The Less Blob

Folks have been saying this for the last 20 years. I'm not saying things won't cool off, or certain things will cool off, but we already had a recession, a little one i guess, diluted by a bunch of money printing. we're supposed to be in a recovery right now, remember?

Yeah, but finding parking near most of them is a giant PITA!

I am hoping for your health you are not a big fattie like me though.

Larger city just means more competition scouring for books

The $100K book is always going to sell. Maybe you need to consign it to the right auctioneer, but it is worth $100K because there's a genuine market for it. The same is true for the $1000 books, although some of the more obscure ones might have a less clearly defined market and price point. But your $1000 SA marvel key is going to wind up selling for $800-$1200 90%+ of the time. The $100 book is a lot trickier, Wider price variations.

OK, we went over this a while ago in the thread, math teacher acknowledged he was looking at it the wrong way and fixed his calculations

I kind of feel like I should hunt down Twin Peaks again and see if it holds up. I don't feel like I was that into it at the time, but I was in college and really not much for regular TV shows then. I feel like I missed something. I can' think of any TV shows i watched regularly in college. I do remember watching a midnight showing of Blue Velvet as a teenager and being impressed with how completely F-ed up it was. I wound up drinking my share of Pabst Blue Ribbon after that...

certain star wars books have gone up 2000-4000% in like 3 weeks!

I guess the 15% was during a week long stretch in March, but there had been other drops. But things started to rebound in April (not sure why as it was pretty horrendous in April covid-wise)

Of course, we can't do this with the stock market so easily as the S&P going from 1500 to 3500 is only part of the equation, your reinvestment of dividends is a huge part of it, and whether those dividends are being kept in a tax deferred setting or not is also huge ... if you're paying taxes on your dividends every year, you're not getting as much of the benefit of reinvesting them. OF COURSE, your income tax rate when you start withdrawing from the tax deferred account is going to matter a lot as it may be higher than your capital gains/dividend rate would have been, but I still think all those years of not paying taxes on the dividend income (and capital gains if you move money around) probably makes up for that.

I was just guestimating with the investment calculator, quick and dirty, my days of actually knowing how to run these numbers are long gone

HUGE drop off for 9.6ses making them not really worth slabbing at that level other than #6

Of course, you probably need the 18% return to make up for the higher taxes you pay for collectible capital gains vs. equity cap gains/dividends as the stock market made about 13.5% during this period ... and yes, i am totally pulling that out of my rear, some financial type can tell me if I am right or wrong or close

I believe that is not how you calculate an investment return over a period like that where you are looking at two end points, etc. and trying to determine what % you'd need to earn each year to get to the end point. Not that your numbers don't have their own validity, but if we are trying to compare AF 15 growth to S&P 500 investment returns, we need to use the same methodology. 27.4% a year on the $4,183 book would mean $47,117 at the end of 10 years: https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html?ctype=endamount&ctargetamountv=1000000&cstartingprinciplev=4183&cyearsv=10&cinterestratev=27.4&ccontributeamountv=0&ciadditionat1=monthly&printit=0&x=0&y=0 A $4,183 to $16,800 book would be about a 14.5% annual return: https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html?ctype=endamount&ctargetamountv=1000000&cstartingprinciplev=4183&cyearsv=10&cinterestratev=14.5&ccontributeamountv=0&ciadditionat1=monthly&printit=0&x=0&y=0 14.5% is terrific, of course, and if you were able to flip the $4,183 into the $21,500 sale that is nearly an 18% return: https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html?ctype=endamount&ctargetamountv=1000000&cstartingprinciplev=4183&cyearsv=10&cinterestratev=18&ccontributeamountv=0&ciadditionat1=monthly&printit=0&x=0&y=0

Well, remember, the stock market only went down like 10-15%, and then it started going back up and then exceeded its previous highs. There wasn't a lot of time when it was in the krapper. I feel like there were about 2 weeks where folks here thought ebay was dead and there were deals, and then there weren't any.

Nobody is doubting that most blue chip books bought in 2010-2013 have appreciated nicely. There may be some 9.8s of late SA/BA that have not because they had low census numbers that eventually got evened out, but most of those are not genuine blue chip books (though the Mask comics you reference elsewhere appeal to a pretty narrow group of wealthy collectors). But do we think that AF 15 is going to be $50K book in 10 years? At some point all these relatively common books can't all be six figures in mid grade, can they? The OP said this: "So maybe including some tangible assets wouldn't be a bad idea. I would think you couldn't go wrong with some Golden age classic covers and silver age keys in mid to high CGC grade over that time period." If you have an IRA/401K, I'd make sure you make your contribution, in full, to those vehicles using more traditional investments. If you have spare mad money, sure, why not? I would not stake your 65 year old standard of living on expected returns from these things though. This is what I would tell a friend if they asked how I felt about this. At least after I sold him 25 copies of the ultimate investment book, Thor 339.

Hindsight is always 20/20. If you had timed the market and predicted March was the bottom you would have been brilliant. I was sitting on cash in my 401K (I don't have a 401K, my version is a little more flexible in terms of withdrawals (no penalties, I just pay taxes). Wish I had the cajones to jump back in with a vengeance, but I was worried this was the start of a 3 year depression and stock crash, possible layoffs for me and the wife and really liked the idea that, if push came to shove, I had a few years of living expenses that were liquid. Timidity.

The point made by someone else is that, in fact, over the last 10 years something as generic as the S&P 500 has given 13.6% rate of return, which is not so modest, it has done as well as, or better than, AF 15 over that period. Picking individual company stocks is tricky stuff. For every tesla there are 10 busts.

Trusting the S&P 500 or some other broad index to deliver sufficient LONG TERM returns doesn't require that much understanding (I say long term because you can find a bad 10 year stretch, no doubt, but saving for your retirement is a 20-40 year process), just a general faith in the U.S. (and other countries to the etent the S&P 500 reflect the too) economy. If the economy that is reflected in that sort of index goes totally third world comics are going down with it too.

$57K would, interestingly, be nearly an exact match with $16K invested in the S&P for the 10 years in question

The AF 15 might be one book that, depending on which years you are looking at, did outperform the S&P 500... Since 2000 most definitely (though 2000 GPA data is tricky). I'm just sayin right now you can bin an AF 15 for $41K from a reputable board member on ebay and there's another one at $41.5K, so $57K does not seem to be FMV: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Amazing-Fantasy-15-CGC-5-0-Marvel-1962-Holy-Grail-1st-Appearance-of-Spider-man/352987982264?hash=item522fb929b8:g:A60AAOSwGBpd5svc I burned myself getting out of the market. I looked smart for a while, but I probably lost $30-50K being chicken and waiting for it to bottom out. It did, but I thought there was more bloodletting and it didn't happen. Thank goodness my retirement plans do not depend on my stock market gut instincts because I'd be in trouble. My 401K will be a lifestyle cushion, not what I actually live off of.

But is that what AF 15 did over that period? Seems to be more around $41K in that shape. No idea what it was in 2010. $16K seemed like a lot in the middle of that recession though.

If you are selling a $50,000 book and bought it for $10,000, you are going to pay that capital gains rate on the $40K. You don't have to be in the business or any of that. If you are in the business you might be able to to take more deductions on the "expense" side and it may just be regular business income.

Does that include dividend reinvestment? Also, 2000-2010 was basically a lost decade for stock returns with 2 or 3 major crashes. So, it can go either way. Also, equities have more favorable tax treatment than collectibles. You can't put them in an IRA/401K as well (or doing that would require you to set up a corporate structure to hold them as assetsd..complicated). Not to mention liquidity/higher transactional costs. I would not want to say "no," because, frankly, if you bought the right books throughout the 80s and 90s you would have done very well and even some books more recently. The genuine bluechip stuff has done well. But some secondary keys.. not as well. But are you going to see these go up 400-600% in the next 15 years? I dunno. Some have over the last 15 for sure. But that is what a 13.6% annual return means (actually, it means that if you have $1000 it is $6771 at the end of 15 years). How many $5000 books today do you think will be $30,000 books in 15 years? (Or $1000 into $6771..) Of course, why would we think stocks will do as well from 2021-2035 as they did from 2010-20? But yeah, you definitely could have seen some of these returns over the last 15 years. So the answer is...we'll find out

My brain might be at its limits for remembering potentially flippable books out of dollar boxes. Need to erase some childhood memories to make room.