What would you invest in?

[joe_collector]

>>I have and will continue to put my money into vehicles that I think will continue to provide an acceptable market return. I believe GA/SA comics continue to fit that bill. You make your choice I make mine.

 

I can drink to that, and I apologize, but I thought you were advocating comics as an investment vehicle for the average Joe Six-pack.

 

If you're paying top-CGC dollar for high-grade slabs, it's your funeral.

[ninanina]

Well, the next step would be the magazines, right?

 

When that's over, maybe people will be looking at VF's to invest in 'cause their cheap now. And when that happens, prices on VF's will start to rise and maybe get a bit closer to the high grades. How?, well the high grades will have been dropping 'cause people are buying VF's now. While all this is happening, the collectors overseas are going to want to upgrade the reading copies they've been buying from North America over the past few years.... and so on , and so on, and so on. (Makes me dizzy just thinking about it.) When and if NM's get rediculously high, well the restoration market may make a come-back.

 

And like a lot of stuff on this post, I do admit it's speculation. But that's pretty much what happens when you invest in anything. You speculate. Sometimes your right, sometimes your wrong.

 

Best advice:

 

"DON'T PUT ALL YOUR EGGS IN ONE BASKET." I feel that just like stocks and bonds, your gonna' have your comics that lose, make money and break even. And, buy what's cheap now. Not what everyone wants - but what they are going to want in the future.

 

Best Bet:

 

Well, hi grade magazines of course, what else? Do what greggy did.

[joe_collector]

>>Well, hi grade magazines of course, what else? Do what greggy did.

 

What Greggy did is no longer possible in comics due to CGC. That was the key to his windfall, having bought the comics in a depressed period, then selling them during a hyped-up buying fest.

 

That's why I feel comics are a dead zone for investment, as the opportunity is long gone. Just look at all the major collections that have been sold off during the CGC phase, and more old-time collectors and celebrities are joining in as we speak.

 

Great time to sell, horrible time to buy for investment purposes.

 

I would normally say that buying VF or VF/NM at lower-than market rates would be a good buy, but honestly, no one knows how bad things will tank in the coming years, or how low you'll have to buy to get an adequate return on VF books.

[clobberintime]

I forgot to mention this part of the story. There was this one guy with this missnomer Comic-Investor who was the kind of leader of the crash cult - he did have many disciples on Wall Street also. He had the darkest outlook on comics as investments and on how dealers just ripped people off and on how people ought to be stopped from wasting their money on these valueless comics. Whatever happened to the king of the henny penns? Well he kind of had a melt down or went completely insane! But rumor has he hs returned - like Jesus himself or something. and he really thought the DD movie sucked and he and his minions like to go on and on about how terrible that movie was! Look for it under a recent thread. You would think some people around here were in the film production biz or something.

[FlyingDonut]

my head hurts from the pounding against the wall. Note that Golden Age and Silver Age books do not fit into these four categories!

 

1) Published post-1966

2) 9.6 or below

3) Borrowing a term from baseball cards, "common" issues (Amazing Spider-Man 115 is a "common", Amazing Spider-Man 121 is not, in an extreme example).

4) Not in any sense of the imagination a "key". (That wacky $120 MTU 53 is a "key" to some people. Same with the insane $600 FF 112).

 

Graded and slabbed books that hit all four of these points have undeniably, without question, crashed in price since last April.

 

At NO point have I ever said that Golden Age books have crashed. In fact, I'm bullish pre-1943 Golden Age books. Very bullish.

[14 of spades]

hey comicman,

 

i see your auction for FF4 - why the private auction? not trying to do rustysstarwars are you??

[Illiterati-migration]

You know, it would help the hobby a great deal if all the hairy-palmed, anti-social, pimple-faced, geeks and jerks would just get out of collecting (just for a while, just to lure in the squares) so everyone else would think it was a "dead art" and thus make it insanely "retro" and thus, impossibly cool.

[FlyingDonut]

now THAT's amusing!

[delekkerste]

SA/GA key books do not show the volatility of spec stocks.

Track record shows that they are blue chip investments based on regular performance and return.

 

You're looking in the rear-view mirror. Of course SA/GA books haven't shown the volatility of spec stocks...but then again, a lot of markets look really good before they go parabolic and cr@p out. If you're 39 and from Australia, you're probably very familiar with the history of the price of gold. There's a market that showed almost no volatility for years (in US$) as the price was fixed. It was revalued upward at one point and was eventually allowed to float, where it appreciated wildly, soaring past $800/oz. (intraday) in a parabolic rise culminating in 1980. Of course, the following 23 years haven't been so kind to that commodity. Neither will the next 20 years be for GA/SA books. I'm not, as FlyingDonut pointed out, predicting an out-and-out crash like we've seen in Bronze/Modern, but I do think you can and will see lower rates of return, at the very least, if not stagnation or outright decline.

 

There are more gen x members of this forum than baby boomers. So why do you collect?

 

I'm a 30-something Gen-Xer and I don't collect any GA and rarely venture into SA. It's not my bag - there's very little nostalgia in it for me. Don't make the mistake of thinking that future generations are going to like exactly the same things that you do and are going to pay up to take those books off your hands at a big profit 20 years from now.

 

Why is ebay a one time quantum leap.

 

eBay instantly juiced liquidity into the market. I think all of us long-time collectors (I've been collecting for 20 years) know what the market was like before then. This had an immediate effect of revaluing the entire comics universe. That's a one-time event. Sure, Internet sales will continue to grow, but the market has already priced in this liquidity. The comic market isn't completely efficient, but it's 2003 and eBay has been around for years and we have over 100,000 comics listed every day...believe me, the liquidity-related repricing occurred long ago.

 

I neglected to mention that the introduction of 3rd party grading (CGC) was also a one-time quantum leap in revaluation. As Joe_Collector pointed out, that sent prices soaring for both slabbed and raw books (the latter being raw material for slabbed books). We're already well into the correction process for much of the market and GA/SA doesn't exist in a vacuum. Not saying that it'll happen overnight or that you shouldn't buy anything, but you should be mindful that it will happen - the only questions are when and to what extent.

 

Please show me the figures that show that collectors are leaving the GA/SA markets?

 

Collectors are leaving the comic market as a whole. I'm not saying GA/SA is going to disappear overnight or that GA/SA collectors are leaving in droves at this moment. However, there is a fundamental longer-term problem that the hobby faces. We're all getting older and most of us will eventually sell off our books before we die...but who will we sell them to? That the number of collectors is shrinking as a whole is undeniable - go read Chuck Rozanski's 2-page article in the current CBG, or the interviews with the various comic creators & executives on www.comicon.com/pulse in the article a month or two ago on Marvel's price increases if you think I'm wrong.

 

Gene

[Mushroom]

We will just have to agree to disagree. The beauty of investing is around different people analysing different opportunities with differing results.

 

As a closer, given your prognosis around the market going forward give a predicition as to % (+ or- or flat) for the major comic ages and genres in the forthcoming O/S guide.

[murph0]

Yeh, it's really tough buying books during weekdays..not. Thank god for a fax machine..without that it would've actually have taken some time to buy all that stuff. :\

It's not like buying a comic takes hours and hours to complete, still plenty of time for other [!@#%^&^].

 

Brian

[comicmankev]

Private auctions described (by me) on the following thread:

Private auction

 

This is certainly getting heated! But just to remind you all, all I asked is what you would advise someone to invest in in the following price brackets:

1)$25

2)$100

3)$1000

4)$5000

5)$10000

 

I have to say that I have been on and off collecting for 15 years, and I am under 30. I started by buying 10p (UK) reader copies from the local book shop, and went on from there. From my knowledge, I still have my own collection that would never part from me until death. But I also suppliment my wages by buying and flippin! There is money to be made, still. Not in modern comics, maybe not in CGC comics, but there is money there.

 

Peopl can discuss far and wide that there are much better ways to invest in, and yes, maybe a static bank interest rate would be safest. The problem is, people that invest want to make a large profit, which can be done anywhere. A frined of mine bought a car for $300, used it for 4 years without spending a penny on it! I bought an Amazing Spiderman 101 in VF+ for about $20 CGC'd it, got a 9.8, sold for $865! Some people in England (and elsewhere) bought stocks in a company called lastminute.com for a penny each, six months later they were worth $1.50 each, and this is during the dotcom bust!

 

There is money to be made anywhere, even at the bleakest of times, it's just knowing what to invest in. I thought it would be fun to ask you guys, in your OWN opinion, what YOU think would be best in the above price brackets. REMEMBER, it's your views on what COMICS would be a good investment. NOT where you can get more return from, NOT comics collecting should be fun and buy what you like to read! These are all valid points in COLLECTING, but we are talking investing here.

 

This thread looks like it will continue for a while, with people having major views on what to do or not to do. THATS GREAT thats exactly what were after here, keep it coming.

[delekkerste]

As a closer, given your prognosis around the market going forward give a predicition as to % (+ or- or flat) for the major comic ages and genres in the forthcoming O/S guide.

 

I don't have a prediction, because I feel the O/S guide is a lagging indicator. Last year's guide did not show huge increases because of the CGC phenomenon and yet the buzz is that this year some of that increase will be seen, especially with the addition of the 9.0 category, which will allow for a Guide revaluation of the 9.4 grade. Also, data for the Guide is collected months in advance of publication while you can better keep up with the current market on eBay, Heritage, ComicLink, etc. People often stick up their noses at eBay, saying "that's not the market", but look how much volume flows through it! While the very high-end stuff may not sell that often on eBay, for most sub-categories there are enough sales to be statistically meaningful.

 

Gene

[Bonds25]

Gene, what are you investing in now? Real estate has topped out, the stock market sucks, and comics are tough to make money with. Are you shorting, or just hoarding cash?

[PovertyRow]

we didn't pull this POV out of our collective behinds

 

Words fail me! Good lord! I have NEVER been in your collective whatevers!

[delekkerste]

Gene, what are you investing in now? Real estate has topped out, the stock market sucks, and comics are tough to make money with. Are you shorting, or just hoarding cash?

 

I'm mostly in cash & equivalents and short-term fixed income, though I do have interests in several private companies and have been trading the stock market opportunistically with some success, managing to ride some nice winners and narrowly averting some disasters...as they say in the markets, "it's better to be lucky than good."

 

Gene

[Illiterati-migration]

Words fail me! Good lord! I have NEVER been in your collective whatevers!

 

ROFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Post of the week, Pov! ROFL!!!!!!!

[PovertyRow]

awwww

[murph0]

In no way would I say Real Estate has topped out. At least not in Iowa, still plenty of people buying and lots of good buys to be had!

 

Brian

[COI]

Murph, I wasn't reffering to the time involved, but more of your age/state of mind. For me, the mid-late 90's was a dead time in comic history. Also given that any money I had would be pissed down the drain, HG comics was not even an afterthought.