Selling 80% of your collection for ‘52 Mantle - would you?

[Fandom0610]

Originally Posted by Balticfox

Because you said this:



I'm a collector. The cards I bought I love. It would be very painful for me to part with a large percentage of my core collection let alone 80%. I couldn't do it.



"Very common"? Is it really? Doing that sounds bizarre to me. I'm all about permanence.



No. It's you who should think very carefully before picking a fight with me with the statement that I couldn't have been thinking very carefully.

Consider just your statement regarding affordability. You realize of course that you're intrinsically assuming that whatever has gone up in price will continue to go up in future. But there's a disconnect there. When it comes to investments, there's only a past tense and a future tense. Past price increases tell you nothing about the future.

Moreover with respect to collectibles such as baseball cards, Pokémon cards, comic mags, My Little Pony figures, coins, stamps, Beanie babies, pogs and tulip bulbs, there are no intrinsic growth factors such as increasing sales, profits and dividends as there are for some publicly traded stocks. Future price increases depend strictly upon future demand increases and these are never certain.

And with respect to the 1952 Mickey Mantle card specifically, the demographic factors don't look good. The main factor that's driven demand for this card is that the baby boomers who once idolized Mantle as kids and collected baseball cards in wax packs with bubble gum could afford to pay ever increasing prices for the Mantle as their own income/wealth increased. But these baby boomers are now all entering their "estate planning" years (or even dying). Many(most?) of them are hoping that they can sell these Mantle cards now to those who are willing to gayly extrapolate past price increases for this card on into the future. But that is in no way guaranteed.

That card may be important to him and something he's been after for a long time. There are some cards that are grails for people and making a sacrifice to obtain that is up to each individual person. That mantle has consistently increased in value and will always be a extremely iconic card. Your remarks were not thought out at all. Good luck though