Hamlet

My definition of a key is pretty simple- when you find a run that has been cherry-picked, which books are missing? Those are the keys.

Yikes, there is an $850 sale now.

I think I've been clear that the actual bet itself won't show much. The time frame is too short and FP1 is a single book. I do think that it will be much more interesting to watch the group of Marvel keys I selected versus the S&P500 over a longer time frame. I think that as the years go by that will show the inherent advantage of investing in stocks over comics.

Fees aren't a part of the bet. unless you were the seller and netted $637.

I mostly put together the list to test the conventional wisdom that SA Marvels are a can't miss investment from here, which I disagree with strongly. The DC keys don't have that same conventional wisdom consensus. For that reason, I agree with you that they have a better chance of doing well as a investment.

The FP 9.6 on Comiclink sold for $708. It won't be in GPA, but its a data point that looks good against the $650 cost basis of this bet.

Another issue that muddles this is trying to figure out what percentage of the restored books on the census were sent in by owners that didn't know they were restored. I suspect that that is not a small number. How many people on these boards have gotten back the unexpected Purple Label?

Here is the thing. If someone is selling an AF15 in a non-trashed grade, they are going to make substantially more by getting it graded unless it is restored. Someone who knows what they are doing and is trying to maximize their sale price would not be selling an unrestored VG+ AF15 raw. So a raw AF15 for sale is more likely to have restoration than one in the wild that the owner has no interest in selling. That doesn't mean that most raw AF15s are restored. It means that most (or more at any rate) raw AF15s for sale are restored. Note that this probably holds less true in the real low grades. If a copy is remaindered, I doubt that there is much financial incentive to get it graded. Does anyone care about the color touch on their remaindered copy?

What can I get for a VG copy?

Do you think a 3.5 is lower or higher than the median copy out in the wild? Think about all the coverless, remaindered, and three-hole-punched books out there. All of the books with a coupon cut out or a page missing. All of the taped up, or cover-detached books. Most older books (especially pre-1965 books) are pretty darn rough. It is pretty amazing that the census median for AF15 is now only a 3.5 though. It probably skews less than almost any other SA book now that the price is so high. I would contend though, that the median grade of the unslabbed copies is less than a 3.5. In fact, I think you've made that point yourself already.

That seems like a pretty obvious fact. The vast majority of any book from that time frame are going to be low grade, and the census is going to be skewed in grade distribution, showing a larger percentage of high grade copies, since the financial incentive to slab increases as the grade goes up. They are still copies though. The idea that a book has to be high grade or unrestored to "count" is in itself a pretty narrowly held belief once you start looking at the wider collecting community.

You just don't seem to get that the books on the market to sell are not going to be representative of the books in collections, because people will very likely slab an AF15 to sell it, but probably won't slab it just to slab it. There is a strong financial incentive to slab when you sell. It's also pretty much the only way you sell via the auction houses and E-bay, which is were most of the visible copies are. You're looking at the number of home inspections each year and trying to extrapolate that to the number of existing homes. If you looked at houses that have recently sold, and checked if they had a home inspection recently, they almost all would have. Would you then conclude that most homes have recently been inspected? You're ignoring the huge selection bias towards slabbing that comes when someone wants to sell their AF15. Yes, some people will also slab a book for other reasons, but most old-time collectors are unlikely to. It's expensive and prevents them from physically handling their books. I've never slabbed a book. It would seem silly to do so unless I wanted to sell it. I suspect that is true of the majority of comic collectors older than say 40 or so. Probably not the majority of people on this site though. I think that you're also complete discounting the lapsed collector. There are a ton of people who put together nice collections in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, got interested in other things, and just thru their longboxes in a closet. I left the hobby for 15 years, and only got back in because a friend of mine that I collected with in the 80s and lost touch with looked me up and got me interested in it again. My collection was just sitting in a closet for all that time. I wasn't going to sell it, but I wasn't doing anything with it. If I hadn't reconnected with that friend, they would still be collecting dust in my closet. Those books are invisible to the census, and they are out there in very large numbers. I was a young collector with little money in the 80s. I could not afford an AF15. However, the collectors who were 10-20 years older than me could. Many of them completed their collections, and dropped out of active collecting in the 90s when everything fell apart. Like me though, I would suspect that an awful lot of them didn't sell their collections, they just put them in their closet. You are interacting with people who like to buy and sell comics on this board, but many collectors don't enjoy selling. They buy, but even when they've lost interest, they don't necessarily sell. I suspect that the number of collections currently sitting in the closets of lapsed collectors who are 50-70 years old is a massive number. I can't think of any way to figure out how many there are. There are no statistics to measure them, but they are there, all the same.

It's still in GPA currently though. what a dingus, I thought thrill bidders were to supposed to bid low before the book got into the stratosphere, not bid to win!

I didn't say there are vast number of people who have done this with AF15. I said "multiple" people. Your estimate of 10-20 sounds plausible to me. Given the hoarding we've seen on the boards of much harder to find GA books and other SA keys (Showcase 22 comes to mind), I don't think its unreasonable to expect that people have done it with AF15. I think you also seem to underestimate the number of people with large amounts of disposable income. Buying 2 AF15's a year would have cost about $5k (say 4.0s) before the last decade's run-up. That's not a ton of money for millions and millions of people. Add to that the larger number of people who have 2-5 copies, and that is an awful lot of supply available if the image of this book as a can't miss investment ever gets tarnished.

I think it is relatively likely that there are multiple people out there with 50+ copies of AF15 hoarded as an investment. It's a pretty common book that has been in huge demand for decades. It wouldn't be surprising to find people who have been buying 2-3 copies a year for 20-30 years. People often have very nutty allocations of investments compared to their incomes. I've seen a lot of people with middle class incomes with millions in company stock in their 401k. Sensible people would diversify, but many don't. I bet there are some long-time comic collector/dealers who are doing the same thing with AF15. On top of that, the can't miss feelings about this book have likely fueled additional hoarding in more recent years. Ok. :shrug: Here is my point of the existance of multiple hoarders: Either these people don't know what they have (unlikely given that they hoarded them - people don't collect specific things that they know nothing about), don't care because they are Scrooge McDuck (moderately likely, but very very very small population) or they truly don't exist in abundance and few select real individuals have been created into an urban legend that drives many of these discussions into even greater levels of speculation (highly likely).

This books is just trash. Sell your copies now-- http://boards.collectors-society.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=8429544&fpart=1

Yeah, I should have asked for a 10% advantage for the selling fees. I think that the actual bet is pretty much a wash, odds-wise. The time frame is too short for the natural advantages that stocks have to really kick in. I do think that the thread will be a very interesting one to dig up in 5 years though.

As promised, my SA key issue price snapshot. I pulled the 90-day GPA average for the books, and I tried to choose grades that had more than a single entry. That actually was pretty limiting. For example, I was going to list FF1, but it just didn't have much in GPA for the last 3 months. I also included GSX1 and IH181, since they are very liquid books that many people are invested in. For the SA books, I focused on the lower grades (mostly 3.0 and 5.0). That is where there was enough current data to be useful, and also where I think most people are realistically putting their money. I picked higher grades for the BA books, since they are readily available and trading hands in those grades. AF15 CGC 3.0 $9786 CGC 5.0 $18075 AV1 CGC 3.0 $1141 CGC 5.0 $2500 IH1 CGC 4.5 $11325 CGC 6.0 $21995 ASM1 CGC 2.5 $2629 CGC 5.0 $5053 Xmen1 CGC 3.0 $1820 CGC 5.0 $2921 JIM83 CGC 3.0 $2400 CGC 5.0 $3999 DD1 CGC 3.0 $670 CGC 5.0 $1047 GSX1 CGC 8.0 $780 CGC 9.2 $1302 IH181 CGC 8.0 $1697 CGC 9.4 $3497

It's funny, I don't have a strong opinion on FP1 either way. I think I will put together a group of SA keys to track in this thread that is more representative of the group think "can't miss" books that I think are likely to be poor investments going forward. Top of my list would be AF 15 in CGC 3.0 for 10k. I think that is going to look a little foolish down the road.

Fair enough. I think you just described the median sale, though, not the mean. Given that there aren't generally a ton of sales, the mean might be better though. It also has the advantage of being calculated right in GPA. So we could just take the 12 month GPA average on 3/1/17. Does that sound good? My reluctance is not the stakes. My reluctance to the shorter bet is that it becomes more speculation than investment. I'm trying to show that comics are not a great long-term investment. They happen to be a great vehicle for speculation, though. The shorter the time frame, the less likely it is that my point will be made. So our bet will be $100 to the charity of the winner's choice, to be settled on 3/1/17. My side- SPY, current quote 210.66 Yours- Forever People #1, CGC 9.6, current value stipulated as $650 Don't forget, I'll have two years of dividends to add in if it is close

The problem is that I don't consider 24 months to be a meaningful amount of time from an investment standpoint. Five years is about the shortest timeframe I consider investments in. How would we determine the end value for the 9.6?

What would the starting valuation of the FP 1's be? It doesn't appear to be a book that has a locked in value quite like a IH181 or a GSX1. The last GPA on the 9.6's was $741, but there was one in Comiclink recently that went for $550. If market value is between those two, I'll take SPY to outperform them over the next 10 years.

The huge difference between comics and corporations as an investment is that corporations have earnings that add to their value as an investment over the years. Stocks tend to go up in value over the years due to those added earnings. Buying stocks at an all time high when corporate earnings are also at an all time high is not as dangerous as buying a commodity at an all time high. It may not be an awesome time to buy stocks, but those corporate earnings tend to bail out the long term stock investor. An AF15 doesn't have an earnings stream to do the same.

This just isn't true. The moves in the dollar have been substantial, but they are tiny compared to the moves in gold. There has been massive speculation in gold in the last ten years. Look at a long term chart of gold and compare the spike in 1980 to the recent spike? They look an awful lot alike don't they? A bubble formed and has been popping, IMO.

You are comparing the intrinsic value of comics with that of houses? You don't appear to know what the word means. I must own shelter for my family. I am currently looking for a larger home because my current one is too small for two adults and two children. I need a house. I specifically want a house in a certain area because it determines how my children are educated, as well as how long my drive to work is. Heck, I need a house as a place to store comics I like comics. I enjoy collecting them, and I derive pleasure from owning old ones. However, their real intrinsic value is pretty small. How much does a set of Marvel Masterworks go for?