1Cool

On 5/5/2024 at 10:50 AM, Shadow said:

I think I've only missed one in the last 30 years but this will be #2. I'll be out of town.

That said, I still go but it's such a shadow of its former self comic-wise. Few big players there except Harley. I miss when it was a bigger deal. Good celebrity list though. (Not my thing)

I went for about 5 years in a row but it's been a couple since I was back.  Booth fees must have gone up and the smaller guys just were not showing up and there wasn't as much comics in the room as Baltimore or Heroes (and I only get 1 big travel con a year)

How did it go?  Bet there was good books in those $10 boxes.

On 5/6/2024 at 12:27 PM, october said:

100%

The big advantage to collectible investing is that with knowledge and patience, I have a good degree of control over my acquisition costs. If I want a Hulk 181, I can find one substantially below the current range of prices with a moderate amount of time/effort. Not so with Apple stock, I have to pay the market rate at the time. This single difference is, far and away, the driving force behind superior collectible returns. Without it you are almost certainly better off with traditional investing where transaction costs, scalability and liquidity are much, much more favorable. 

Selling comics is also 20x more time consuming and difficult compared to just buying a wide variety of stocks or mutual funds (hopefully with some knowledge and luck).  Buying a collection and thinking you will triple your money without a lot of experience, time on your hands and some luck is not going to happen.  2020 through half of 2022 you didn't need much but other than that one outlier it really is not easy to sell comic book collections for big bucks (if you can find them in the first place).

Completely missed the big crease on the Web so I went 9.2 which is about as much as I had in the first few rounds.  Tricky obvious but still kind of hidden defect.  Great contest

On 5/2/2024 at 6:34 PM, namisgr said:

I didn't find that to be true.  Over a half dozen different auctions for around 350 high grade SA and BA slabs, I realized excellent prices overall and the after-commission returns were much better than anticipated based on past market prices.

It's almost certainly not the best venue for realizing the highest prices possible for every era and genre, but for the kinds of things I collected they were a major outlet for buying and selling for 15 years.

 

CL does have record prices realized every now and then which is why they did want to have some sales included in GPA.  It’s a bad optic if they say it’s a lot of work but I’ll only do the work if only the great sales get included but it’s not worth our time if everything has to go in (since it doesn’t benefit us).  They should have just said no it’s proprietary info and be done with it and not added that other option.

If Hector doesn't show the books he is bringing - I'm not going

On 5/2/2024 at 11:04 AM, dick pontoon said:

To elaborate further, Clink was willing to submit selective data only. GPA insisted that Clink had to submit all sales, not just exceptional ones, or none. The discussion was played out here on the Boards years ago.

Talk about trying to cook the books to make prices seem higher in GPA.  Kind of shows you what CLink thinks about their final prices if they don't want the general public to know what they are.

Grades are in and I've got a bad feeling about these books.  We will see!  Thanks for another fun grading contest.

On 5/1/2024 at 10:03 AM, batmiesta said:

I don't think he will ever let me live this one down.  I sent out his package and put in $400 for the total price of the 30 books but I neglected to notice that the stupid price was per book so they wanted him to pay fees on $12,000!!  I'll look a lot more carefully on the next one - thank goodness E-Bay takes care of all that stuff when I sell books to people up north.

On 5/1/2024 at 3:11 PM, Ride the Tiger said:

Three people with the score of 11 are tied for 1st. Two people with the score of 12 are tied for 2nd. Which means 13 points are tied for 3rd.

You're not wrong but that is not how rankings go in any competition.  If he finished the competition right now there would be side contest to determine which one of the people with 11 gets 1st, who gets 2nd and the loser of that group would get 3rd.  The people who you refer to as being in 2nd place would be content to share 4th and 5th place since the top three spots are taken by the people with 11.  

I really don't want to get into a tie breaker with The General!  Hopefully he will rocked up to 1st place and stay away from my 6th place.

I'm in 6th place (or at least tied).  Things get stressful when you are not out of it in the last round  

On 4/30/2024 at 8:38 PM, zzutak said:

I just checked the two scans available on Heritage.  I was wrong -- both copies have this same blemish! 

I looked and each of the high grade copies had that weird scratch mark on the back.  Sure made me take a few looks.

3 bullseyes and 1 off but the SW 8 was a complete guess at 7.0 so 3 points for the round.  I’ve seen perfect books get a 6.0 but the staples were very ugly.  I bet it would have gotten 7.0 or worse if it was visible from the outside.

On 4/30/2024 at 5:30 PM, the blob said:

You don't think if you put that up for $400-50 with a best offer that you wouldn't eventually get a decent price? 

It would take awhile to get over $300 considering all the not even close to key books in the set but I guess $3 a book is possible.  I don’t get even close to the eyeballs he gets so the set could sit for years at that price.

On 4/30/2024 at 3:40 PM, kimik said:

Nah. Kids up here are spending big $$$ again which is nice as it is sign of solid economy. They youngest buyer I had was a 6 or 7 year old dressed as Batman who pointed out a Batman #427 on the rack. His mom asked if he wanted it, he said yes, so his mom handed me the money and they thanked me for it. I am sure that meant one less high grade Batman #427 by the end of the day.  

You sold a death in the family book to a 6 year old?  Hope he knows Robbin didn’t stay dead.

Kids are getting into comics for the 1st time in Canada.  They are a little bit behind the states up there.

He is correct.  The couple other sets were cut off and shown next.  I'm envious they get so many people paying hundreds of dollars for sets.

Lot to do about basically nothing especially since the group photos are way too far away to determine grades or how books present.  All the sets are billed as high grade so I can see why they would take one set of pictures and use them for a few different sets if they are basically the same.

Grades in.  It can't be worse than the last one!

Wow - that is a lot of red   I'd think we would be seeing a lot more green on the left side of the chart with it being the start of comic book season.  

And everything is over $350 so this is the good stuff and we still see so much red.  That's sad.  I don't have GPA but we must be seeing 2018 - 2019 prices at this point with a lot of these books.

Wow - I’m only 2 points out of the top spot since pretty much everyone sucked this round.  Typically having 10 points after 2 rounds would put you in the middle of the pack.

I couldn’t have been more wrong on the round if I tried.  Always next year

My grades where in yesterday so I'm not a slacker.  But his emojis this time don't give me much hope with staying up in the front.