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Posted By: T206Collector

Jim,

You have obviously spent a lot of money on PSA 8 and higher vintage commons. You have apparently done this with investment on your mind. And you may be right -- at some point in the future these cards may be higher than what you paid for them. But there is certainly no guarantee that that will be the case, even if your statement that prices are now rising were true. Indeed, the evidence in this thread alone is that sometimes (and perhaps often) prices drop precipitously. This is what we call a volatile market. Your purchasing decisions reflect highly risky investment behavior. I would counsel caution and thus that you avoid making statements that have never been true in the context of any market, including vintage baseball cards, such as "it is unlikely that demand will drop." Similarly, given the short life of the PSA Set Registry, broad statements like "the PSA Set Registry has changed the collecting landscape forever" are short-sighted.

Demand and supply (and therefore price) will continue to fluctuate no matter how close to perfect our knowledge is about the existence of a particular issue, i.e., in the most efficient market for baseball cards imaginable, prices of baseball cards will often fluctuate greatly because price will never be judged by how many cards are in existence at a certain grade. Rather, price will be determined by how many are available for sale at the time that a certain number of people are willing to buy at that time of availability. Even if all of the 1958 Topps cards in existence were known and accounted for, supply and demand as a determinant of price would fluctuate dramatically for the rest of eternity based on how many were actually for sale and how many were actually in demand at the specific point in time.

If you spend thousands of dollars on mint commons, more power to you. But do not fool yourself into thinking that you are making a sound investment with no risk. Rather, the risk is actually pretty substantial. Especially if the vintage baseball card market is on the verge of collapsing. Swiftly rising prices are usually evidence of an imminent collapse, not a continuing trend.

Paul (aka T206Collector)