lou_fine

Well, if you are talking about CGC 9.8 graded copies of what are otherwise common BA books, YES there was a definite crash in prices here. Due mostly to the fact that these graded collectibles, but otherwise common in all other grades below 9.8, was really nothing more than a huge speculative bubble of its own. It didn't take the marketplace very long to figure out that you could artificially manipulate already HG copies of many of these books into this so-called 9.8 investment quality grade without disclosing what had been done to the books.

Where are you located? As research has shown, capital gains alone in equities will top real estate over time, and when you add dividends it is not close. You can use leverage for equities as well with investment loans. I made a nice return with leverage from 2010 - 2015 (I chickened out and exited the loan way too early due to rate hike fears). However, all it takes to buy or sell equities now is a minute or two - that type of liquidity is the key. Real estate works on an almost generational basis for the big price gains for the most part. From what I can tell having dabbled in it and in discussions with more seasoned investors, it is the 3 - 5 year hot market that you need to sell into and then wait for 10ish years after that to buy in again during the long plateau/pull back. We built our house in 2004 and it has more than doubled in value, but putting that same amount into key comics or the stock market would have netted a much better return. Investing in a portfolio of the bigger SA and BA Marvel keys would have netted a 6 - 10X (or better return) in pretty much any condition, which is much better than gains in real estate. As I tell my wife, If I had held onto my keys from back then instead of selling over time, I would be retiring early. Hey neighbour, located on the west worst coast or the hippie left coast of your glorious country. I imagine I could have used investment loans to bankroll some comic book purchases, but never gave it any thought since I always considered comics to be a luxury and a hobby for me which meant using only excess disposable money to buy them. Guess we can't all be as smart as Dave who used some of the credit cards bring passed around to help finance his purchases of the Mile High Action's when he first came out from dental school. I guess banks liked to catch them when they are young and about to have a promising career. As for equity investments, have you so quickly forgotten all about Bre-X and Nortel? With respect to real estate, how about a nothing special house on the west side of the city being sold for $3.2M in 2014 and then flipped 3 or 4 times until it gets resold for $7.6M in 2016. Real tough on the younger generation here when you can't even buy a dilapidated shack ready for tear down for less than 7 figures even on the poor side of town here. And now you've got the average housing affordability index in the city running at close to 90% of average annual household income when it should be somewhere in the 30's. No wonder why the speculators are now targeting the more affordable condo market, but also not good news as evident by increases of 30+% a year which is going to make them approach the 7-figure mark very soon. With respect to the comic books though, I am just glad I held onto them as opposed to selling them off over the years. Unfortunately, I've got absolutely no idea where most of these more recent books are (like my Hulk 181), as I simply had the bad habit of filing my books in order of purchase, as opposed to filing them in order of title. I always say this, but I must go through and look for them one of these days now that they are actually worth something.

+1 Yes, I'll take the original 'Tec 31 over the poor man's Batman 227 version any time of the day. Except for the fact that I would never be able to purchase a copy of one in today's still red hot pre-Robin 'Tec marketplace.

Wow indeed and it looks like you are not seeing things here: https://www.comicconnect.com/bookDetail.php?id=761861 And I thought that I was crazy to pay over guide at the time for the wall display copy that I had picked up at a local comic convention. Definitely the most that I had paid for a BA book at the time and more than what I had to pay for the Spidey 129 or the then red hot Adams Avengers 93 book which I was lucky enough to have brought a few years earlier.

It depends. I have found that my equities portfolio outperforms the real estate we dabble in from time to time (my wife still swears by real estate even though the financial statements say otherwise ). One big advantage of equities is that they are much more liquid than real estate - if you need to sell a property it may take months or even years in a down market. With equities, you can liquidate your position in seconds. From my experience, that is a huge differentiating factor between the asset classes. Heck, blue chip key comics are more liquid than real estate. I guess it really depends on your location. Unfortunately for me, it's pretty much game, set, and match for me as my better half has clearly won her side of the argument here. I used to always tell her that my books would eventually go up in value which they certainly did do, but definitely nowhere in comparison to what the real estate market here has done over the same time period. Especially when you can factor in the highly profitable concept of leverage when buying real estate, as opposed to having to pay the full 100% for a comic book. Yes, it might take time to sell property in a down market, but you can certainly sell it rather quickly (i.e. after just one showing) in an up market and usually with multiple competing offers all at over the original asking price. Throw in a bit of leverage and sad to say, but it's easy to get 100% returns in less than a year in a hot real estate market. So, if you are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be living in a hot property locale, although the red hot Hulk 181 might be able to keep pace, the other 99.9% of your comic book collection certainly will not even come close.

Well, I imagine the answer to this thread's title question must be pretty obvious since I have been away from the thread for only 2 months and it now has an additional 18 pages added to the last time I was here.

Absolutely love the deep bold colors on that cover, especially the blue contrasted against the red and yellow. Definitely looks like a keeper to me.

I doubt this was a record price. I'm sure there was a sale 2 years ago that trumped this hammer price. Back when it was 10k/point or so. I guess you would be referring to this CGC 4.5 graded copy that sold on CC for over $37K back in the spring of 2017 when those 3 big AF 15 auction results from that same auction seem to be the turning point that ignited the most recent AF 15 price explosion that took place last year: https://www.comicconnect.com/bookDetail.php?referral=EAlist&id=689896&title=AMAZINGFANTASY

And who in the heck is Kevin Michael McFadden that he gets a special designation on his books? Especially when somebody like Bob Overstreet never received any kind of designation for his collection of books.

You mean something like this Blue Bolt 105 with the classic si-fi and the usual damsel in distress cover by L.B. Cole: https://comics.ha.com/itm/golden-age-1938-1955-/blue-bolt-105-star-publications-1950-cgc-vf-75-off-white-to-white-pages/a/7189-91019.s?ic4=GalleryView-Thumbnail-071515 A highly underrated cover that was used as a frontispiece for one of the coffee table books (can't remember which one) on GA comic books. Certainly didn't have the same impact as the Suspense 3 frontispiece used for the Gerber Photo-Journals. Already at well over 4X condition guide and makes me wonder where this copy will finish up at?

Well, I was just reading that you should not be bringing any of your electronic equipment (i.e. cell phones, computers, iPads, etc) as U.S. Customs officials have the right to access them and go through all of their contents when you try to cross the border. Especially true if you happen to have direct equity investments in any of the cannabis companies or indirect investments through mutual funds that might own shares in a company that supports or facilitates (i.e. steel for construction, fertilizer, hydro electric utilities, etc.) the operation of a cannabis company. Would this not include anybody who owns mutual funds? Since cannabis is still considered to be an illegal controlled substance from the federal point of view in the U.S., you could be barred from ever entering the United States as you could be seen as aiding and abetting and hence profiteering from the proceeds of crime. Sounds like your usual typical Trump logic.

If you are referring to Heritage's usual annual market report for the price guide, it looks like Lon Allen and Barry Sandoval did not bother to submit one for this year's edition of the guide. In fact, it looks like there are fewer pages dedicated to the market reports this year, but still over 100 pages of them. No wonder why it took me almost the entire year to plow my way through all of those reports. Haven't really read many of the market reports yet, but the one that caught my eye was the one by Dr. Steven Kahn who appears to be a new advisor to the guide from the class of 2017. What caught my attention was a couple of sub-titles in his market report, namely "What To Do When It's Time To Pass On Your Collection" and also "How a Comic Book or Series Becomes Uncollectible". Definitely not the typical rah-rah cheer leading and hotly hyped market report that we are normally used to seeing from virtually all of the other Overstreet advisors. A much more down to earth take on your comic book collection. Shudder to think that as predictable as death and taxes, your loved ones will almost assuredly disposed of your collection lickety split just like that once you are gone. His take is that they barely tolerated it while you were living with them and may in fact, actually have a lot of pent up resentment towards your collection due to all of the time spent on the collection and not on the family. Finally......the day they've been waiting for!!! He also appears to be bang on with respect to most comic books collections. Yes, there is definite interest in the keys when it comes time to dispose of your collection. But how about the other 99+% of your comic book collection which you have spent decades carefully storing and lovingly taking care of. There just may not be as much interest (if any if fact) in them as what you were hoping for. I guess this is where the old axiom about making sure that "you love what you collect" comes into play.

Not sure if the submittors from Europe will be able to avoid the crippling shipping charges to the U.S. since I believe the London office is just a receiving office and all of the books will then have to be shipped out to Florida for actual grading or whatever services you want. So, this might be more of a double whammy from a shipping point of view because I am quite sure that they will simply shipped the books to Florida at your expense. It will not be like dropping the books off at a con and then having CGC bring them back to the office for no charge.

I would generally tend to agree with your point about relative pricing, but the only problem is that Overstreet does not do enough breakouts for many of the books in the guide, especially when it comes to the older books. For example, Suzie 51 has been going for big money the past few years and yet Overstreet still has it lumped in as part of the Suzie #50 - #55 standard valuation grouping.. He finally got around to breaking out Archie 50 (but not issue 46 yet) from the Archie #41 - #50 standard valuation run several years ago. Not sure how much of a help it was, but at least he's got the VF copies listing now valued at $1,030 as compared to the $256 it would have been valued at if it had not been broken out. Of course, in the real marketplace, VF- copies seems to be fetching in the $6K price range. Definitely not enough breakouts for many of the older books, and yet he seems to have so many issues broken out for negligible price differences when it comes to the more recent books. Go figure that.

Maybe, maybe not. You can tell from the thread that there isn't a lot of enthusiasm for this auction. Might lead folks to save their money for CL or CC, or a coming convention. Well, I took a quick look at the CC auction scheduled for late August and that auction also appears to be a bit light. Although there does appear to be a few books from the Nedor titles which usually don't seem to show up that often. Kind of surprising since I thought with their last Event Auction featuring the Second City Collection, they would have had a backlog of nice books for this next auction. Guess not and this is probably an indication that some of the nicer more in demand GA books are just not that easy to come by and we were just spoiled last year with all of the super nice and rare HTF books (eg. Centaur's and early Fox's) that did come out. Any idea if the Saturday portion of this upcoming Event Auction is like their version of the Heritage Saturday dump of their second rate books since they seem to have the same end time of 7:00 PM Saturday for all of their lots, instead of the usual consecutive ending times? Is this the first time that CC has had a Saturday portion since I don't remember them having one before?

I find it funny that Jaydog talks about Cerebus 1 as a niche book , and in the same breath can talk about his Del Otto variants as if they were gold bars. As a comic book collector, this is an absolute no-brainer between these two books and it wouldn't even be close.

I believe it would be worth a bit more than the $2,000 that poor old Chuck had to scrounge around and borrow in order to purchase the collection. The old lady must have thought she had found a live one in young senseless Chuck since somebody was actually willing to pay full cover price (20,000 times $0.10) for some old used books.

+1 I picked up my copy from the LCS earlier this morning. Definitely a far cry from the old days as he had only 10 copies of the DC cover version (8 HC & 2 SC) plus only 1 each for both the Apes and American Flagg HC cover versions.

Well, looks like a repeat from last year's Top 50 SA list with both Action 242 and TTA 13 at the front of the class once again, albeit with a smaller increase but still top of the class at 25%.

Picked up the Apes and Green Lantern/Flash Guides today. Both look really good in hand. 48th Edition! Where did the time go? Why in the world would you need 2 cover versions of the same book? I was originally planning to pick up the Apes version, but my better half said that she preferred the Green Lantern/Flash version as it was brighter and she at least knew who the characters were. I guess I also didn't really have much of a choice as my LCS had 10 copies of the DC cover version (8 HC and 2 SC) and only 1 HC each for the Apes and American Flagg cover versions. I remember back in the day when they used to order something like 50 copies. Definitely no longer the case here.

Well, I guess today's the day you are going to find out the answer to your question here. From Overstreet's Top 50 SA books, it looks like the answer for last year was Action 242 and Tales to Astonish 13, both with a 43% increase. And it looks like the SA winner from the year before that was Brave and Bold 25 with a 40% valuation increase at top of guide. Almost time to open up the envelope.

It does seem odd that those 2 books would not be noted trimmed while the rest were ? Assume they all came from the same volume (or maybe 2 volumes ) ?? Never could understand why the people who bound the books back in those days did not simply bind them with a larger cover so that the trimming of the books themselves would not have been necessary? That would have made a lot more sense to me and also made the job a lot easier and faster to complete.

I absolutely love the thick squarebound 100-page cardboard cover books ever since I saw a gorgeous copy of New Book of Comics 2 way back in the day. Not sure if there's any truth to the rumour that it's a lot harder to "mess around" with these thick cardboard cover books?

I would have love to get one with a Thanos cover. But somehow, this one just doesn't do it for me as it just seems a bit too simplistic. I would have much prefer one by Ron Lim in the same classic Thanos style like Silver Surfer 44 or even SS 34 (although less so for the SS 34). Surprisingly, I took the Hero Initiative Edition copy last year with the Deadpool cover by Liefeld since the cover artwork reminded me a bit of Gulacy's artwork on Master of Kung Fu which I really loved.

Wow, it's almost unbelievable that Heritage would treat you like this since I thought you was one of their high end customers. Maybe you should try one of the other auction houses like CC whereby I've heard that the consignors can work with them to ensure there are no other copies of that same book in any condition in the same auction. In fact, if it's a truly HTF in-demand title and if you are not in a hurry for your money, you can probably even schedule your book to ensure there are no other books from that entire run in the same auction. That way, there will be more eyeballs and hopefully dollars if your copy is the only one book from that in-demand run in the entire auction. Also interesting to note that Heritage took the safer route for themselves by dropping (or postponing) the 9.0 copy from the same auction, even though it might have been better for you as the 9.4 consignor if they had gone the other way. Especially in this day and age of record setting results in comic book auctions, it's not a bad idea to use other copies (especially slightly inferior copies) to "stage" your copy so that your book will potentially go for even bigger dollars when it does hit the auction block.