Stefan_W

Their business model depends on fees, and people contact each other to cut out the middle man and avoid fees, so I guess that part was inevitable. Becoming FB means having different revenue streams that are outside of fees and I guess that was a bridge too far compared to their established sales model. I always post a bunch of comics in the New Year and stop selling when I hit a certain point in sales, and yeah I also notice far less traffic even from a year ago. There are also far fewer terrible offers so I guess it is not all bad

A local guy has been slowly selling off his collection to me over the past few years. We agree on pricing pretty easily which makes things work for both of us. I knew he had these early ASMs a couple of years back but he wasn't ready to sell yet, and he let me know a couple of couple of days ago that he was moving on from them. As always it was a pretty easy deal to make. I actually put a higher value point on the ASM 5 than he did so he actually negotiated down from the price I offered him, which is not something you see every day. I did make a video of it that is going live tomorrow but that is pretty much the story.

Picked up some low grade ASMs. The first issue is a Golden Record Reprint.

I am going to eat a bit of crow here. The books arrived today and the ones that I had listed in my order as CPVs are actually news stand editions. The good folks at CGC were completely right to change them to news stands and I made an error when sending them in. So kudos to them to catching my error

Cool, but they can't afford me. ;)

I just opened this thread for the first time, and..... it is not what I expected

This order hit Q/C on March 22 and was picked up by Fedex this morning March 23. A new speed record for one of my orders

If you look at it in terms of ROIs and basic marketplace principles I see GA books in general and SA keys as being like blue chip stocks that continue to modestly appreciate over time. Moderns are typically more volatile so they are essentially higher risk/higher reward books. So if you go back to 2019, if you put $400 into a GA book it would be worth $500-$600 today. If you put that same money into a 9.8 copy of Ultimate Fallout 4 you would have a book around the $1800-ish range in value. If you put that money into 9.8 copies of other modern keys you may be up a bit depending on which one you picked. I think the basic idea is that you can do well with 9.8 moderns if you pick well, but maybe not so much if you catch it too high on the type train when pricing is inflated. GA are a bit easier in the sense that it is harder to go wrong. I am leaving out buying in 2021 since that was an anomaly - almost no 2021 purchases look particularly great right now after the large price correction.

Will do, PM sent. I appreciate the effort since sending them to me and then sending them back as ME is pure wastage considering I already know of the issue with these books. I hope they can be pulled in time

I just got results in for my latest shipment of moderns and all three books that I clearly marked as Canadian Price Variants in my submission form were changed to News stands. The box is still at CGC waiting for pickup by FedEx tomorrow, but that is an automatic minimum of three books for ME once they get back to me. Mistakes happen and I don't sweat that stuff but, honestly, I shake my head a bit at how the exact same mistake was made for three books in a row in the same shipment.

I may be wrong, but I strongly doubt that CGC has much to worry about here.

CL will hold books for you if you do not have enough to bother with shipping.

I'm not sure I agree. When you dont have enough to ship you just ask them to hold, so the amount in each shipment would be roughly the same as it is right now.

They have tons of books in their auctions. The change that I would make on CL that is the highest priority in eyes is at this point they should run weekly auctions instead of these month long marathons. When I look through books at the start of an auction it often takes me a few sittings to get through them all, and I usually forget a lot of the stuff that was interesting to me as the weeks roll by and hundreds of other books come up. Week long quick hit auctions, like what Heritage does, are far more engaging and easy to manage on my end.

Agreed. It is sort of like putting stickers on the back of sold slabs thinking that this is somehow an advertisement for their auctions. Procedure is laid out and it sometimes takes a while for rational thought to catch up.

I think it is common for people to sell off some stuff to be able to buy things they want more. My own story is a few years ago I got back into the hobby after a couple of decades off, and I wanted to fill out my Fantastic Four run. I quickly realized that I did not want to pull hundreds out of the household each month for my hobby so things started to fizzle. A guy contacted me asking if I was interested in his ASM 2 (I had an ad looking for FF comics). It was super low grade but I bought it for $200 and sold it for almost 600. I took the proceeds and bought raw ASM 40-49 at a Comic Link auction and turned that $350 into about $700. I kept doing stuff like that and built up a stock of books. Every book I now own in my PC or otherwise came from that initially $200 investment, and I have not pulled cash out of the household funds for comics since then. In fact, I actually paid down some household debt when prices started climbing and everyone wanted my Silvers. Flipping is not inherently a bad thing. Some people are kind of sleazy about it, but that is more who they are then the actual buying and re-selling process.

One thing that always bugs me is during the comic boom when prices were going up and up the dealers with overpriced books basically got a get out of jail free card. In late 2020 and into 2021, everything seemed to sell well above what anyone would have paid a few years before. So people who basically sucked at selling and overpriced their books were suddenly able to move their stock and cash in big time. The really funny flip side to this coin is some of the people who were overpricing their books kept raising the prices above FMV as the market went up, and then when it crashed out they missed their golden window and were stuck with the same books they had before. Their tears of anguish give me sustenance.

Ah, ok. I just do that by putting in a low bid so I can see it in my auction bids section, but yeah I completely agree that would be very helpful.

They don't? I get notifications regularly for recent listings that are on my watchlist.

Another order, another speed record. Sent in a group of Moderns that hit the system on Mar 15th, and they just moved to G/E/I this afternoon so 48 hours!

I can access the submission tracking on my PC but not on my I-Phone. This has been going on for a few days now.

9.8 is only a benchmark for newer books. People who collect silvers, for example, are not as obsessed with chasing that type of grade. Just as an aside, I have noticed over the past 5-8 years it has become tougher to sell more recent books that are below a 9.8 unless it is something that is really high value. I suspect that as the market is continually adding 9.8 copies of books people do not hold a 9.4 or a 9.6 in the same regard as they used to. Those grades are still gorgeous copies, but they are not the "perfect" copies that a lot of people now hold out for.

I buy comics and resell a lot of them at a higher price. The most important thing is giving people fair prices, which means that you have to be able to find books for an even bigger deal than the deals you offer to buyers. That often means buying in bulk and re-selling the pieces. I dont think people generally care where you get your books so long as they are happy with the prices, grading, etc. As a side note, I could caution against re-selling in the same place as you buy. There are local people who buy collections on kijiji or FB and start re-selling the pieces in the same place within a day or two. That just comes across as icky and impacts on a person's reputation, although of course a deal is a deal and at the end of the day people still buy books when they are priced well.

What on Earth was up with that MP15? So much red and yet that book roars in at over double current value.

Mine hit the system as SFG on Feb 21 and zero movement so far. I have a reholder submission that has been SFG since Feb 1 so I am not holding my breath since that process is largely the same.