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Total Market Value of All Comic Collections???

Started by nesta,

20 posts in this topic

nesta

nesta

Posted
Posted

Has anyone ever come up with a rough calculation of the value of all outstanding comic books? (say 1996 and before). If you just took the true market value of the CGC graded books... we must be talking about several hundred million dollars (? a few billion) correct?.

 

If we estimate that CGC'd books are only 10% (max?) of all outstanding items, we are talking about an insane amount of $. Anyone know how that compares with stamps and coins?

 

I'm just curious how much 'product' is actually out there and if anyone has taken an educated, realistic stab at estimating it.

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rob_react

rob_react

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If we estimate that CGC'd books are only 10% (max?) of all outstanding items,

 

I would guess that it's not even 1/10th of 1% yet, forget about a full 10%. The vast majority of collections are mostly raw, even around here. Then you've got to factor in dealer inventory, most of which is also raw. Actually, 1/10th of 1% might be a stretch, I just have no idea how many books CGC has graded.

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sfilosa

sfilosa

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Posted

CGC has graded over 400,000 books.

 

While they probably haven't graded even 1 out of every 10,000 possible books, I would also say around 9,990 of those should NEVER be graded. The value added by CGC will not come back in added profit.

 

And I would guess that the total value of all comic books exceeds $1 billion.

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rob_react

rob_react

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Posted
CGC has graded over 400,000 books.

 

While they probably haven't graded even 1 out of every 10,000 possible books, I would also say around 9,990 of those should NEVER be graded. The value added by CGC will not come back in added profit.

 

No doubt about that! Lots of stuff should never see the inside of a holder. In fact most of it is exactly what they made quarter bins for.

 

Back to my original point, with that number my estimate was way too high. It's a miniscule percent. A dot followed by a lot of zeroes and then a number... I mean, CGC, hasn't even graded 10% of all the Jim Lee X-Men #1s that were printed- meaning if that was the only book they ever graded 400,000 would only represent 5% of the total print run.

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DawgPhan

DawgPhan

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Well let's see..

 

cgc has graded 395,353 books as of 3/2/2004

(according to http://www.gregholland.com/cgc/stats.asp thanks ValiantMan)

 

But I believe that the question was about all books before 1996...so we will take out the books from after 1996 from cgc numbers. Which gives us....well I dont know... blush.gif I thought that there was a search function on Greg's site that would allow me to figure this out but I could not find it..oh well...let's just look at all years...Maybe ValiantMan will show up and help us out...anyway back to noddling...say 2 million books get published every month...this probably far short of the actual numbers, but what ever...since Jan 1940 there have been 771 months. which would mean about 1,542,000,000 comics. you figure that probably at least 1 in 5 comics is destroyed so that would leave us with...1,233,600,000

so even if you just value these comics at $1 each that is still well over 1 billion dollars in total value. of course if you went OPG or wizard it might be higher. so the 400,000 that cgc has graded(395k plus what they graded since 3/02/2004) is about .0324 % so about 3/100ths of 1%...of course sonsider all of these numbers to be rough estimates...but they should at least give a little bit of an idea... acclaim.gifconfused-smiley-013.gif

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nesta

nesta

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Forgeting about the cheap books (under $10) I agree that the outstanding # of issues is huge... 400K X say an $100 avg per book = $40 Million graded by CGC. I think that $ value is way low, considering the monthly transactions reported by GPA. I think $100M is probably more accurate (and that is probably is low).

 

If we go by the 1/10th of 1%... heck round it up to 1% of all $10 or more books have been graded... then we are talking about 100 X $100 million... then we would be talking about a $100 billion market, which is HUGE. It could easily be 10X that.

 

In reaction to the post of why this is in 'the marketplace' ... For one, I am curious. Second, it does lend credability to this hobby as a significant asset commodity market, and third, while the broad macro stuff here does not directly impact me, it is a basic starting point for those who analyze the market (not me) and the value base of these assets in the marketplace.

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DawgPhan

DawgPhan

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If we go by the 1/10th of 1%... heck round it up to 1% of all $10 or more books have been graded... then we are talking about 100 X $100 million... then we would be talking about a $100 billion market, which is HUGE. It could easily be 10X that.

 

 

I think that you meant 10 billion which is still a lot...

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AlexH

AlexH

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Forgeting about the cheap books (under $10) I agree that the outstanding # of issues is huge... 400K X say an $100 avg per book = $40 Million graded by CGC. I think that $ value is way low, considering the monthly transactions reported by GPA. I think $100M is probably more accurate (and that is probably is low).

 

If we go by the 1/10th of 1%... heck round it up to 1% of all $10 or more books have been graded... then we are talking about 100 X $100 million... then we would be talking about a $100 billion market, which is HUGE. It could easily be 10X that.

 

In reaction to the post of why this is in 'the marketplace' ... For one, I am curious. Second, it does lend credability to this hobby as a significant asset commodity market, and third, while the broad macro stuff here does not directly impact me, it is a basic starting point for those who analyze the market (not me) and the value base of these assets in the marketplace.

 

I was just thinking it would have been better to list this in the General section to get more responses. Not everyone looks here...

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joe_collector

joe_collector

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If we go by the 1/10th of 1%... heck round it up to 1% of all $10 or more books have been graded... then we are talking about 100 X $100 million... then we would be talking about a $100 billion market, which is HUGE. It could easily be 10X that.

 

You're off by a decimal point, but even $10 billion is insane and should help illustrate the inherent problem. Comic collecting IS NOT a $10 billion business. It never was, and probably never will be.

 

The entire hobby relies on people buying, holding and NEVER selling their books. If the masses of comics ever got released, the meltdown would be bliblical. 893whatthe.gif

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deathlok

deathlok

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If we estimate that CGC'd books are only 10% (max?) of all outstanding items,

 

I would guess that it's not even 1/10th of 1% yet, forget about a full 10%. The vast majority of collections are mostly raw, even around here. Then you've got to factor in dealer inventory, most of which is also raw. Actually, 1/10th of 1% might be a stretch, I just have no idea how many books CGC has graded.

 

This is really true. There are vast numbers of raw books in people's collections. Just my own collection, I have .02% of CGC books, or about 250 slabs. There are a large majority of collectors who have never heard of CGC, that have large collections also.

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s-man

s-man

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I think I speak for everyone here when I ask....

 

$650,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 ....

 

why did you start with 65...?? confused-smiley-013.gif

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nesta

nesta

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AlexH,

 

Perhaps you are right about posting in another section... I haven't really explored much of the other forums due to limited time, but I also figured that many people in the general section want to talk about characters, titles and the such... not so much about the economics.

 

DawgPhan, you are correct... it is $10 billion, not $100 billion, and I think that is still very conservative. Boggles the mind.

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thecomicsheet

thecomicsheet

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For what it's worth.

 

There have been in excess of $30,000,000 bid on CGC graded books on eBay since May 1, 2002. That is about 175,000 books or about $171 average bid. If we use that as an average for the 400,000 that CGC has graded that gives a market cap of about $68,000,000 for all CGC graded books.

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DoubleCovaBrotha

DoubleCovaBrotha

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You're off by a decimal point, but even $10 billion is insane and should help illustrate the inherent problem. Comic collecting IS NOT a $10 billion business. It never was, and probably never will be.

 

The entire hobby relies on people buying, holding and NEVER selling their books. If the masses of comics ever got released, the meltdown would be bliblical. 893whatthe.gif

 

Wouldn't this be true of all collectible markets?

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joe_collector

joe_collector

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You're off by a decimal point, but even $10 billion is insane and should help illustrate the inherent problem. Comic collecting IS NOT a $10 billion business. It never was, and probably never will be.

 

The entire hobby relies on people buying, holding and NEVER selling their books. If the masses of comics ever got released, the meltdown would be bliblical. 893whatthe.gif

 

Wouldn't this be true of all collectible markets?

 

Yes, and that's why these "hobbies turned graded markets" ultimately fail.

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valiantman

valiantman

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Well let's see..

 

cgc has graded 395,353 books as of 3/2/2004

(according to http://www.gregholland.com/cgc/stats.asp thanks ValiantMan)

 

But I believe that the question was about all books before 1996...so we will take out the books from after 1996 from cgc numbers. Which gives us....well I dont know... blush.gif Maybe ValiantMan will show up and help us out...

I don't know if you're all done by the time I'm posting this... but...

CGC Submissions 1996 and earlier... 326,433

CGC Submissions 1997 to current... 68,920

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