mintacular,
Be careful "investing" in baseball cards. I once had an old time collector (who owns a T206 Wagner and whose collection would be valued well over $1 million dollars now if he still owns everything he did when I was in almost daily contact with him) tell me that he was worried about cards becoming a bubble situation.
He watched what happened to coins after they started to be graded (a bubble and then a crash followed by only true rarites keeping ahead of the inflation rate) and what happened to stamps (especially Hawaiian issues). For a short period of time, they skyrocketed then crashed and only a small percentage have regained the value they had 30 or so years ago.
He was worried that cards wouldn't be collected as much in the future and thus not be as valuable because children were NOT as dedicated to baseball or collecting cards then (2002) as they had been when he was young (late 1940's and early 1950's) or when I was young (mid to late 1970's).
This man was worried that graded cards would skyrocket in value and because of that, the "average" collector would be priced out of the market.
He was also worried that graded cards would increase in value and that would, in turn, cause people to trim cards or do other things to falsely cause cards to go up in price. He said if enough of this happened and too many people got burned then the trust in cards and graders would be gone and people would dump their "investments" and never return (like they had done with stamps years before)..
He said this would ESPECIALLY be true of people who "invested" in cards instead of just being happy in collecting and owning them for what they were.
He advised me that if I was accumulating cards just for financial reasons then I should either get totally out of cards or only put into cards what I felt I could be comfortable with losing if their value fell to zero.
The last time I saw him was the Summer of 2007 and he was selling a LOT of his cards because he saw the economic crisis coming and wanted to be prepared for it and sitting in cash.
|