alexgross.com

love to hear how we can reduce the BUYERS PREMIUM at heritage. many of us have negotiated better sellers rates for better books, but i never heard of anyone negotiating down the BP. do i have to spend 50k per month or something?

one problem with higher interest rates is that if i sell the home i bought in 2020 when rates were super low, the next mortgage i get will cost me massively more per month for the same price house. so i am disincentivized to sell, and prospective buyers are disincentivized to buy. that's a major reason why housing markets across the country are way down, especially on the west coast. i also have a HELOC whose payment has tripled since 2020. ultimately this also means i, and perhaps others, are way less apt to spend discretionary income. i used to buy a book per month in one or another auction, but those days are over for me now.

this one ends on heritage soon. i think it's a poor example of a 5.5 book with all the chipping on it. and unless your name also happens to be sam peterson, it is less appealing with the writing so boldly on the cover.

if i was not broke right now i would be asking for better pics. might not hurt to add some here. good luck with this-- amazing book!

hate to interrupt the bickering, but yes, it's totally lame that they do not provide back cover scans. for the last year or two they have at least started adding rear scans of key books. but it does not seem that hard to do it for all books. i still prefer their site in every other way to comicconnect, for one thing, their scans are much more consistent in terms of quality. their site is much faster and easier to navigate. and if i have books i am considering, i do request back scans from them. it's an annoying extra step, but not super hard. for me CL and HA have been the ones that almost always get my money. at least, back when i was still buying...

amen to the idea of researching actual sales results including the images. also, GPA has broken out faded books into their own category, at least some of the time, so as not to totally contaminate auction averages. sometimes they need to be notified that a sale was a faded copy. but i've been impressed with their doing this in a timely way.

thats simply glare from the light. note the big bright spot on the mylar just left of it. incredible books!

thats amazing! how do you play ice hockey in the summertime?

i take your point on the silliness of the planet comics not getting the grade it seems to deserve. still, grading comics on some basic level makes sense because some people want to collect an old comic that appears to be perfect in every way. the collectible item itself is being evaluated for condition. rusty staples are an issue because they can affect the book, soiling its pages with brown rust stains. it is usually the corners of a 9.9 comic that differentiate it from a 9.6 or 9.4 grade. with a graded video game, we seem to have established the fact that, with modern games, it is a little plastic box (with rounded corners in the case of switch games) that is being evaluated. not the label artwork (hidden under the plastic sleeve) nor the game cartridge itself. i get that with games, the item itself is the total package. and with a 20 year old game, i get the impulse to collect the highest grade possible. but with a modern game like the one i referenced, cgc and their competition titrating the distribution of a couple of 10s just seems a blatant ploy to milk the market. of course this is also done with modern comics too.

it's a real shame that any attempt at establishing legit competition for CGC in the realm of comic grading has thus far mostly failed. i read these threads every year as CGC continues to raise prices on everything and i see the vast number of unhappy customers. and yet, we have nowhere else to go. it's nice to have a monopoly if you're the company. i don't play the grading game myself but i understand that for many sellers/dealers this is a major part of how to generate income. i would be absolutely infuriated at the continued gouging and slow turnaround times that has been taking place ever since the new overlords took over.

okay i am not a video game collector, i am a comic collector. but my son who is 8 is obsessed with them. and as a former atari 2600 and intellivision owner back in the 70s and 80s, i totally appreciate the collectibility and nostalgia angle in collecting graded older games, just like comics. but when we saw this in the current heritage auction catalogue, i was a bit gobsmacked. it's graded by another company, but it received a 10, which heritage describes as a "very rare" grade for a game from this era (5 years ago). please tell me why i am not a smart person for thinking this is ridiculous, since the game is in a plastic case. are we not grading the game based on a 5 cent plastic case? the paper artwork inside the case on my son's identical game is just as perfect as this one. it's the case itself that gets dings or scratches on it once opened, or apparently even unopened. this game is already at 1k. ?!? clearly the grading companies are betting that there are collectors who love the idea of collecting absolutely perfect 10 graded games, much like with comics. but at least with comics, we are talking about the book itself, not a cheap little plastic case. seems like a purely manufactured market for something otherwise completely not collectible in any special way.

maybe 8-9 months ago there was a book i wanted on a dealers website. it was overpriced and i offered an over-market price but lower than ask. dealer politely told me he was into it for more than that and so passed. fast forward to 2 months ago, i check the site, and the book is now 32% cheaper than before. so i bought it. it must be very tough to be a dealer in times like these. when markets are up, (2021) if you price right, you can make a killing. but most folks need cash flow too, so unless they can live now on what they made a year and a half ago, they must lower prices sometimes past what they paid for books. i'm not a dealer but i have had to do that too this year on several books to raise cash to fund a purchase. some dealers slowly come down to reality, some faster than others. with all of the online selling competition these days, that process seems like it ought to be quicker. but re-pricing hundreds or thousands of books is a time consuming process. it's understandable if the sticker price is out of date. hopefully the good guys are open to market realities and willing to talk pricing at shows.

i do also prefer better page quality than C/OW fyi

if it presents well that sounds like a good price to me considering a 3.5 sold for 36k in january. if its faded or ugly then pass. on the other hand, if there is more bad economic news and we enter a real recession, or if china invades taiwan and it causes a worldwide recession, then prices may fall further. but i would only buy now if you are willing to hold for 2-4 years. things could be slow for quite awhile. no one knows the future but several smart economists seem to think that it will be years before things might look rosy again.

yes it thinks that all my read messages are new, unread messages. they all seem to be there, where i left them. but i have already read them over the years. avatars at least appear normal now on ipad. thanks mike-

every time i log in it says i have 73 unread messages. and yes all the icons are smushed on ipad. @CGC Mike

all three B's are written differently, especially the one on this lovely asm14. i doubt that it is related to either of those other books as far as an original collection goes. granted, i'm no handwriting expert.

yes its all about the kids. my 8 yr old and his 2 friends all enjoyed it as well. i found it derivative and boring, and basically a 90 min commercial for all the mario games. but its not for me or my generation.

just did a huge deal with robert and could not be happier. book was packed in 5 boxes! bulletproof. robert doesn't have many kudos here but seems to have done plenty of deals. definitely a great seller!

i finally picked up the last key book in my ditko spidey white page collection (not including my af15 which is owwp) from @machone79 and it's a great looking copy! very stoked to have all the big books in this run now, and with the white pages to boot. i don't normally care for the cva stickers but i can see why this book got one.

my first slab was a cgc 6.5 asm14 from comiclink. it had a very rusty staple that was not disclosed in the auction and i was too rookie to read the notes. i always disliked the book because of the rust. years later i upgraded and sold it for about what i had paid. immediately after, the book doubled in price, probably thanks to me.

how wazzit?

@jbud73 great report, thanks for that! as you mentioned hearing, terry's show was almost 2 months prior to wonder con and it absolutely obviates the need for this show. so many good dealers were at that show. i spent 1k to come in for that one and it was basically worth it. thats the show to plan a trip around, on the west coast. as you also mentioned, so many dealers at cons now, including some of my favorite guys, still have 2021 pricing. of course sales will be slow if you're pretending that prices are still at all time highs. i saw it at terrys show and i've seen it at many others over the years. during down markets, those dealers who are willing to adjust pricing dynamically with the market are the ones that will do some business, even when things are slow.

if that's true then i'm going on the record now as saying we're in big, big trouble.