How did the 90's bubble bust impact GA sales/values? 3 3

[Knightsofold]

20 minutes ago, batman_fan said:

My experience is anything I am selling goes low and anything I am buying goes high 

90% for me too.

[sfcityduck]

2 hours ago, mwotka said:

It has also been observed that art markets are inefficient, which means that prices don't always reflect true values.

I completely agree with the conclusion that art and collectibles markets are "inefficient" in the sense that information disparities are at work.  Uninformed sellers are taken advantage of and sell at prices well below "what the market will bear."  But, these inefficiencies don't come into play in a major auction setting.  True auctions (as opposed to BIN) in the major auction venues (eBay, Heritage, CC, CLink, Hakes) are the very definition of "what the market will bear" because the pool of bidders is deep enough and sufficiently knowledgeable that information disparities really don't come into play.  Prices can, however, be inflated by fraudulent sham bidding.

Having said that, the notion that there are "true values" for art or collectibles is an illusion.  Art and collectibles have zero intrinsic value beyond the value of the materials they are made out of.  They are only worth what the market will bear, and markets are changeable.  The significance of the decline in purchase price for the Billy Wright books when re-auctioned was not that the original prices were "inflated" by some sort of fraud, they weren't.  The prices realized for those books were what the market would bear at the time they were sold.  The problem was that one of the bidders creating that market had stolen the money he used to fund his bids.  When he exited the market, the market became weaker.  Which proves that in an auction market, the exit of a single bidder can radically deflate prices.  This should not be a revelation to anyone, because we've seen the same thing happen multiple times with regard to comics.  Notable examples include the collapse in Flash Comics prices when a strong buyer sold his collection and the collapse in Duck prices after a buyer who had been driving up prices in competition with others completed his collection and no longer was buying. 

Which is why I'm curious to see how the exit of the two buyers responsible for the top three purchases of Action 1s, including the purchase of this 8.5 back in 2010, impacts the market for this 8.5. 

[Sqeggs]

16 hours ago, MrBedrock said:

From my point of view sales are steady and good on all back issues in all grades ... especially when I have them priced at or below market. If I have them priced higher than market then sales are slower.

Crazy, huh?

Are you sure it's a good idea to blab about your business plan in public? 

[MrBedrock]

1 hour ago, Sqeggs said:

18 hours ago, MrBedrock said:

From my point of view sales are steady and good on all back issues in all grades ... especially when I have them priced at or below market. If I have them priced higher than market then sales are slower.

Crazy, huh?

Are you sure it's a good idea to blab about your business plan in public? 

Yes. Studies have proven it to be a good idea.

[MrBedrock]

4 hours ago, mwotka said:

 Once one has had his need satisfied for a certain book, then the next auction will find less buyers pushing the book higher (obviously some buyers like certain books and keep buying multiple copies; I can think of a few that have commented already).  I noticed this trend with some of the Billy Wright books that were bought fraudulently.  When they went back up a year or so later, they usually went for less.  

 

I had not heard about this. Sounds interesting. Could you explain a little further?

[jimbo_7071]

Regarding the funding of comic books with stocks, I more or less did just that. After losing quite a bit of equity in 2008 and getting most of it back in 2009/2010, I basically cashed out and bought comic books. I guess I figured that if there was nothing safe to invest in, I might as well keep my money in something I enjoyed.

One thing I would want to know in order to assess the health of the GA market is, how old is the average collector now vs. 10 years ago vs. 20 years ago? If the collector base is aging, then the robust GA market that we see now has an expiration date. I know that some younger collectors are entering the hobby, but I don't know how many. I'm 43, and offhand I'd say that most of the GA collectors I know are older than I am.

Edited March 28, 2018 by jimbo_7071

[atomised]

if the market corrects, it's sorta expected and it won't impact my buying.  If the US economy goes into some sort of prolonged recession for whatever the reason, I'll stay on the sidelines for a hot minute then target GA keys if prices look like they might be trending down or even flat. That said, I did slightly pause in a sorta spooked way when I was plucking down some hefty bids in the cc auction while the nasdaq was correcting but went ahead.  For me, there's a bit more emotion involved buying books than other types of investing per say, so I'm a bit motivated by simply wanting something cool and I'll find a way to rationalize it more often than not.

[MrBedrock]

2 minutes ago, jimbo_7071 said:

One thing I would want to know in order to assess the health of the GA market is how old is the average collector now vs. 10 years ago vs. 20 years ago? If the collector base is aging, then the robust GA market that we see now has an expiration date. I know that some younger collectors are entering the hobby, but I don't know how many. I'm 43, and offhand I'd say that most of the GA collectors I know are older than I am.

Most of the people on the planet who are breathing are older than you.

[porcupine48]

Just now, MrBedrock said:

Most of the people on the planet who are breathing are older than you.

Not I 

[Knightsofold]

IMO if the kids growing up on all these awesome comic movies doesn't express their nostalgia/love through collecting big books by 2036, then all but the 20-40 most beloved and historic comic keys will be worthless.

[BarristerBaker]

On 3/27/2018 at 2:31 PM, MrBedrock said:

I always love reading these threads and seeing the differing viewpoints stated as fact, and which are each solely based on anecdotal evidence or biased opinion.

I can never remember a time when the golden age market as a whole has dropped in value. There have definitely been times when specific genres or titles have been stagnate or have dropped, but never a time when ALL golden age was stagnate, or ALL silver age was stagnate. Frankly there has never been a time when ALL new comics were unsellable. If that were the case then ALL comic stores would have gone out of business. Even during the mid to late 1990's there were new comics that were selling well. Some segment of back issue collecting has always increased in value but some amount which is higher than whatever segment has decreased in value. The back issue hobby has grown every year since I have been involved in it. The new issue market has grown and contracted a number of times over the last four decades (I started working in a comic store in 1978), most notably at the end of the "black and white glut" of the early 1980s and the end of the "speculator market" of the early 1990s. I don't think there is any solid evidence to make a correlation between new issue sales and back issue growth over the market as a whole.

My point is that this entire thread is conjecture. There have been no serious economic studies on the correlation of vintage comic sales and new issue comic sales. There have been no serious studies of the various trends in vintage comic pricing over time. I would love for someone to use some hard data to actual analyze these trends. But how many stores carry vintage? How many vintage dealers carry new comics? More importantly how many comic dealers are willing to share their actual sales data?

So speculate away. Have fun. But please don't take much said here seriously.

I'd love to dive into comic-related data and have explored the idea a bit. I am currently in an analytics grad program. One requirement for the degree is a capstone project. Students are given freedom to pick their problem space. Though I don't practice law (I'm a consultant in the legal industry), I am a lawyer by training and bar admission, and I have considered a number of paths in my "home" domain for a project. That's pretty much what I do for a living, though, so that's no fun and deep work in that space could be traded for dollars (and then for comics). I've got some cool ideas here, however.

The other space I've toyed with is our hobby. I'd rather play there for academic work, if I could. I think it'd be a riot. I contacted the folk at GPA to see if I could get access to some of their data, and they politely told me "no." I told them I'd do it for free, share anything I found, yada, yada. No dice. To be fair, they have licensing constraints, but I believe most of the content owners would be okay with it, provided any work product was given back to licensors. But, that would require a dialog with licensors, probably sounds like work to GPA, and no one likes work.

Interest and technical abilities are there. I am just missing data. I have a bit of a runway, though. Since I work full-time (and then some), I'm on the slow-drip program, just sharpening the saw. I might shake some more trees in the months ahead. If anyone has ideas on where I can get a good dataset, I'm all ears. If I land on a project related to our hobby, I'd be happy to share. A lawyer with data chops who collects comics is a special kind of geek, I guess. 

[mwotka]

8 hours ago, MrBedrock said:

I had not heard about this. Sounds interesting. Could you explain a little further?

Cityduck covers it above pretty good.  I tried finding an article about this but came up empty.  I believe it was a guy who had perpetuated some large scale corporate fraud and he bought a number of issues from the first Heritage Billy Wright Auction.  Then he got caught and I believe they became the property of the company or group he had scammed, and they put them back up for auction with Heritage about a year later.   

I just checked some Heritage records and notable books that sold twice in a year and went for less were Adventure 40, Cap 2, Batman 2, and Detective 18.  However I also noticed the Action 1 was resold and it went for $100K more, so apparently it wasn't always true on the resale.

[lou_fine]

22 minutes ago, mwotka said:

9 hours ago, MrBedrock said:

I had not heard about this. Sounds interesting. Could you explain a little further?

Cityduck covers it above pretty good.  I tried finding an article about this but came up empty.  I believe it was a guy who had perpetuated some large scale corporate fraud and he bought a number of issues from the first Heritage Billy Wright Auction.  Then he got caught and I believe they became the property of the company or group he had scammed, and they put them back up for auction with Heritage about a year later.   

I just checked some Heritage records and notable books that sold twice in a year and went for less were Adventure 40, Cap 2, Batman 2, and Detective 18.  However I also noticed the Action 1 was resold and it went for $100K more, so apparently it wasn't always true on the resale.

I believe you guys are talking about this case here:

https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/22/8870089/texas-comic-book-heist-anthony-chiofalo-tadano

Definitely a long story to read through, but one which has been discussed here in the before. 

Yes, who else would pay $200K for a CGC 8.5 graded copy of All-Star #3, almost $6K for a CGC 6.5 graded copy of Subby 17, etc. 

[Zolnerowich]

6 hours ago, lou_fine said:

I believe you guys are talking about this case here:

https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/22/8870089/texas-comic-book-heist-anthony-chiofalo-tadano

Definitely a long story to read through, but one which has been discussed here in the before. 

Yes, who else would pay $200K for a CGC 8.5 graded copy of All-Star #3, almost $6K for a CGC 6.5 graded copy of Subby 17, etc. 

Hey Lou. That article is a great read. Fascinating. 

Though these days, no one is really batting an eye over ever-escalating prices. 

$200K for All-Star #3, CGC 8.5? Maybe so!

$6K for Subby 17, CGC 6.5 Well, okay!

[rjpb]

I just started getting back into GA in the early 90s, and it seemed like classic covers were picking up steam around that time. Many had only a small value premium in the OSPG, and that was the era where "multiples of guide" began to become more common place for some these books. Still, they were dirt cheap by today's standards. I wasn't paying attention to how random copies of Superman, let alone Star Spangled Comics were doing at the time, so the market as a whole may have been softer.

For common GA books, with no outstanding cover or content, and little interest beyond completists, I'd guess ebay did more to deflate values in the early 2000s than anything had in the 90s. Prior to that, one was largely limited to buying from dealers or blind from ads in the CBG. That set a floor value for a lot of stuff that only got heavily discounted when a small dealer set up at show just wanted to blow out some slow sellers. Along comes ebay, and its auction format (far more popular in the beginning than now), and suddenly the average collector could snag lower interest books for way under guide value with a little effort. It's harder to get great bargains now, as much is listed as a BIN, and dealers themselves use ebay as a source for inventory.

 

[jimjum12]

28 minutes ago, rjpb said:

I just started getting back into GA in the early 90s, and it seemed like classic covers were picking up steam around that time. Many had only a small value premium in the OSPG, and that was the era where "multiples of guide" began to become more common place for some these books. Still, they were dirt cheap by today's standards. I wasn't paying attention to how random copies of Superman, let alone Star Spangled Comics were doing at the time, so the market as a whole may have been softer.

For common GA books, with no outstanding cover or content, and little interest beyond completists, I'd guess ebay did more to deflate values in the early 2000s than anything had in the 90s. Prior to that, one was largely limited to buying from dealers or blind from ads in the CBG. That set a floor value for a lot of stuff that only got heavily discounted when a small dealer set up at show just wanted to blow out some slow sellers. Along comes ebay, and its auction format (far more popular in the beginning than now), and suddenly the average collector could snag lower interest books for way under guide value with a little effort. It's harder to get great bargains now, as much is listed as a BIN, and dealers themselves use ebay as a source for inventory.

 

Here's an example .......in the early 1990's, GA Batman Joker covers in VG/F were mostly in the 400 dollar range....except Batman 11, which was the king of Joker covers then. Fast forward 10 years and they were still going for about the same ...... so it's not always endless "up, up, and away." I  bought the Cookeville copy of Detective 71 for $ 335 in the early 2000's for $ 335 and traded it to Richie a few years later for $ 400 credit. GOD BLESS....

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)

Edited March 29, 2018 by jimjum12

[Sqeggs]

On 3/28/2018 at 3:54 PM, MrBedrock said:

On 3/28/2018 at 2:18 PM, Sqeggs said:

On 3/27/2018 at 9:44 PM, MrBedrock said:

From my point of view sales are steady and good on all back issues in all grades ... especially when I have them priced at or below market. If I have them priced higher than market then sales are slower.

Crazy, huh?

Are you sure it's a good idea to blab about your business plan in public? 

Yes. Studies have proven it to be a good idea.

And just who, may I ask, commissioned these so-called studies? 

[rjpb]

10 hours ago, jimjum12 said:

Here's an example .......in the early 1990's, GA Batman Joker covers in VG/F were mostly in the 400 dollar range....except Batman 11, which was the king of Joker covers then. Fast forward 10 years and they were still going for about the same ...... so it's not always endless "up, up, and away." I  bought the Cookeville copy of Detective 71 for $ 335 in the early 2000's for $ 335 and traded it to Richie a few years later for $ 400 credit. GOD BLESS....

-jimbo(a friend of jesus)

I won an Archangel auction lot of 14 Detective Comics ranging from 110 to 148 in 2000, all in 1.5 to 3.0 condition that included 6 Joker covers, both Riddler appearances, and the Catwoman cover, issue 122. My winning bid was $1100 dollars. Those were the days.

[Aman619]

What I remember happening with GA comics in the 90s that was referred to as a crash, was that with the onset of Sotheby’s and Christie’s opening their doors to comics, and having great success moving GA and SA Keys , prices rose dramatically.  Remember that this was comics finally eaching the mainstream of collectibles.

but at the same time, the red hot bull market was happening! It became clear to the collectors with 50k and more that while they loved comics and they were increasing, that far more money was being made much quicker with tech stocks — Wintel, Cisco and phone and internet companies etc. so the big money was diverted away from comics.  Why go for doubling your money in ten years when you could double in 2 months.

when the stock market crashed in 1997,  comics gained back the buyers, and baseball cards took off as a sure bet collectibles that were more fun and wouldn’t crash like Wall Street does. So GA comics didn’t t crash, they stalled, meeting buyer resistance at the top end due to greener pastures. Meaning it was hard to sell since the usual buyers were elsewhere.

ironically, in the long run, while Wall Street has obviously done very well (so long as you stayed in it) our comics have done far better in certain sectors, having had so much room to grow from their seemingly lofty prices that look so cheap today.

[sfcityduck]

10 hours ago, Aman619 said:

 

ironically, in the long run, while Wall Street has obviously done very well (so long as you stayed in it) our comics have done far better in certain sectors, having had so much room to grow from their seemingly lofty prices that look so cheap today.

Stocks and comics are an apples to oranges comparison.  Their is no "Dow" index for comics.  Further, while ever share of Nike is the same, ever Action 1 is not.   Even so, the 8.5 Action 1 which sold for $1.5M in 2010 is going to have to garner about $5M to outpeform Nike stock, which is not going to happen.  Obviously, you can pick many other stocks which have had greater appreciation.

I think for a lot of collectors, the fact that GA comics appreciate in value is the icing on the cake of being able to own and enjoy the comics.