When Collectors Holdings — the parent company of PSA — announced on December 15, 2025 that it was acquiring Beckett, the reaction inside the hobby wasn't shock so much as recognition. The deal closed a pattern that had been building for years: PSA in 2021, SGC in February 2024, and now Beckett/BGS. Put those three together and, by trade estimates, one company controls north of 80% of U.S. card-grading volume. On the so-called 'Iconic 100' list of the most significant graded cards, Collectors' brands account for 98.9% of graded examples.
What turned that concentration from hobby gossip into a legal and regulatory problem was what came next. In April 2026, a federal antitrust class action landed. In June, the defendants filed their opening motions to make it go away. And on September 11, 2026, a judge in the Central District of California will hold the first hearing that could shape whether any of this actually gets litigated on the merits. This piece maps the concentration, walks the litigation and regulatory timelines, and — without pretending to know the outcome — works through what a forced divestiture versus a status-quo win would actually mean for what you pay to slab a card.
The concentration map: PSA → SGC → Beckett
The market-share numbers here come from the plaintiff's complaint, so treat them as the plaintiff's framing rather than adjudicated fact. But they're the clearest picture available of the pre-acquisition landscape. According to the complaint, before the roll-up the split ran roughly: PSA around 72%, CGC around 18%, SGC around 5%, and BGS (Beckett) around 3%. Fold SGC and Beckett into PSA's parent and Collectors lands at approximately 80% of grading volume, with CGC standing as the last major independent grader.
Scale matters here because grading is a genuinely large market now, not a niche. Total industry graded volume exceeded 26 million cards in 2025. That is the pie one company now takes the majority of.
CGC's position is the part collectors should watch most closely. It grew roughly 121% year-over-year in 2025 — about 4.92 million cards — landing at an estimated 18.4% overall share and around 25% of the trading-card-game (TCG) market. That surge was driven largely by the Pokémon boom and, by many accounts, by demand for an independent alternative as PSA turnaround and pricing pressures mounted. A fast-growing lone independent is a very different competitive check than a shrinking one, and both sides of this dispute know it.
The lawsuit: Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings
The case is Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, Inc. et al., No. 8:26-cv-00897, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California the week of April 14–15, 2026. Plaintiff's counsel are Daniel J. Mogin and Timothy Z. LaComb of Mogin Law LLP. The named defendants are Collectors Holdings, PSA, SGC, and Beckett. Bloomberg Law and Value Added Resource have the fullest reporting on the filing.
The legal theory rests on two federal statutes: Section 7 of the Clayton Act, which targets acquisitions whose effect 'may be substantially to lessen competition,' and Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which addresses monopolization. The requested remedy is aggressive — the complaint asks the court to force divestiture of both SGC and Beckett, effectively unwinding two of the three acquisitions.
The harm theory leans heavily on what the complaint alleges happened after the SGC deal, treating it as a preview of what Beckett integration could bring. Per the complaint, following the SGC acquisition, SGC prices rose approximately 20%, turnaround times increased by as much as 400%, and assets were reallocated from SGC to PSA. It's worth being precise: these are allegations in a lawsuit, not findings by a court. But they're the factual spine of the plaintiff's argument that 'operate independently' promises don't survive contact with integration.
That framing matters because Collectors made similar representations again with Beckett. At announcement, the company stated that PSA and Beckett orders would process normally 'with no change in pricing as part of this acquisition,' and that acquired brands would remain independently operated. The lawsuit's entire premise is that the SGC precedent — first reported around the February 29, 2024 SGC deal — undercuts those assurances.
The procedural fork: dismiss, or send it to arbitration
On June 8, 2026, Collectors filed two motions, and understanding the difference between them is the key to reading this case.
The first is a motion to dismiss. Its core argument is that the complaint fails to plausibly connect the alleged price and turnaround changes to the acquisitions themselves — that correlation in a booming, capacity-strained market isn't the same as causation traceable to the mergers.
The second, and arguably more consequential, is a motion to compel arbitration and stay the case. The argument here has nothing to do with market share. Collectors contends that the plaintiff, Rasmussen, accepted the Collectors User Agreement when using its services, thereby agreeing to arbitrate disputes individually, waiving class claims, and — critically — that he did not opt out of arbitration within the 30-day window the agreement provides.
Both motions are set for a September 11, 2026 hearing before Judge John W. Holcomb. The sequencing is the whole story: the arbitration motion is expected to be decided first, and a defense win there could push the entire dispute out of federal court and into individual arbitration — potentially mooting the dismissal question and the antitrust merits along with it. In other words, a contract clause most submitters never read could determine whether the monopolization claims are ever heard in open court at all.
The regulatory track: Rep. Pat Ryan's FTC letter
Running parallel to — not inside — the class action is a regulatory push. On December 18, 2025 (released the following day), Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) sent a letter to FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson urging an investigation under Section 5 of the FTC Act.
The letter flags three things: the serial 'roll-up' strategy of acquiring one competitor after another; vertical-integration concerns, given that Collectors also owns the CardLadder analytics platform and the Goldin marketplace, creating potential conflicts across grading, pricing data, and sales; and a pointed question about whether a pass-through entity referred to as 'Collēctīvus' was used to structure a deal in a way that might evade merger scrutiny. Sports Collectors Daily independently confirmed the letter and its context.
An important framing point: a letter from a member of Congress is a request, not an enforcement action. The FTC is under no obligation to open a probe, and if it does, that process would run on its own timeline, separate from the Rasmussen litigation. But it does mean Collectors is facing pressure on two independent tracks at once.
What divestiture would actually do to grading prices
Here's where skepticism has to do real work, because the intuitive story — 'break up the monopoly and prices fall' — is messier than it looks. Consider three scenarios.
Scenario A: Forced divestiture. If the court ultimately ordered Collectors to unwind SGC and Beckett, the market would regain two independent-ish graders and, more importantly, CGC would gain leverage from operating in a less concentrated field. In theory, more competing submission tiers and turnaround options put downward pressure on pricing. In practice, an unwound SGC or Beckett would have to be rebuilt as a standalone operation — with its own capacity, staffing, and pricing power — and there's no guarantee its prices would snap back to pre-acquisition levels. Divestiture restores competitors; it does not automatically restore old price points.
Scenario B: Status-quo or arbitration win for Collectors. If the arbitration motion succeeds and the class action stalls, or if the case is dismissed, Collectors retains its consolidated position and the pricing power that comes with roughly 80% share. That's the outcome the complaint is trying to prevent, and it's the one where the SGC-precedent allegations — if they reflect a real pattern — would be most likely to repeat with Beckett.
Scenario C: The muddy middle. Most likely of all is something in between — a narrowed case, a partial settlement, behavioral commitments instead of structural divestiture, or an arbitration ruling that reshapes who can even bring these claims. None of those cleanly translate to lower submission costs.
And here's the nuance that should keep anyone from overrating 'independence' as a synonym for 'cheaper': CGC, the very independent whose survival anchors the pro-competition argument, has also raised its grading prices. The reporting on this is blunt — collectors are getting squeezed across the board. A market with more independent graders is healthier for competition and optionality, but 'independent' has not, in this cycle, reliably meant 'discount.' Rising costs appear to be an industry-wide condition of the grading boom, not solely a function of who owns whom.
Practical takeaways for submitters
Until the September 11 hearing, the honest answer to 'how does this end' is that no one knows — and anyone telling you they do is selling something. What you can actually do:
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Watch turnaround as closely as price. The complaint's most striking allegation isn't the ~20% price hike; it's the claimed turnaround increase of up to 400% post-SGC. For active submitters, service speed is a cost too.
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Read the tier pricing, not the headline. Grading costs move by service level and card value. Blanket 'no change in pricing' statements at the corporate level don't always map to the tier you actually use.
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Know your arbitration and opt-out terms. The entire procedural fight turns on the Collectors User Agreement — the class waiver and the 30-day opt-out window. If you submit through Collectors' brands, those terms govern your ability to bring or join claims, whatever the market outcome.
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Keep CGC on your radar as a competitive check, not a guaranteed bargain. Its growth is real and its independence matters for market structure — but it has raised prices too.
The concentration is a fact. The lawsuit is real and has cleared its filing stage. The remedy, the timeline, and the price impact are all genuinely unresolved, and the first meaningful test comes at a hearing that, as of this writing, hasn't happened yet.
Related reading
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They Banned a $3,000 Card That Can't Be Reprinted: Candelabra of Tawnos Leaves Legacy
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[39 Copies Per Buyer on a Common: The June 19 White Flare Buyout That Targeted the Cheap Cards on Purpose](/article/white-flare-buyout-cheap-cards-copies-per-buyer)
Sources
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Collectors to Acquire Beckett — official company announcement
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Led by PSA, Collectors corners even more of grading market by acquiring Beckett — cllct
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Collectors, PSA acquire card-grading rival SGC — Sports Collectors Digest
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[PSA Parent Collectors Holdings Faces Antitrust Lawsuit Over SGC, Beckett Acquisitions — Value Added Resource](https://www.valueaddedresource.net/psa-collectors-antitrust-lawsuit/)
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PSA Parent Collectors Pushes Back On Antitrust Suit — Value Added Resource
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Collectors Holdings Hit With Sports-Card Grading Monopoly Suit — Bloomberg Law
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Congressman Pat Ryan Demands FTC Investigation into Collectors Holdings — House press release
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Collectors Holdings Letter 12.18.25 (Rep. Pat Ryan to FTC Chair Ferguson) — PDF
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Congressman Calls for FTC to Investigate Collectors Holdings' Acquisitions — Sports Collectors Daily
Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed in our editorial workflow.
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