Brock

Two new additions today...

A lot of questionable things get said on these boards. We know this one hasn't been true since Amatino Manucci introduced double entry bookkeeping in the year 1299.

This part of the market is so volatile right now, it's hard to keep track. I don't want to be contrary, but a lot of the previously mentioned titles were hot a couple of years ago, but IMHO it's pretty tough to move Immortal Hulk, Lady Thor or Captain Marvel books at the moment, even below cover. There are a lot of sporadic Star Wars books/1st appearances that are good, so I typically grab all the Star Wars books in these kinds of situations. Spawn books are usually a safe bet, especially before #300. Many of the popular cover artists from this era (Hughes, Middleton, Frison, Cho, Artgerm, etc.) will sell for at least a little over cover, and some may surprise you. There are a number of hot Ninja Turtles issues in this timeframe. Video game books from this period can do very well.

Apparently that’s been the strategy for my entire collection…

I was a huge fan of this series when it came out, and thought the stories were awesome. However, I was 13… I will buy one of these to see if they still stand up.

Fun cover, but the wrong Hughes…

I think it's one of those things where the charity mails your mom 300 stickers for sealing envelopes in the desperate hope that she'll feel guilty and make a donation, and eight-year-old you finds the sheet of stickers six months later and decides that - since you are the ONLY one in the wide-eyed world of eight year olds with these stickers - you will repurpose these as personal identification tags and stick one in every single one of your comics books, because it's SOOO much more sophisticated than just writing your name on the cover. Not that I would ever have done something like that, of course...

I used to work in Geneva. My rule of thumb was that if I wanted to find comics, I had to drive to France.

There seems to be a hot book of the week this week - Star Wars High Republic Adventures Quest of the Jedi (there's a mouthful) #1 looks to be on a tear.

I just checked to see if I had one... I'll grab these if I seem them in high grade in the wild, but I only have 4, 12 and 25.

Ouch! $1,000? That should definitely bring more out of hiding.

There are only four copies on the CGC census, with one of those only an 8.0. Seems like a tough book!

Keep in mind that the production cycle means the OPG prices were largely set towards the end of 2022 (e.g. market reports were due by December 19). At that stage, the market was definitely slowing, but the duration of declines, or any possible rebounds, would have been unclear. When the new edition comes out in July or August, it's likely to look a bit disconnected from reality - but the real test will be what they do in the 2024 edition.

Another deadbeat. eBay user ryansem made three separate offers on a book, and I accepted the third one. He then filed a cancellation request with eBay saying "Order placed by mistake".

Here's my latest Whitman registry set addition, courtesy of a seller in Manitoba. Lower grade than I like, but one step closer...

I just added a DC Whitman to my registry set that cost me close to $200 and got me 1 point. Do the Marvel price variants work the same way?

This is a great post... well argued and reasonable. You definitely have me thinking!

I just finished “Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid” by Dr. Gregory Forth. He reviews the fossil record of floresiensis, the human-like but hobbit-sized creatures who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, and then compares that species to the ape-men described as living in the island’s mountains today by the indigenous Lio people. No smoking gun, but an interesting tour through circumstantial evidence. I’ve since turned to “The Ascent of Rum Doodle” by W.E. Bowman, which Bill Bryson has called “the funniest book ever written.” Well, the joke’s on us, as the book is very “meh” and Bryson’s introduction is the funniest thing about it…

Absolutely... in addition to the wrap and colour issues already raised, the second copy has lower page quality, and a stamp on the cover.

The Good Asian seems to be slowly heating up. I'm noticing that the David Choe "B" cover of #6 seems to have jumped a bit lately (and is approaching $25), but not the David Johnson "A" cover - does anyone know why this might be the case?

You should try the DC Whitman variants…

That's good, because in my 10 years here I don't think I've ever interacted with you about anything other than our shared love of early Valiant.

This seems likely... the message you intended to send ("YOU DO IT") was different than the message I received ("you like to complain about other's work but have zero skills for making improvements"). So, if I'm understanding you correctly now, we were all having a conversation about the relative price stability of CGC 9.8s. You suggested we were wrong, because blogpost. I explained that I (and others) didn't find the blogpost particularly valuable in this discussion, because reasons (see my world's longest thread post). But now you want us to work to make your blogpost, which we don't agree with, better? This suggests that - even before you put your blogpost in the thread - you were aware of the idea that your blogpost was not statistically strong (see: sample size), theoretically unsound and logically fallacious (see: unconditional convergence) and not particularly useful (see: utility). Perhaps you can help me understand why it was important to link to your blogpost then? I'm genuinely not trying to provoke conflict, but to understand what your key message is here... I'd love to have your help, expertise and input into some research projects I'm working on, but am not sure what to take away from this discussion.

TLDR version: I suggest some areas where I think @valiantman's model could use some strengthening, and make a genuine effort to help think through aspects of this. (And pray that it doesn't descend into another Board flamewar...)

Ouch. That's pretty defensive... I may regret this, but I'll take the bait. Let me start by saying that I have a lot of admiration for your contributions here and elsewhere. You put a lot of thought and work into your efforts, and while I don't always agree with your analysis or conclusions, I recognize the importance of the effort, and the need to propose hypotheses that can be tested in the hobby. Your PhD in information quality gives you some strong credentials to lead us in this space. However, a blogpost is not an academic publication, and so has not been subjected to peer review. So - in the spirit of "making improvements" and enjoying a collaborative and collegial attempt to build some consensus - let me suggest a few things. I do not mean to question the information or quality here, but to reflect on the analytical approaches and conclusions drawn, which I think could use some further work. I will also do my best to suggest how these could be strengthened. First, though, I should point out that I think your blogpost doesn't quite address what I felt was the main thrust of the thread as I see it. I recognize that the nature of threads is to have several discussions going on at once, so we may have different perspectives on this. Your blogpost suggests that 9.8s are not the best from an ROI perspective, and you present some interesting data in support of that theory. I think what at least some of us were suggesting was that purchasing 9.8s was (to quote myself) "a good way to preserve my initial investment/outlay." This thought was echoed by others, such as @D2 who spoke of "volatility" or @grendel013 who suggested it was critical to "trade or sell your current copy without losing money reselling." Thus, while you are addressing ROI and highest possible returns, we were discussing the preservation of capital, which I think you'll agree is a different thing. I note this largely because it could be relevant to parts of the discussion later on. Having said all that, I think your blogpost is definitely interesting, and does provide evidence in favour of your hypothesis. However, in general, I believe that your analysis and conclusions make too much of your limited data. In the following section I try to do two things: Address what I see as some of the weaknesses in your case Suggest some approaches that might help to overcome those weaknesses +++ The first issue I see - and I suspect it is one you will acknowledge, given your academic background - is that the sample size for your case is very small. With only 12 books discussed, we have only an extremely small sample to support your hypothesis. That does not, of course, mean that your analysis is wrong, but that the limited quantity of evidence makes your case very tenuous, and subject to wild swings in accuracy. This is related to a number of other "sample" issues in your blogpost. All of the books you have selected for your sample are keys, "blue chip" books that are widely traded in the marketplace. In this sense, they are not representative of the market as a whole. Thinly traded books, for example, are likely to be much more volatile in their pricing, and could produce sales results that contradict your findings with "blue chip" books. Without having included those books in your analysis, we can't say whether your hypothesis is more generally valid or not. This is important, as the vast majority of books traded in the comic book marketplace are not "blue chip" keys. Similarly, your sample is all made up of older books - 10 silver, 1 bronze and 1 copper. As a result, we also can't say whether or not your model fits with modern books. Indeed, several people commenting in the thread, including myself, @Stefan_W, @Dr. Balls, @D2, @Aman619, all suggested that modern books behave differently in the market than older books. We have not provided data to support this assertion, but neither does your blogpost provide data to contradict it. Finally - and perhaps most importantly - on the sample size question is the fact that the 12 books you've selected have all been rising in price over the timeframe you're looking at. This is also not representative of the market, as many books fall in price. Indeed, my own hypothesis - based on your work - would be that when prices on a book fall, grades lower than 9.8 fall faster (i.e., at higher percentages). This means that we could conclude the opposite of your blogpost... if prices are falling, then 9.8s could have the highest ROI (even though those ROIs are negative). This is a critical consideration when thinking about ROI, and it is not addressed in your sample or your analysis. In order to strengthen your model, I would suggest a large sample - perhaps 1,000 books to pluck a number from the air. Those 1,000 books should be drawn from all ages (including modern), should include not only keys but a wide range of key/desirable and non-key/less desirable books, and should include books that are both rising and falling in price over time. This might provide us with a more robust data set that allows some more genuine analysis. +++ There are some other concerns which I see with the approach in your blogpost, which are not explicitly related to data. For example, your core argument is that with books you have sample, lesser grades rise in value at a higher rate (%) than 9.8s. This is a well-known feature of mathematics and economics, sometimes referred to as "convergence" or "unconditional convergence" and it has largely fallen out of favour as a tool for analyzing trends in the market or economy. The classic example is its application in the context of National GDP rates. In 2023, for example, the International Monetary Fund anticipates that the US economy will grow by 1%, while the economy of Libya economy will grow by 17.9%. Because of the low starting value of the Libyan economy, any increase will be represented by outsized percentage returns. Basically, this tells us something about math, but not about real returns as you suggest. The alternate view - that these percentages represent a genuine trend - leads to logical fallacies when played out over time. They suggest (in the GDP case) that the Libyan economy will eventually be larger than the American economy, or (in the case of your blogpost) that CGC 4.5s will eventually be worth much more than CGC 9.8s. One way to try to correct this in your work might be to consider other explanations for the rise of lower grade books. Forces like supply and demand could figure here, for example. The number of people who are looking to buy (i.e., demand) a $100,000 key in CGC 9.8 is small, but the number of people looking to buy that same book in a lower grade for $1,000 will be larger. This suggests that price may be a more important factor in driving demand for lower grade books than the assigned grade. This has an implicit suggestion that as lower grade copies see more demand, their prices will rise faster - until they reach a point where higher graded books become more attractive because of their lower price point. This suggests that your research could find ways of exploring this problem by thinking of pricing tiers rather than grading tiers for future analysis. Finally, there is one other key feature of your blogposts' model that raises questions in my mind. If your model is valid, it should have some predictive capacity, but - at least based on the 12 datapoints in your blogpost - I don't see this. In fact, I see the opposite - a lot of noise within the data. If the model is robust, I think I should be able to predict which grades will see higher price rises than others, but instead I see high levels of randomness. In your 12 sample books, for example, I see that 5 rose in value fastest in a grade at CGC 5.0 or above, and 7 that rose in value fastest in a grade below CGC 5.0. On a 10-point grading scale, that's pretty close to 50/50, and this epitomizes a random result in my mind, like flipping a coin 10 times in a row and getting 6 heads and 4 tails. For your model to have UTILITY - that is usefulness - it needs to be better than random, and it needs to help those in the marketplace determine which grade of a book they SHOULD be purchasing. Without some attempt to explain why Amazing Fantasy #15 sees the highest increases in CGC 8.5 while Avengers #1 sees the highest increases in CGC 2.0, your 12 datapoints are interesting, but not particularly useful. It may be that a larger sample size will begin to address the utility challenge, but in my mind, a focus on making your data more useful to recipients would be tremendously helpful. ++++ Again, all of this is offered in the context of collegial and collaborative peer review. If I can help to shape and strengthen your future efforts in this field, I am at willing to help where I can.