Originally Posted by BobC
Turning the hobby into an investment industry!
The constant market exploitation coupled with the TPGs, AHs, vault providers, and the like pushing the collectors out and making it a more business or investment-like endeavor for the newer dealers/flippers/investors entering into the market or industry every single day that goes by, has succeeded in driving up the prices for many cards to the point where people trying to complete many vintage pre-war sets can't do so anymore unless they are independently wealthy. And since this thread was started in the pre-war, main page forum, I am keeping it on point and responding to it in the same regard.
A lot of the pre-war sets included cards of the all-time, iconic, big name, HOF, superstars that we have all learned to admire and long to possess cards of. For the flippers/investors, as has been noted time and again in many threads talking about what cards will hold or increase their value, thereby making them the best investment decisions, set collectors have had to compete with those types of people to acquire those cards in many of these pre-war sets to complete them. The resulting astronomic price increases to many of these cards, has caused many true collectors to be unable to finally complete their sets, without possibly incurring an unaffordable expense, going into unreasonable debt, or maybe having to sell off other portions of their collections to fund such a new purchase. The latter of which kind of runs completely counter to the idea and concept of being a true collector,
There are a number of pre-war sets I had started working on at one point or another that I will likely never now finish because there is a Ruth, Cobb, Wagner, Jackson, or some other unbelievably priced star/HOFer card now in that set needed to complete it. And I'm not talking about the extreme rarities that exist in some sets, like the 1933 Goudey Lajoie card, or the 1911 T205 Hoblitzell "no stats" card. To most set collectors, they realize that extreme rarity and value, and consider completed base sets without them. The T206 set is probably the most classic example with many collectors accepting 520 different player cards as a completed set, and not worrying about the Wagner, Plank, Doyle N.Y. Nat'l, and Magee cards. Same goes with the 1933 Goudey Lajoie or the T205 Hoblitzell "no stats" cards. You can have a complete set in the majority of people's eyes without having those particular cards. But in the case of a set like the 1933 Goudey set, you can't have a complete set without all four Ruths, and both Gehrigs. The costs of those six cards, versus the costs/values of the remaining cards in the set, make it extremely unlikely that many new collectors will ever want to take on the completion of such a set, unless they are wealthy. And let's face it, the average person/collector is not going to be wealthy. For now, we still have a lot of old-timers in the hobby that were lucky enough to have gotten into collecting long before these cards were turned into a new investment industry, and still remember collecting sets as kids back in the day with Topps, Bowman, and so on. And they were lucky enough to acquire many of these now extremely high-priced cards when they were still somewhat affordable. As these old-timers start to leave us, the newer collectors who don't seem to be anywhere near as interested as the old-timers were in actually trying to collect and complete sets, will become the main force driving the hobby. As a result, I can see in the future that values for many common pre-war cards will fail to rise, or even drop, due to a dearth of new set collectors entering the hobby. The baby boomers that initially sparked the boom of the card collecting hobby back in the 80s and 90s, in conjunction with the rise of Topps and Bowman when they first started collecting cards as kids, will eventually leave us, and the hobby. I feel the hobby will still do well as a whole, but the set collecting aspect of it may take a huge hit. Unless you're ridiculously well off and don't care about spending money on common cards simply to check an item off a want list.
To me, this slow changing of the hobby into an investment industry and therefore pricing most collectors out of ever being able to afford certain cards, is the biggest overall nemesis to being a collector of pre-war card sets.
|