PSA Lawsuit: Antitrust Claims, Collectors Response, and FTC Push

The PSA lawsuit is a federal antitrust class action filed in April 2026 accusing Collectors Holdings, the parent of Professional Sports Authenticator, of illegally monopolizing the trading card grading market by buying its two closest rivals, SGC and Beckett Grading Services. The case, Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, Inc. et al., is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California before Judge John W. Holcomb, and Collectors is now trying to push it out of court and into private arbitration.¹

What the Lawsuit Alleges

Plaintiff Michael Rasmussen filed the complaint on April 14, 2026, represented by Daniel J. Mogin and Timothy Z. LaComb of Mogin Law LLP.² The core theory is straightforward: Collectors bought SGC in February 2024 and announced its acquisition of Beckett in December 2025 to eliminate competition, and the combined brands now control roughly 80% of card grading volume, according to data from the tracking service GemRate. PSA alone graded over 19 million cards in 2025. The only remaining major independent grader, CGC Cards, handled about 4.9 million, roughly 18% of the market.³

With that share, the complaint says, Collectors can raise prices, slow turnaround times, and suppress competitors without meaningful market discipline. It points to a 20% price increase at SGC after acquisition and a sharp drop in SGC submission volume as evidence.¹

Vertical integration is the other pillar. Collectors doesn’t just grade cards. It also owns Card Ladder, the pricing analytics platform used across the hobby, facilitates card sales on eBay, and supplies repack vendors. Congressman Pat Ryan has described the resulting structure as creating potential for “market manipulation and unfair self-dealing.”⁴

What Happened to SGC After Collectors Bought It

The SGC acquisition is the factual anchor of the case. Rather than run SGC at its previous scale, Collectors repositioned it as a “boutique” brand focused on vintage cards. Ryan Hoge, president of the grading business unit, said the goal was to “right-size” SGC back to volume levels from its 2017–2019 pre-pandemic era.⁵

SGC’s longtime president Peter Steinberg resigned in July 2025. Hoge took over the brand. A “significant amount” of SGC staff shifted to PSA grading operations, and SGC’s Boca Raton, Florida, facility began supplementing PSA’s work.⁵ By September 2025, SGC graded roughly 60,000 cards, a 49% drop from August alone, making it the only major grading service to record a year-over-year volume decline that month.⁶

PSA’s Price Increases

The pricing changes at PSA fed directly into the lawsuit’s timing. On February 10, 2026, PSA raised prices by $5.00 per card across several service tiers, including Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus, Value Max, and Regular. The Bulk TCG rate, previously $18.99 per card, rose to $24.99 after being consolidated into the standard Bulk tier. Turnaround times for Value Plus, Value Max, and Regular grew by five days.⁷

Hoge described the increases as an effort to “tamp down on a little bit of the demand,” acknowledging submissions had “outpaced our ability to scale up our grading capacity.”⁷ That same rationale, capacity chasing demand, is now the heart of Collectors’ defense.

How Collectors Is Fighting Back

On June 8, 2026, Collectors filed two motions that could end the case before discovery begins.

The first is a motion to dismiss. Collectors argues the complaint fails to establish a plausible connection between the acquisitions and any price increases or slower service. Rising prices and longer waits, the company says, reflect explosive demand and capacity constraints in a growing market, not anticompetitive conduct. The defense characterizes the plaintiff’s reasoning as a logical fallacy: prices going up after the acquisitions doesn’t mean the acquisitions caused the increase. Collectors also notes the complaint doesn’t allege it shut down the acquired companies, fired graders, or prevented CGC from expanding.⁸

The company also challenges Rasmussen’s standing. It says he doesn’t specify what service levels he used, what he paid, or concrete evidence of price inflation, and it argues he cannot challenge the Beckett acquisition at all because his only recorded PSA submission occurred before that deal was announced. On the plaintiff’s request that a court force Collectors to sell off SGC and Beckett, the defense calls the demand excessive, arguing operations are already integrated and that Rasmussen waited too long to challenge the SGC deal, which closed more than two years before the suit was filed.⁹

The second motion may matter more. Collectors filed a motion to compel arbitration, arguing Rasmussen is bound by the Collectors User Agreement, which contains both an arbitration clause and a class action waiver. He had 30 days to opt out of arbitration, the company says, and did not. Collectors goes further, arguing that an arbitrator, not the federal judge, should decide whether the antitrust claims even fall within the agreement’s scope.⁸ If that motion succeeds, the case moves into private arbitration and the class action piece goes away.

What Happens Next

Judge Holcomb has set a hearing on both motions for September 11, 2026. The court is expected to take up arbitration first, because a ruling for Collectors on that issue would make the motion to dismiss unnecessary.¹ The September ruling will effectively decide whether the case continues as a public federal class action or gets resolved individually behind closed doors.

Collectors has publicly maintained that its three grading brands remain competitors. In a January 2026 interview, Hoge said PSA, SGC, and Beckett each keep their own operations, technology teams, grading standards, and scales. He noted PSA now grades up to 100,000 cards per day, up from 15,000 five years earlier, with over 3,000 employees across at least eight international locations.³

The Parallel FTC Push

The lawsuit isn’t the only pressure on Collectors. In December 2025, New York Congressman Pat Ryan sent a formal letter to FTC Chair Andrew N. Ferguson asking the commission to open an antitrust investigation, citing potential violations of Section 7 of the Clayton Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act.¹⁰

Ryan flagged the unusual structure of the Beckett deal. Beckett was first acquired in late 2024 by an entity called Collēctīvus Holdings, backed by $250 million in private equity. Less than a year later, Collēctīvus sold Beckett to Collectors. Ryan asked the FTC to investigate whether Collēctīvus operated as a “pass-through entity designed to evade regulatory scrutiny,” effectively a shell to sidestep merger review that a direct Collectors purchase might have required.¹⁰ With Beckett folded in, Collectors’ brands would control roughly 83% of grading volume, leaving CGC Cards as the only meaningful independent competitor at about 17%.¹¹

As of mid-2026, there is no public indication the FTC has opened an investigation or responded to Ryan’s letter.

1
Athlon Sports. PSA Antitrust Lawsuit Motion to Dismiss
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Law360. Trading Card Grading Deals Spark Antitrust Claims
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The New York Times / The Athletic. PSA SGC Beckett Collectors Grading
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Pat Ryan – U.S. House of Representatives. Congressman Pat Ryan Demands FTC Investigation Into Collectors Holdings
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Yahoo Sports. SGC Transition to Boutique Grading Brand
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cllct. SGC September Grading Volume Its Lowest Since July 2022
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Sports Illustrated. PSA Increasing Card Grading Prices and Turnaround Times
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AOL. Collectors Holdings Just Asked Federal Court to Dismiss Antitrust Case
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Value Added Resource. PSA Collectors Pushes Back on Antitrust Suit
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Pat Ryan – U.S. House of Representatives. Collectors Holdings Letter to FTC
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KY3. New York Congressman Asks for Investigation Into Potential Monopoly in Trading Card Grading