Investing in baseball cards

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Posted By: steve k

Warshawlaw had some good points in both of his posts. Having graduated as a finance major from Penn State, his points and history about investing are accurate. Just to expound slightly - there are different types of investments and the stock market and baseball cards are different. Not to get into a stock market seminar - but picking stocks is exactly the same thing as picking random numbers, no matter what someone’s perception might be. As Gordon Gecko said, to strongly paraphrase - if you aren’t on the inside of a company knowing the intimate details of their particular financial operations, then you are on the outside throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal stock price pages in selecting which stocks to invest in. Also, today’s stock prices generally as a rule of thumb are what is expected to happen approximately six months from now. Since no one can accurately predict the future, it is impossible to accurately forecast stock prices. So forecasting stocks and picking stocks is exactly the same as selecting random numbers. The stock market is a good long term investment though for a multitude of reasons, mainly resulting in a growing worldwide population with a constant demand for new and improved products and services. So even since having to select stocks at random, your long term odds of making money in the stock market are excellent. That being said - a hobbyist such as a smart baseball card collector/investor, IS on the inside of the baseball card collecting community. A smart hobbyist has a much better chance of making the right money making decisions in his/her chosen hobby than in the stock market, whereby for all intents and purposes in the stock market that person is simply on the outside trying to look in. Also there are times when a particular hobby becomes stagnant, and then even selecting random numbers in the stock market becomes a better investment. So a smart hobbyist investor knows when to buy & sell and/or when to just sit back and just have fun collecting with no intention of profit. Hey - even hobbyist investing is tough - if it was easy, then we’d all be millionaires. So all this being said, my opinion is that pre-1973 baseball cards are and will continue to be a good investment and I believe better than the stock market for at least over the next few years. Now since I predicted this, watch the Dow Jones go to 20,000 next year