Quote:
Originally Posted by Rhotchkiss
Bingo. As someone who loves cards but ultimately buys them for investment, I believe that real/natural rarity is much better than manufactured rarity or rarity based on grade. And real rarity is most often found in the prewar stuff, like E107 and W600s. Even better, indeed almost essential, is the player, which is why I focus mostly on Cobb, Wagner, Ruth, Jackson, etc. In my opinion (and general experience), rare cards of these types of players, regardless of grade, make for pretty good investments; this is especially true if you can hold them and sell when you choose.
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100% agree. Absolute rarity is wonderful. When you have a truly rare item, you can set the price and hold out to get it.
I am contemptuous of condition rarity. It only matters when a card is abundant enough across the grades to be readily acquired for the asking if the money is there. And modern PSA 10s are a joke. When you have a ton of cards kept in pack-fresh condition and a mountain of unopened material, there will be a ton of pack-fresh cards to grade and inevitably a big stack of 10s. Consider the card that many think of as the granddaddy of modern cards, the 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookie card. Total PSA population of this card as of January 14, 2023, is 176,667, of which 4,091 are unqualified PSA 10 graded cards. The people trying to sell these cards will tell you that PSA 10 are only 2.3% of the total population of PSA Griffey cards. True, but meaningless, because there are still over 4,000 PSA perfect 10 Griffey cards. And, of course, the distinctions PSA makes over these cards is so trivial that you can put a bunch of PSA 9 Griffeys with a 10 Griffey in a pile with the labels covered and the vast majority of collectors will not be able to choose the PSA 10. I also am disgusted that massive value swings result from arbitrary and opaque decisions made by unknown persons at the TPG, and the TPGs have a dismal track record of approving altered cards. Lots of 10s with a shave and a haircut.
I loathe manufactured rarity. The problem with manufactured rarities is that demand for them hasn’t built organically and over the long term. The manufacturers keep churning them out, year after year, in every series and set, and they get hyped relentlessly to push the issue out the door, until the next wave of cards is issued and they become yesterday’s news. Also, when every card has a rainbow of parallel manufactured rarities, player collectors get frustrated and burned out, and they quit. The result is a mountain of very low print run cards that fall in value after issue and stay way down by comparison to the initial price run. Reminds me of bad IPOs.