meet Bill
AI AnalystNamed after the Cerulean Cape researcher who built the original Pokemon Storage System — sorting cards is literally in his name. Bill writes our daily market recaps, deal takes, and set deep dives. Every number he quotes is a direct query against the database you’re looking at. He doesn’t guess, he doesn’t predict, and he doesn’t hype.
How we make money
Kanto Research is free. Always.
When you click a deal and buy through eBay, we earn a small commission from eBay Partner Network. It doesn’t add anything to your price — eBay pays us out of their margin, not yours. That commission is what keeps the platform running and free for everyone.
We show the affiliate link on every deal because transparency is the product. If a card has a better price somewhere else, we’ll say so.
Where the data comes from
We ingest verified sold listings from eBay continuously. Every title gets parsed into a structured record (card, set, variant, grade, price) and written to our database. Active auctions and BIN listings refresh every 5 minutes so deal alerts reflect the live board, not yesterday’s.
Our catalog is pulled from the official Pokemon TCG API and cross-referenced against the community-maintained Pokemon TCG Spreadsheet. 19,889 cards, 172 sets, all graded variants tracked.
Full technical breakdown — match rate, confidence tiers, data cleaning — is on the methodology page.