miraclemet

early 90s photo scanned in and compressed by facebook, the theme was dead characters from stories we read in AP english Babydoll body on a table with place setting and my head sticking thru....

(side note, I dressed as "A Modest Proposal" for my very nerdy AP English Halloween Party)

The recent GameStop market manipulation story made me think of this thread....

Publishers would be on the hook to pay for the cost of producing a whole arc, without knowing if it will be recieved well or not. TPBs cost more to produce than the sum of the individual issues.plus they have the benefit of ad space being sold.

Lots of great stuff closed last night. I went all in for this upgrade from my current CGC 9.4 cause it's top census, and I gotta spruce up my Space Adventures registry.

Im seeing some available inventory dry up. Some books that had 5-10 copies on ebay at any given week (that always kept resurfacing in my saved search alerts) now there's only 1-2 of them. I dont know if thats people buying up these books, or people pulling books awaiting thr next buying flurry when those checks arrive.

Just arrived. A mystery box from @1Cool. I sent him a picture of my bookshelves of HCs and Omnibuses and said any good read additions for my shelf were welcome and he didnt disappoint! Cracked it open and lo and behold, signed by the man!

so the stock bidders determine the value of the book? Not any actual book transactions? I know some of these fractional sales companies use GoCollect and other market analytic sites... RallyRd uses the bidders?

Ooooh those are good reads!

How are these valuations even remotely tied to reality? There were no gpa sales of this book between july and november so how do they justfy the 30% increase in value based on no sales?

Wait. A "shareholder vote"?!?! So not knly do you have to find a buyer at your price point if you want to sell you also have to have the vote of (i assume the majority) of the other stockholders?

but you dont have three books, You have some shares valued at a price that corresponds to the value of a book that you dont own. The first biggest problem I see here is in their initial valuation of these offered books. They buy a X-men 1 CGC 9.4 for $134k. They immediately release it for IP at $136,500. The "market price" for their book was set by their own purchase price, nothing else. Then they immediately boost the value $2500 in their valuation for their offer (so assuming a 100% sale of the stock they've made $2500 with NO OTHER MARKET INPUTS).Think of it like a BIN on ebay. If a book has a market value of $1000, but some whale comes along and his a BIN on a copy that's listed for $1500, every other copy of the book isn't suddenly worth $1500, because we all know it was only worth $1500 to that one guy (otherwise it wouldn't have been sitting there with a BIN forever). These guys hit a BIN on a book with no other recent market history. I actually think this is intentional. A book with little market history is easier to inflate. Books that are easier to inflate make for quicker money for them. People buying in are thinking "cool I could never buy an X-men 1 for $134k, but this way I can spend $750 for 10 shares of an X-Men 1 CGC 9.2" but those 10 shares are only worth $750 if the market agrees with the valuation. Problem #2 is that most of these setups are buying books that rarely trade, so their valuations are not based on market sales, but rather 3rd party "valuation" sites like "gocollect" or such. And many of those sites have less than rigorously tested valuation algorithms. Many of them can easily be boosted or dropped by a single sale, OR a spurious sale because again, not all of them do good data validation. So we have questionable valuation to start, questionable valuation in the middle, and now we get to the problem of selling. In regular stocks selling is not a problem because the market is flush with buyers and sellers. If you want to sell a stock today, no problem. Put in a sale. Sold. Now yes you can put in a sell @ price and say at what price you're willing to sell at or a price that you want to use as your "dump at" price. But with most of these fractional collectible sites (as you point out) you have to have a BUYER interested in buying at your price when you want to sell. So with new listings each day, why would someone buy into the current high water mark on a book (and buy the stocks you're trying to sell) when they can instead buy an IPO fresh on the market. If you dont have a buyer, you arent able to cash out. And do you really want your money tied up in something that you dont have the ability to cash out on? This isn't an IRA, this isn't insured money, but you are taking on all the risk and adding the inflexibility of maybe not being able to cash out if you cant find someone wanting to pay $120/share for the stocks you paid $75 a share for. Or worse case scenario, what if the stock starts to drop, and there arent any buyers? You watch your stock go down from $120 and wanna get out ASAP, but with no buyers you're forced to ride it out until you find a buyer. In the end it's not like buying a comic (cause you dont actually own the physical thing), and it's not like buying a stock (because the mechanics around it havent scaled to the point of being "like" a stock style market. And the cherry on top is that it is all based on a valuation that is questionable from start to finish.

In order to sell doesn't there have to be a buyer at the price you are selling? And as such, doesn't the relatively narrow audience for these type of ventures hurt it?

which just helps make it a great buy. One in-universe appearance to bring Hal into the DCU and the book will skyrocket as people forget about that movie *shudder*

you should frame two so you get to display both the front and the back awesomeness! Just remembered having the Battle Ram!

Is that a tear on franks right knee?

Please Grade me! So the obvious defect is obvious. How low does it go for the removed tape at the spine and staples used for "reinforcement" and the color loss and left behind discoloration? All attached thankfully. No brittleness. - miraclemet

I just picked up an "entry level" copy today. The more I thought about it the more ridiculous I thought how cheap the book was in lower grades. I picked up what I think is a raw 2.0 or better for under a grand, and couldn't think of another silver age 1st appearance key of a headlining super hero that could be had that cheap! I mean even a DD1 will cost almost twice that in the same grade, and its from 5 years later and has FOUR TIMES the census (4400 vs 950 Blues and Yellows). Why is this book not on everyone's radar like GSX1 and FF48?

The recent reveal on the relevance of Mr E in the Knull Universe (and thus the spike in Marvel Spotlight 9) wasnt tied to movie/tv but rather events in current comics... or the bump that the current volume of ASM55 is enjoying (again not movie related), but yeah most do tie to tv/movies.

right, as I said plenty of comics have retained value with no modern publication reinforcement, but are you saying you'd expect to see no impact? Obviously with iconic collectibles like Action 1, they're above such influences, but what about Batman Adventures 13, or Green Arrow/Green Lantern 76, or the latest modern speculation?

(and sorry if this has been discussed before, tried searching the boards and found nothing, but if it's a repeat topic, feel free to hit me with a fish)

Using this article as a jumping off point (DC Comics Leaves Its Legacy Behind - Publishers Weekly) Extrapolating from some of the moves by AT&T upper management following their acquisition of DC Comics what would happen to DC comics as a collectible market if they decided to stop publishing monthly titles? I assume they would retain ownership of the IP for the sake of trademarking and selling license images and continue to make movies, but what if they just stopped making comics... What would happen with all those Silver age keys? Or even more modern keys? Plenty of collectibles have retained (some or all of their) value even when their subject matter is not actively being published, but what do you think would happen? I guess the question is how much of a comics collectibles market value is propped up by the ongoing publication of modern books about the same material?

To me itss UXM Omnibus 1-2, the New X-Men Omni, and the Astonishing X-men Omni. Those are the great stories to me.

Totally lucked into a DCBS restock of Uncanny Xmen Omnibus vol2 a few nights ago. Its been on ebay at full retail due to OOP for a bit. They must have found a few copies. They also had some more Excalibur omnibuses so I grabbed one of them too. A very mutant centric pair of buys waiting for me in my next dcbs shipment.

Winner!