Steve, I'm pretty slow sometimes at catching on. Thank you for your patience with me in explaining the line of thinking.
You have expressed a valid point, my collecting compadre. There are bad sellers, and some monsters in the form of buyers. I will never, ever forget the scathing indictment upon buyers that Joe Orlando penned in his "Taking My Hacks" column in the SPORTS MARKET REPORT. I could not find the entry among the archived issues on their site. I distinctly recall the time frame being about 2001-2002, and the title of Joe's column was "Heirloom Doom". It was about as ugly as it can get. A prime example of why Joe always signs off with, "Never Get Cheated".
A fascinating and rather humorous example happened upon a pawn shop earlier this year on the West Coast. Seems a gent was browsing through the shop and happened upon a diver's watch. With so many glitzy "looks like an expensive watch" el-cheapos, the timepiece connoisseur recognized the diver's watch as a seldom seen prime example of an elite brand that only made several hundred of them a year back in the day (about 1961). He paid about 25 bucks for it. Whereupon he took his bounty to either a major auction firm specializing in timepieces, or wherever it was, and garnered about 25,000 dollars for his find. Not often does a pawn shop gets the shaft; almost invariably, it's the other way around. Time to do something else with my life.
Regards, Brian Powell