Do we need a Comic Book Price Index? 1 1

[Westy Steve]

So much discussion about which way the comic book market is headed.  It makes me wonder if we need a comic book index. Sort of like a stock market index. Or does one already exist?

If not, we need to make one. 

I'm toying with the idea of making one.  But then I start realizing that if I do make one, it's something that has to have a meaningful monthly update.  For example, it can't use Action 1 as a benchmark because they don't sell often enough.  So here's some of the stuff that I think could go into it:

1.  An early Action Comics that trades often enough to track monthly.  Maybe the first Luthor?

2.  An early Batman that is comparable...perhaps first Penguin?

3.  A few non-key golden age books with interesting covers

4.  A few "mega key" silver age books in mid-grade.

5. A few "mega key" Bronze Age books in the 9.0 range.

6.  A few mega key Copper Age books in 9.4

7.  A few mega key Modern books in 9.8  (but not 1st Ninja Turtles or Walking Dead #1 because it would skew the index)

8.  About 10 non-key books that are a mix of Gold, Silver, Bronze, Copper and Modern

Also, I was thinking that instead of trying to average  a bunch of prices, perhaps I could take the median price of 3 to 5 sold prices.  This would approximate an average but wouldn't take as much work.

 

How would you do it?  Looking for ratification, criticism, or any other kind of input.  Or does such an index exist and I don't know about it? 

Steve

 

Edited August 31, 2017 by Westy Steve

[HighRadArt]

Too broad.  Perhaps if you narrowed it down a bit more.  As in raw or graded?  Plus, MA is all over the place with exclusives and variants.

[01TheDude]

have 30 or so key books from the SA and call them the DOW (admittedly I'm a little biased towards that segment)

30 more from the Bronze age and call that the NASDAQ

go with a broadly trading grade range say 5.0-7.5 for the SA and take all average values (using some sort of price point on grade level) recorded in GPA for the past period

Not sure if you can do one for GA but if you can-- call it the S&P 30

Copper through modern-- penny stocks

Manga -- Nikkei?

Not sure if this is something someone would want totackle on their own. It can be done but it seems a little more work than it might be worth UNLESS the GPA was the one who actually controlled it and offered it up as a service to its members or to show that it has the pulse of the prices on comics in the world.

[ComicConnoisseur]

12 hours ago, 01TheDude said:

have 30 or so key books from the SA and call them the DOW (admittedly I'm a little biased towards that segment)

30 more from the Bronze age and call that the NASDAQ

go with a broadly trading grade range say 5.0-7.5 for the SA and take all average values (using some sort of price point on grade level) recorded in GPA for the past period

Not sure if you can do one for GA but if you can-- call it the S&P 30

Copper through modern-- penny stocks

Manga -- Nikkei?

Not sure if this is something someone would want totackle on their own. It can be done but it seems a little more work than it might be worth UNLESS the GPA was the one who actually controlled it and offered it up as a service to its members or to show that it has the pulse of the prices on comics in the world.

[TheSurgeon]

I like your idea. I have thought about a comic fund similar to a mutual fund where investors would buy shares into the fund and the manager would be responsible for buying and selling comics. That way individual investors who could normally not afford a six or seven figure comic could own part of one. Investors in the fund could then sell their shares in the open market, and presumably the value of the shares would rise and fall with the value of the comics. No way I could have afforded the Action Comics CGC 6.0 that sold for $317k back in 2009, but if I could have joined other investors to buy a portion of the book I would have considered it. 

[Westy Steve]

10 minutes ago, TheSurgeon said:

I like your idea. I have thought about a comic fund similar to a mutual fund where investors would buy shares into the fund and the manager would be responsible for buying and selling comics. That way individual investors who could normally not afford a six or seven figure comic could own part of one. Investors in the fund could then sell their shares in the open market, and presumably the value of the shares would rise and fall with the value of the comics. No way I could have afforded the Action Comics CGC 6.0 that sold for $317k back in 2009, but if I could have joined other investors to buy a portion of the book I would have considered it. 

Honestly I thought about running one, but you need all kinds of special licenses to run a fund for that.  However, (I think) a way around that would be to start an LLC that has a charter to buy and hold comics and then sell shares in the LLC.

[grebal]

^Yeah, for one thing it would almost certainly be required to register as a RIC (Registered Investment Company), just like any other mutual fund.

For balancing purposes, if you ran with @01TheDude's idea of market based "index", and calculate a market capitalization for each of the 30 'dow' component comics, presumably just like the stock indices you'd multiply the $FMV for each included grading-increment, times the quantity in the census.  But would you also need to add a multiplier for the estimated amount of raw comics outstanding (in similar grades for that issue) if you trying to truly reflect the market cap outstanding?  In some cases the o/s raw books might equal or even exceed the quantity that was slabbed, and in other cases perhaps the ratio of raw:slabbed might even be reversed, from the impression I've got reading these boards the past year and a half.

[01TheDude]

comic coins FTW -- who wants in on that Avengers Annual 7?

 

-- the whole idea of investing funds for comics seems silly to me. I can see how having an index of sorts might be helpful from a macro standpoint of the overall health of the hobby but little else. Each book has its own set of variables and demand

[grebal]

^I thought your idea was to quantify the same thing the Dow was designed to quantify - risk inherent in the market system (aka diversifiable) risk.  As contrasted with the risk of owning that you can't avoid - i.e. the risk of owning any particular, specific, stock (or comic or coin, in our case).

If so then your last point is what kills the idea - there is little correlation between the price movements of individual comics - they go up or down depending on the current demand for each issue - there's no point in quantifying whether & how much the market is going up or down (which everyone can pretty easily see, anyway).  But I'd disagree that buying a "basket" of comics is a bad idea, since it would lessen the impact of any one or two books dying off (but then it'd also lessen your reward if you've a knack for picking the winners).

[01TheDude]

my last comments were simply joking around - mostly about the idea of comic book coins which someone floated around here a couple of years ago with the coin being backed by some so-so book like Avengers Annual #7. Hardly the incredible key book and even using that as the starting point made it the whole idea seem bizarre. I mean-- I would bet many of us already have our own copy of that book. Now if it were some highly sought after and rare book --- THAT might have made it seem more credible.

If someone comes up with a valid formula and method to measure the strength of the hobby-- I would be all for it. While the information would be much less statistically significant (i.e. less data than the stock market), it might do a decent job of approximating relative market momentum. The tough part would be picking the representative books and qualifying how they are measured across grade ranges. Some keep pointing out the impact of raw sales-- but other than the iffy/susceptible-to-manipulation data culled from eBay - I'm not sure where reliable data might be collected on raw sales. GPA keeps decent track of the slabbed books-- and while they seem to have an inherently higher perceived value because they are formally graded/encapsulated-- one should be able to extrapolate representative values for raw from them. 

 

anyway-- happy Friday errybody!

[Westy Steve]

   OK, I know some of you might be critical of this.  Perhaps it doesn't go far enough.  Perhaps I shouldn't omit unslabbed comics.  But here's something I'm going to track monthly.   These books are a cross-section of what fairly serious comic book collector would buy.  It doesn't include Action 1, AF15, etc.  But it also doesn't include the drek.  It's intended to represent the kinds of books most of us invest the biggest chunk of our money into routinely, or at least would reasonably consider buying.  I'll make the data presentation prettier next month when I have something to compare it to.  My baseline is from last available sales on ebay and I will be as impartial as I can.  I will take auction values when they are available over buy it now prices.  When I have multiple prices to choose from, I'll try to take the most "median" value, rather than average them.  So yeah, I'll be taking what I would call "sensible shortcuts" where needed because I just want to approximate market direction more than nail down specific perfect rates.  I am not including "raw" books because then I'm hostage to my own, or a seller's own grading bias. Also, that would take way more time than I have to devote to this.   I think that, in general, the value of slabbed book should help one derive an estimate for the value of a raw book anyway.  

Each era is represented by a nicer book, a medium book, and a more common book, but the books all still represent some of the nicer, more collectible books within their respective era.  One could argue this is a semi-key to key index, omitting mega keys.

I wanted to normalize the data, so I'm dividing my starting prices (the "Baseline 9/1/2017" column) by a weighting factor (my "100 factor") to arrive at a baseline normalized value of 100.  Next month, I'll divide the new prices by the same 100 factor so if we see that it computes to a value of 101.2, that would imply that the comic rose by 1.2%.

If any of you have access to GPA, it would be interesting for you to compare the shortest available average (3 month?) to my baseline prices to see how far off I am.  Hopefully this will demonstrate that my estimates are fairly good, though doubtful they are perfect.

I invite anyone interested to make up their own monthly index if they like...especially if they hate mine.

								Baseline	Sep-17
						100 Factor		9/1/2017	Normalized
Silver	ASM 14			4.0 VG		6.56		$  656.00	100
Silver	Green Lantern 1			5.0 VG/FN		7.75		$  775.00	100
Silver	X-men 3			4.0 VG		3.12		$  312.00	100
Bronze	Iron Fist 14			9.0 VF/NM		3		$  300.00	100
Bronze	X-men 101			9.2 NM-		4.37		$  437.00	100
Bronze	Batman 232			6.0 FN		2.64		$  264.00	100
Copper	ASM 300			9.6 NM+		7.25		$  725.00	100
Copper	TMNT 2 (first print)			9.4 NM		3.29		$  329.00	100
Copper	Swamp Thing #37			9.6 NM+		2.01		$  201.00	100
Modern	Batman Adv 12			9.4 NM		5.5		$  550.00	100
Modern	NYX #3			9.4 NM		4.5		$  450.00	100
Modern	Walking Dead #2			9.4 NM		4.8		$  480.00	100
								Total:	1200
								Avg:	100

Edited September 3, 2017 by Westy Steve

[Aweandlorder]

What I would love to see is a census platform with gpa built in. I think this would be a huge step in visualizing current stock value and share amount. This could further be adapted as an app. They could have different tiers. A free version which just shows you 9.8s or a full version and an app that shows you all grades. 

[rjpb]

It could be a fun diversion, but outside of high grade copper/modern books with fairly constant sales and not much appearance difference between copies of a given grade, I don't see how practical it is.  Even more common books from the 1940s and 50s generally don't have enough sales data to get specific enough for an index, though you could obviously extrapolate ballpark values. And up through the Bronze Age factors like page quality, production quality, eye-appeal, nature of flaws, pedigree status, etc, effect comparative values for books even in the same grade.

While there is plenty of archived sales information to make realistic assessments of a FMV range for most comics, and to track their overall trajectory, enough to allow estimates for similar comics where there is less available data, an actual index implies a more exact measure. 

What might be a better indicator of  the market is to do something like track the aggregate value of all books sold on ebay (or listed in GPA) from a given era within a certain price range. For instance eliminating anything under $100 in GA, where there is high price volatility, and over $1000, so that individual sales can't skew the numbers easily.  I don't know how feasible this is, and someone with a background in statistics would know better, but overall market strength is probably better understood by how much people are willing to spend on it in general as opposed to individual books. 

[Westy Steve]

1 hour ago, rjpb said:

It could be a fun diversion, but outside of high grade copper/modern books with fairly constant sales and not much appearance difference between copies of a given grade, I don't see how practical it is.  Even more common books from the 1940s and 50s generally don't have enough sales data to get specific enough for an index, though you could obviously extrapolate ballpark values. And up through the Bronze Age factors like page quality, production quality, eye-appeal, nature of flaws, pedigree status, etc, effect comparative values for books even in the same grade.

While there is plenty of archived sales information to make realistic assessments of a FMV range for most comics, and to track their overall trajectory, enough to allow estimates for similar comics where there is less available data, an actual index implies a more exact measure. 

What might be a better indicator of  the market is to do something like track the aggregate value of all books sold on ebay (or listed in GPA) from a given era within a certain price range. For instance eliminating anything under $100 in GA, where there is high price volatility, and over $1000, so that individual sales can't skew the numbers easily.  I don't know how feasible this is, and someone with a background in statistics would know better, but overall market strength is probably better understood by how much people are willing to spend on it in general as opposed to individual books. 

That's interesting and it really isn't that hard to do.  You can look at ebay past sales in the comics section and then screen for sales between $99 and $101, and then look at how many results/hits you get.  Ebay tells you the number of matches to your search parameter.

My problem with $100 books is that if you take a $40 book in NM and you slab it, the market considers that a $100 book.  So the number of hits you get might actually be a function of slabbing activity or collector acceptance of slabs.  But this method would track whether more money is being spent and that's valuable information....so I see your point.