H0RR0RSH0W

I found this interesting in that this was the exact reasoning I used in making my own purchase of X-men 94 in a 9.2 slab. In my own cave-man words "how long did it take to get to how much?"

Basically I had a certain amount of money to buy a key. So I took a look at a sort of age versus value comparison. I held that up against established value. I have been a fan of X-men for 25+ years and I have marveled at X-men #94 as a sort of grail of grails. All I am saying there is that I understood this book well. It was always a pricey book and as long as there is comicbook collecting it will always be a pricey book.

In terms of established value what you kind of want to look at is the "slope of the curve". If you were to plot out spreadsheet data in a graph it might become obvious. What you would want to see is not too steep and not too shallow. A sort of slow but steady rise. As long as there is a healthy enough economy to support hobbies like collecting then it safe to say that investing in comics relatively safe. If all the worlds markets ever crash then you have bigger problems than comics books.

If we take this reasoning to the extreme this is the type of thing that throws up a flag for me in modern books. If there is a spike in price ,why such a rapid appreciation?Is it just a plastic premium? The hype train?  What sort of stability will the future bring? I just see moderns as the comic/stock  market version of high risk investing. but just like in stocks risk = reward. (Not that paying $300,000 for a comic is not risky but a different type of risk.)

Think of someone who bought a mint condition copy of Walking Dead  #1 for cover price 15 years back.  Really no risk in that one book and when it comes to sell it is going to be all reward. Be it 5x,10x, or 100x of the original investment. The risk there was not the expensive jumping on point, but rather the risk of buying 5 or 10 different titles a month every month is hopes of getting that 1 "golden ticket".  

Same animal-different breed if you will.