• If you’re looking to make some investments, but don’t like boring financial crap, consider baseball cards.

• A Derek Jeter rookie card was recently auctioned off for $99,000. A signed LeBron James rookie card sold for $312,000 in 2016. And a Tom Brady rookie card recently sold for $250,000.

• And a 1948 George Mikan rookie card once sold for $403,664. That seems like a lot for something that looks like this.

• George Mikan actually looks like a guy who would be way too into baseball cards.

• ·He kind of reminds me of the Baseball Card Guy from Better Call Saul. Which reminds me of a pretty good reason not to become Baseball Card Guy.

• Because once you’re Baseball Card Guy, it’s way too easy for people to make the leap that you’re also a cobbler squatter.

• But I’ve never heard anyone who invests in celebrity bonds called a cobbler squatter. It almost never happens.

• Celebrity bonds are bonds backed by royalties from intellectual property. We’re talking music sales here. The way it works is this: an artist sells off the rights to their royalties in one big chunk to a bank. The bank then breaks that chunk into bonds that pay out later based on the royalties made off songs or album sales.

• The most famous celebrity bond was the Bowie Bond. In 1997, David Bowie received $55 million dollars from Prudential Insurance for royalties for the next 10 years for the 25 albums Bowie recorded prior to 1990.

• Sadly, no regular people got to buy Bowie Bonds. Prudential kept all the bonds. The $55 million was really more of a loan to Bowie backed by the promise of future royalties.

• Bowie used the $55 million to buy back some songs from a former manager. It’s rumored that he lost the songs in a card game along with $50, a case of Heineken, and Penny Lane.

• Stagnant record sales caused the Bowie Bonds to be downgraded to just one notch above Fidget Spinner Bonds in 2004.

• Sorry, did I say Fidget Spinner Bonds? I meant junk bonds.

• While Bowie bonds were rated just above junk, they paid out at a 7.9 % interest rate.

• Ashford and Simpson had a celebrity bond. It was solid. Solid as a rock.

• To be fair, celebrity bonds aren’t exactly taking over at the moment. Some guys tried to create a bond based on Eminem’s royalties that would be available for purchase by regular people.

• Chances are slim these bonds would be shady.

• The idea was that you wouldn’t lose your shirt in the moment. You would own it. You would never let it go!

• Sadly the guys trying to create the Eminem bonds (Royalty Flow) couldn’t make their plan come together. So until there’s a celebrity bond that’s actually available to working slobs, I guess I’ll have to invest in baseball cards for now, cobbler squatting stigma be damned.

• But what if, and I’m not saying that there’s any rationale basis for this, but what if, you could invest in rap lyrics? Not in the royalties from the sales, but the lyrics themselves? And their value was based on whether or not the lyrics stayed relevant...…………….

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