A New All Time Record for a Sports Card

[calvindog]

Originally Posted by Balticfox

No, I flatly disagree. First of all you're conflating collectors with investors when there's an enormous chasm between their interests. Investors are on the side of scarcity since they'd like to see an increase in the value of their holdings. Meanwhile collectors are on the side of plenty and thus low prices since they want to be able to readily afford additions to their collections. Otherwise they're not "collectors" since collecting is all about precisely that.


Not I. Some of us collect because we truly like cards and thus want to be able to afford adding ever more cards to our collections. I'm one of those.

How can you suggest that collectors are not also investors? I've been a baseball card collector since I was 4-5 years old. I collected through my childhood, spending peanuts on the cards until I got an adult job, then a career, and began spending more and more discretionary income on the cards I loved. I never once bought a card for an investment purpose. I never once considered the cards I bought to be part of my net worth, or an asset. They were purchased in my mind, with the same money I'd use for recreational purposes. The money was spent, the fun was had, and that was it. And I steadily spent money on cards, month after month, the amounts increasing as my income increased.

Decades into my collecting journey, someone out of the blue offered me 32.5K for a Ty Cobb postcard of which I had paid 3K for just a couple years earlier. Suddenly I realized that I had a very valuable collection as I had numerous rare Cobb postcards -- along with hundreds of other rare cards. And then I checked a database I used to determine how much money I had spent on my "hobby" and saw that it was well into a range that was worth more than my home. And that was over ten years ago and I have spent multiples of that number since then. While I am a passionate collector, I acknowledge that my card collection is a very valuable asset of mine and is no longer to be considered the product of just throwaway, recreational income. It had grown too valuable.

So while I am still a passionate collector, I am forced to also be an 'investor' even though the number of cards I have purchased for 'investment' purposes can be counted on one hand. So there is hardly an 'enormous chasm' between the interests of collector and investor, assuming the investor got into collecting for the love of the hobby, and things just snowballed over time.

Now maybe some collectors never spent a large amount of their income over time on cards and were capable of exercising some self-control, limiting their collections to a rounding error on their net worth. Does that make them more of a collector than me? No chance. I still buy the new Topps factory set that comes out every year and have since 1978. I still buy $20 cards and the next day I might spend 6 figures on a card. That doesn't mean that I don't concern myself with what my collection is worth as someday I'll be cashing out -- or just leaving it for my kids to cash out after I'm gone. So yeah, I'm all for someone spending 13M on a dopey basketball card because it ultimately increases the value of my collection -- and unless you're a communist, socialist or an idiot, the value of our collections matter to us.