Posted By:
warshawlawA very interesting discussion.
I do not see a bubble forming in the traditional sense simply because the cards are not concocted out of thin air. Vintage postwar cards are a good example of this; they have been in a recession or at least a holding pattern price-wise for several years. There has not been a wholesale devaluation. People simply keep the cards they like and add new ones when they find them cheaply.
I think after 70+ years of "serious" collecting and a 30 year run of collecting as a "serious" investment it should be apparent that we are not going to wake up tomorrow back in the church basement with $10 T206 HOFers. There are too many people into it. All of us would pounce on examples of what we collect if they came up even slightly below "market" and when things go badly, we sit on our collections and enjoy them. I was on the "front lines" of the dot.com disaster in my practice because I represented a lot of service providers whose lucrative contracts suddenly went into default when their customers came apart at the seams. I filed approximately 20 cases in a two month period, all seeking to collect on these companies and learned there was NOTHING underlying these companies; I literally did not have the time to serve many collection cases before some of the defendants went into bankruptcy.
I don't think gas prices have any real impact on the serious collectors who spend thousands of dollars a year on cards. In all candor, those of you who spend on a very limited budget are not the market-setters anyway. You don't factor in financially. No offense, just math.
We are at a point where vintage material is rightfully recognized as rare and desirable by everyone involved. I definitely see a bubble on the high grade slabbed stuff because the prices are so high and the market so thin as a result. If a few of those guys quit, the last one holding the bag is going to get hurt. For middle and low grade cards, however, the market is robust. I know because I am not winning auctions at a pace suggestive of a weakening market.