Kryptic1

Rally is going to reopen the IPO for the Larson Batman 1 next Friday. Demand for all new IPOs had crashed during the summer. I guess people were tired of overpaying and then watching their investment drop over 50% as soon as it started trading. They have had some recent success with IPOs, but they’ve done it by taking little to no markup and offering things for market value. That’s nice for investors, but it’s not sustainable. Rally has been around for 3 or 4 years now and still haven’t found a revenue model that works. Their latest idea is selling an NFT collection. Seriously. There’s still very little liquidity in their secondary market. At this point I’m just waiting for the announcement that they’re going out of business and sending everything out to auction. I like the idea of fractional ownership and I wish things had gone better for Rally, but they built a business that only works in a bull market for collectibles.

I know a way to cut back on the number of pieces in the auction.

I’ll take it

Whoever decided to move the Garfield strips all the way to the end of the auction should be nominated for sainthood.

If this piece comes up for sale again, the price might go negative.

Neal Adams splash to Brave and the Bold 84 sold for $28,800 at Heritage in January and $22,800 today.

I didn’t read the full description on this. Did it say there’s $30k cash taped to the back of the board?

I see the “recent auction price + a large markup” pricing often and I’m amazed that the market is inefficient enough for that to work. Is there a large pool of buyers who just don’t pay attention to auctions? I don’t understand why someone who was unwilling to pay $30k a few months ago is willing to pay $50k today.

But then a 9.4 sold in the June Heritage auction for $162k.

The ComicLink auction opened last night and there’s a FF #5 CGC 9.4 already at $210k, almost $50k over the GPA high. Two people put in bids that high within hours of the auction opening?

Bid increments at Heritage for live bidding is $50k for $1M - $1.999M, then $100k for $2M - $10M. My recollection of the auction was that it went into live bidding somewhere around $1.2 - $1.5M. When the lot opened and all of the Heritage Live bids were posted, it immediately went to $2.0M. The auctioneer tried to coax out another bid for a minute or two, then closed the lot. This is consistent with what Halperin told Felix about placing the bid in advance. However, I think he said that bid was $2M and he would have gone higher, so that would mean he was prepared to place live bids too.

Birth page of that box!

They shut off new investments to the Batman 1 a few weeks ago. They had sold about 50% of it (including the 20% retained by the prior owner) but it had slowed to a trickle. They made a vague comment about doing some promotion for it later in the year, but I’m guessing they’re hoping for a strong auction comp to generate some interest. They are still just running 2-3 IPOs per week, almost all of them for lower value items. Since this is where they generate most of their revenue, I’m wondering how long they can survive. They raised more venture capital money last year so they might be OK for a while but they have to be burning cash much faster than they expected. I’d love to hear what they’re doing internally to turn things around because from the outside it doesn’t look like they’re doing anything.

The bidders from last week didn’t show up for the Heritage Sunday auction.

I’ll take it

I now know that they can be sloppy, but I didn’t when I started watching Dueling Dealers about six months ago. I assumed they did as much research as necessary to identify the art and price it reasonably, but then I started seeing some badly overpriced pieces and it made me a lot more cautious. Here’s another example from last week’s show: Anthony offered a Stuart Immonen DPS from All-New X-Men for $2,000. I recognized it from a recent Felix drop so I checked the price: it sold for $700 in Nov ‘21. Both Felix and the inker’s rep still have a bunch of similar DPS’s from the series for under $1000. I’m assuming Anthony wasn’t the original buyer and probably overpaid for it and is now pricing it off his mistake. He didn’t do anything intentionally misleading (although he did incorrectly identify the main character on the page), but I still would have felt like I got burned if I had bought it.

I agree with most of what you said, but the format of the claim show pushes buyers to make a quick decision without doing all of the homework they might normally do. Mike could have taken as much time as he wanted to research the piece before bringing it to market. He could have asked Albert why he sold pages from that run of Spawn issues as Larsen-only when he could have gotten much more for McFarlane/Larsen pages. He needed to do more than just check Comics.org, especially since the page looks like it’s only Larsen’s work. I’ve been in the position of quickly doing my homework in the middle of a Dueling Dealers episode, and the question “did the seller even correctly identify the artists” never crossed my mind. It’s a basic piece of information about the art that the seller has to know for certain, or state that he doesn’t know. In this case, Mike’s main selling point for the page was that it was a rare McFarlane/Larsen piece, and he should be certain that’s true before he says it.

I’ll take Batman 404, 405, 406 and X-men 153

I’ll take it at 20% off

They still haven’t opened it up to the general public. The original time frame they gave was mid-March, and we’re now over a month past that with no update. They have given some users early access and they have sold 49% of it so far, which includes the 20% retained by the prior owner and whatever % Rally bought for themselves. It’s tough to say whether 49% is good or bad since I don’t know what % of users have early access, but they have been giving away free promo shares and the limit for what each person can buy is high, so that doesn’t suggest they are confident they can fill it. That’s the most likely reason for the delay but they have also pulled back on IPOs lately. They used to offer a new one every weekday and they’ve cut back to three per week and they have been lower cost items. I’m guessing it’s because their market has been performing poorly and they’re hoping that cutting back on IPOs will cause people to put more money in the assets already trading. If they can’t fill the IPO, they have the option of returning everyone’s money and selling the book or buying up the remaining shares themselves. Lately they have been buying the remaining shares of anything that doesn’t fill.

Another batch of Garfield strips in the June auction!

Congrats. I was watching that one and would have gone after it harder if I hadn’t won something earlier. Definitely a bargain compared to the crazy prices his style guides were selling for last year.

Way too many lots in this auction. Did we really need 45 lots of Garfield strips? Those could have been thrown in a weekly auction or the nearest trash can.

X-men 271 & ASM 50 pages should make the interior page list.

It’s over 2 minutes per lot.