In mid-December, Collectors announced that it had acquired Beckett. Collectors is the company behind the grading service PSA while Beckett has its own grading service.

Congressman Pat Ryan has demanded the FTC investigate the acquisition calling it an “attempt to monopolize” the trading card grading market.

In the press release, Congressman Ryan has said that Collectors has consolidated 80% of the grading volume, leaving only on significant independent as a competitor. Along with a vertical integration, controls on grading capacity, pricing, and even purchasing and selling graded cards, there’s a severe conflict of interest.

He has called on the Commission to investigate:

• Monopolization: Whether Collectors acquired SGC and Beckett specifically to eliminate competition, and whether internal documents reveal a deliberate strategy of monopolization.
• Serial Acquisition Pattern: Whether Collectors’ systematic roll-up strategy violates Section 5 of the FTC Act as conduct that inherently produces the cumulative harms the antitrust laws were designed to prevent.
• Regulatory Evasion: Whether Collēctīvus Holdings functioned as a pass-through entity to evade merger scrutiny, and the extent of Collectors’ involvement in the 2024 acquisition of Beckett.
• Good-Faith Representations: Whether the post-acquisition marginalization of SGC was contrary to representations made at the time of the merger, and if those actions warrant a court-ordered divestiture or unwinding of the deal.
• Erosion of Competition: How the elimination of independent rivals has directly impacted consumer pricing, service quality, and turnaround times across the industry.
• Price and Policy Coordination: What safeguards, if any, prevent Collectors from coordinating pricing, grading standards, and competitive behavior across its three nominally “independent” brands.
• Barriers to Entry: What structural barriers now prevent new competitors from entering the market, specifically regarding the control of the limited labor pool of professional graders.
• Market Manipulation: How vertical integration — controlling the grading process, the pricing data through CardLadder, and the marketplace itself — creates unique opportunities for market manipulation and unfair self-dealing.

You can read Congressman Ryan’s press release here and letter to the FTC here.