HoshinoWhy we built Hoshino
The trading-card market moves billions across borders — yet almost everyone still prices cards off a single country. We built Hoshino to show the whole world's price, and the gap between markets where the money is.
Operators, not spectators
Hoshino is built by a small team obsessed with market microstructure and arbitrage — people who spent years building trading and market-data systems, watching how professional markets price the same asset differently in different places. We're now pointing that lens at the multi-billion-dollar trading-card market, which behaves exactly like an inefficient global market: the same card clears at wildly different prices in Tokyo, New York, Shanghai and Seoul, and almost nobody can see across the gap.
Asia is our home market — and that's not a detail. It's where the deepest, least-visible card liquidity lives: Mercari and Snkrdunk in Japan, Xianyu and Dewu in China, Bunjang in Korea, Carousell across Southeast Asia. None of it has a clean public price feed. It's the market we live in, so we collect that sold data first-party instead of guessing at it — which is exactly what a US-only incumbent structurally can't do.
The mission
Give every collector and dealer the same cross-border price intelligence that institutions take for granted: honest, real sold-price data — never asking prices — and the spread between markets, in one place. Not a hopeful average from a single country. The actual number a card clears for in each market it sells in, and the gap you can act on, net of fees, shipping and FX.
We're early, and we say so. There's no wall of logos here and no fabricated testimonial page — inventing either would insult the exact dealers we built this for. What we have is the data spine, the workflow dealers actually use, and a refusal to show you a number we can't stand behind.
Four rules we won't trade away.
Sold prices over asking prices
An asking price is what a seller hopes for; a sold price is what a buyer actually paid. Only completed sales, recency-weighted, ever feed our number. When a card drops, our chart drops — we never scrub a decline to fake an uptrend.
The whole world, not one market
A card has a price in every market it sells in, not just the US. We show all seven regions side by side, then the gap between them — because the gap is where the money is, and it's exactly what single-market trackers can't show you.
No conflicts of interest
We don't own a marketplace and we don't grade cards. Nothing stops us telling you to buy the same card cheaper in Japan — or not to grade it at all. Our only product is the honest number and the spread, so that's the only thing we sell.
Ship the edge, not the hype
No fake scarcity, no countdown timers, no invented reviews. Every price carries its own last-updated timestamp so you know how fresh it is before you act. We'd rather flag a stale number than show you a confident wrong one.
The non-conflicted, cross-border layer
The big trackers can't follow you across borders — not because they couldn't build it, but because their business models won't let them. TCGplayer is owned by eBay; it can't route a buyer to a cheaper card in Japan. PSA is a grader; it will never tell you not to grade. Card Ladder sells a clean US index that messy Asian sold data would only dilute. Each is excellent at what it does, and structurally unable to show you the gap.
Hoshino sits in the space none of them can occupy: the neutral, cross-border layer that prices a card everywhere it actually sells and tells you which side of the spread to be on.
We're honest about what the moat is and isn't. The idea alone isn't defensible — anyone can say "track prices globally." The real moat is the depth of first-party Asian sold data, which compounds every day and can't be back-filled after the fact; the dealer workflow built around it; and focus — this is the only thing we do.
Check one card. See the whole world's price.
Scan a card and watch Hoshino price it across seven regions, net of every fee — then decide. Free to start, no credit card.