Financial Times - "Stamps Can Deliver First-Class Potential"

An interesting article posted today in UK's Financial Times on the prospects of using rare postage stamps as an investment:


Here's the link:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0ffe...xzz1lGrSbBJT

Read the article. Basically a plug for Stanly Gibbons, who makes money selling stamps as an investment. Big deal!

I have been a stamp collector for 30 years. Since late 1970's. In that time, I have only seen stamp prices drop and the Hobby (much as I hate to say it) get smaller. How anyone can denier that is beyond me. How many publishers of albums were there forty years ago, and how many now? Are there more children in the hobby or less? Because less children means less adult hobbyists who can pay real money for stamps in the future.

See this article if the FT
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7daf...xzz1lHyDN6ka

Enjoy stamps. But don't make the mistake of considering it an investment. We all have to struggle against that tendency, because we all wish it were so. Then we could justify spending more money on our hobby. But wishing it were so doesn't make it so!

The story appears to have disappeared, but the point is perfectly fair. Rare stamps grow in value; common stamps go backwards. This stamp



has increased in value by 270% since it was first listed in Gibbons in 1998. This stamp



has gone precisely nowhere. It was a 10p stamp in 1998, and it's still a 10p stamp in 2012.

Look, obviously any stamp can go up in value. Asia especially in the past decade. And a stamp that gets a Scott # will certainly shoot up as a result of that alone. But the vast majority of all stamps, INCLUDING valuable ones, by which I mean the few hundred to few thousand dollar range will NOT go up, and haven't in the past few decades. Nor has ANYONE ever been able to explain to me logically WHY they should, as serious stamp collectors become less. Simple logic dictates that there will be fewer serious collectors chasing more available stamps! By way of analogy, you could possibly make money in penny stock, but 99.9% of all penny stock investors lose money. Same with stamps

Joe, I have no proper idea of the market for US stamps, but I assume you're thinking of it when you say


But half the world's population lives in Asia, and wealth in the big Asian countries, China, India, Indonesia, Thiland, Vietnam etc, is growing rapidly. The Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, Thais and Vietnamese etc are collecting their own stamps (surprise! surprise!) and these stamps are going up in price.

Among the Indian States that I collect, I can't think of any stamp in the hundreds to thousands of dollar or pound price range that hasn't gone up solidly over the last decade. I'd make a large wager that the same applies pretty well across the board to the stamps of just about all the Asian countries.

In the Western countries, there's a different phenomenon. Fewer young people are being recruited to stamp collecting, it's true. But the young rarely have the money to spend on the expensive rarities. It's the empty-nesters in their 50s and 60s who have the time and money to indulge their passions, including stamps, who are underpinning the market for rare stamps.

I find it fascinating to see the same scenario being played out again and again: the 30 or 40 year-old rediscovering their childhood passion for stamps, and taking up the discarded collection again. Many of them may never graduate up to spending serious money on their collections, but it doesn't take many to put the squeeze on available supplies of stamps. And after all, collecting per se seems to be deeply embedded in the human psyche.

My core collection is of Barwani State, in India. There were precisely 400 of these Barwani stamps



printed, and precious few of those survived to find their way into collections. In 2002, these stamps used had a cat. value of £375 each; this year, it's £850. How many new collectors will it take to start to put serious pressure on those prices? And the new collectors are there. I know: I talk to them.