Just my "take" on this based on passed experience. I hope I am wrong about this but the whole contemporary autograph scene seems to be heading in the same direction as a phenomena I witnessed when I was actively doing baseball card shows in the 1980's.
I never had much to do with baseball cards except when I was a kid, but I'd set up at shows with my display cases full of vintage autographs. Most of the time I was the only autograph dealer in the room and would always get alot of "Oh's and Wow's" from people viewing what I had to sell but very little in the way of actual sales. I felt like a museum curator.
In the meantime the card dealers on either side of me , had STACKS AND STACKS of unopened boxes of baseball cards , their biggest complaint was that "They couldn't get enough product" and my biggest complaint was being afraid one of those 20 foot high stacks was going to fall on me and kill me.
I watched throughout the course of a 3 day show , customers actually loading up HANDTRUCKS full of unopened boxes of cards and wheeling them out to their cars while talking about the cards being an "INVESTMENT" in their kids college fund or retirement, or stuff like that.
I became friends with some of the card dealers and innocently asked "What are they buying so many boxes of cards for ?" I got alot of different answers but basically the condensed common theme was this.......If you had bought boxes of Topps or Bowman cards in the 1950's and then never opened them and sat on them for 30 years they would be WORTH A FORTUNE ! So the theory was to buy up all the 1980's cards you could find and just stack them in the basement and wait 30 years and they too would be worth a fortune. WRONG !!!!
At the end of the show the card dealers would ask me how I did and I'd check my wallet and tally my autograph sales and would usually end up with about $150.00 , They would laugh almost to tears. I'd ask them the same question and the numbers were staggering the guy to the right of me took in $7,000 and the guy to the left maybe $8,000 and I would shake my head and wonder why I wasn;t a baseball card dealer.
Well, most of us know what happened to all those baseball cards pristine sitting in their unopened boxes 30 years later.
Slowly I've begun to see many of the same parallels happening with autographs , I shutter when I hear the word "investment" , I'm asked all of the time "What will this autograph be worth 10 years from now ? 20 years from now ?" and my answer is usually always the same "How the heck do I know....smile, maybe if you are lucky you might be able to trade your whole collection for a cup of coffee and a loaf of bread".
But I'm afraid many of todays collectors (and dealers) somewhere along the line got stuck in the same mind set as those same card "investors" mentioned above. Buy it, slab it, stash it away for future "investment". Because its SURE to be worth more someday. Money is nice , to be sure , And collecting autographs is great fun , for a fact. But if your collecting today is motivated by "whats it gonna be worth tomorrow" well .....just think about those unopened boxes of baseball cards from the 1980's and 1990's that were mass produced to supply an artificial demand. Or that athlete sitting at a table somewhere signing 1,000 autographs a day every single weekend and maybe the two comparisons have something in common.
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Buying and Selling Vintage autographs for over three decades
jim@stinsonsports.com