Live Stamp Auction Etiquette

I don't have any problem with the behavior that floortrader outlined. The other bidders could have outbid NYSTAMPS next, and didn't. The auctioneer always has discretion to pause and ask for more bids. I've done this many times while present in the auction room - said nothing as bids escalated and paused, and if I'm still willing to go one step up at "last call," that's when I bid.

Nothing wrong with coming in at the end to outbid two people duelling for a lot. Have done it many times myself. It is not my fault, that my bottom bid is your top. There are no friends at auctions.

There are a surprising number of people who go into an auction not knowing the value of what they want to bid on, and who just try to pick up cues from other bidders. The NYSTAMPS guys (and most other big ebay sellers -- CKStamps, NobleSpirit, etc.) are in that group -- like floortrader said, they just bid on big lots that they think are popular. They're what are called in finance "noise traders"; they don't actually know much about stamps.

The only reason they get away with doing that is because many ebay bidders have seriously inflated ideas of what stamps are worth, so they can make money anyway selling there; the stamp market is multi-tiered and highly inefficient. What would bring $10 in one venue can go for $50 on another, or even on the same venue the next day. It's fun to watch, but can be a real minefield if you don't know what you're doing.

When I buy stamps at auction I'm competing mostly against knowledgeable dealers and serious collectors who also know their stuff, and accordingly I'll usually pay about fair price for material. Now and then you can find a bargain but they will be hidden in the corners. I'll get good quality, though, because anybody who has good material to sell with a lick of sense wants to bring it to multiple informed buyers who have to compete against each other.

When I buy at ebay, OTOH, I have the choice of buying from the popular sellers (most of whose lots end up overpriced, since they have a lot of followers, many of which do not know to snipe, and at least two of which will be willing to pay a sucker price), buying from collectors who just want to dispose of duplicates (usually mid-priced, every now and then cheap), or finding the stamp tyro that doesn't really know what they're doing or what they're selling (real bargains exist here, but are rare and should be jumped on -- most ignorant stamp sellers just price their childhood collections at $1,000+ and hope for a miracle).

It's almost as important to understand whom you are buying from, as it is to understand what you are buying.

A number of other bidders do the same thing, tailgate on certain bidders that they know have a real knowledge of how to evaluate a lot. Dealers have been doing this to each other for decades. Of course sometimes the first dealer is aware that it is happening and tries to stick the second bidder with a bad lot. And sometimes they do.

floortrader, It's likely I'm missing the point of your outrage, but I don't see what the issue is. I have never bid over the phone, so maybe I lack perspective. But when I'm at auction, if 2 or 3 people are bidding up an item I'm interested in, I'm not going to add to the momentum by throwing my hand up. If the bidding stalls short of what I'm willing to pay, then... before the hammer falls I'll jump in with my first bid. I don't care that someone held their card up till there hand turned blue. It only matters who's hand is up last before "sold!"

Is what I'm doing any different than what you described?

Waiting for three active bidders to winnow themselves down to one active bidder hardly seems unethical or unfair.

I been at a few live auctions myself, and I've never known an auctioneer to quickly close a lot on a late bid; rather, they are always careful to make sure that every one has a last chance to bid.

No harm, no foul.




Actually, every stamp collector takes price cues from every other stamp collector; what, after all, is a catalog?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

"I been at a few live auctions myself, and I've never known an auctioneer to quickly close a lot on a late bid; rather, they are always careful to make sure that every one has a last chance to bid."

My non-eBay auction experience, whether bidding live or through SAN, has been similar. I can't recall a situation where there wasn't some opportunity to put forward another bid if someone made a last second bid. Unless the auction house was in cahoots with a particular bidder, I'm not sure why the house would have any incentive to quickly cut off bidding and forego the chance for a higher realization for their consigning client and a higher commission for themselves.

With ebay, however, I used to get ticked off when an item was picked off by a last second sniper, since you don't get a decent chance to counter. For a while, I was wishing that ebay would adopt a procedure whereby if someone bids during the last x seconds of an auction, the time of the auction would automatically be extended by some additional amount to allow for counterbids. After a while, I just let go of the purely emotional reaction to having items that were seemingly won snatched away at the last second and accepted the situation for what it was. Now I try to just rationally determine what the value of an item really is to me and either just put in my highest bid and let the chips fall where they may or join the ranks of the snipers. Either way, if an item gets away because someone else values it more highly, so be it. Unless you're trying to buy a truly unique item, there's thousands of other items to bid on and many more auctions to come that might have the stuff I'm looking for.

Excuse me, but while I have never been an agent, I have sat right next to Mark, Chuck and Johnathon for hours and know that they don't have time to be updating clients as they have many of them and can't afford to be distratcted by trying to contact any of them inbetween lots they are bidding on, plus they don't have time to be updating bids for a client that wants to change his bids based on how the action has been going. As it is, clients drive them nuts by waiting till the last second before a session starts to submit a bunch of bis as if they are the agent's sole client.

Floor trader I don't understand your gripe and agree with the others.

You must be be observing a different ebay than the one I see.

Sometimes the lot osn't a bad lot it is a decent one, but they play a game of chicken and run the price up in the hopes of pulling out and leaving their competion to overpay, but sometimes they get stuck themselves.

The knowledgeable dealers rarely get stuck, they usually buy so much that they can find a way to get at least a small profit on any lot unless they overpay really badly.

This is the interesting dynamic, It's probably similar in other hobbies, we have "dealers" and we have "collectors". We have a business and we have a hobby. We have people trying to complete a page in an album, and we have people trying to profit from that. At auction these two collide.
I have no problem with that.

The only thing I watch for is shill bidders.

A catalog is a reference work describing what stamps exist. Catalog values are the least helpful information in them, unless you're hoping to buy a copy of a single stamp from a retail price list and want to know what to expect a dealer to charge. At auction, catalog values only enter into the equation in very limited cases. Don't believe that a stamp listed in the catalog at $5 is remotely worth $5, or even a fixed percentage of $5.

What is that stamp worth? Normally, it's worth somewhere around 4 cents, already mounted in a serviceable set of albums with about 30,000 others. We're talking about stamp auctions here after all, not the retail dealer
marketplace. You might pay a dealer $5 for it because it's the last stamp you need for your Elobey Annobon and Corisco collection, but that extortive price is just because you're paying for his mortgage. Most stamps, most of the time, are individually worth little to nothing. The way I value commons is: if they're new to me, they're worth a little, otherwise nothing. Fortunately there are still a lot that are new to me (when I first started working on my WW collection again, I set an arbitrary cut off end date, which was a mistake) so finding new common material is not yet difficult.

I buy large collections to build mine. The remainders are sold off, spread like manure, to newbies on ebay, collecting friends of mine, or if they're good enough, they are consigned right back to the auction houses. If you're building a seriously big worldwide collection that's about the only way to do it.

And this might just be about the best time to build worldwide collections in ages, because collectors are retiring from the hobby in droves (usually, unfortunately, by death or old age) and there is far more supply than the market can really bear. I like to think that hopefully new collectors will sprout from the manure I spread, and it will help the hobby to survive. If it doesn't, well, at least we're having a gas now, right?

There are a few single stamps that I look for at auction, some from specialty areas and some I need for stubborn holes in my WW collection. I will pay real market value when I find them. In those cases market value will not be based on the catalog value -- it will based on the bids I and a few other similarly mentally ill people make for it. The catalog editors may even use the number we bid in the sale for next year's catalog, if it looks good enough. It takes a nice stamp to get me to throw money at a single stamp.

There is one other time catalog value means anything; that is when we're talking about one of the "expensive but common" stamps. These are the popular stamps: think dollar-value Columbians or Graf Zeppelins, or for that matter many early PRC issues; they are everywhere (even small no name auctions usually have some) but still sell for significant percentages of catalog. Many of the Guyana surcharges from the 1980s are much scarcer (especially if, as I do, you prefer them postally used), but the pool of buyers is also much smaller, so by the laws of supply and demand in this case the rarer stamps bring less money than the common ones. There will always be "expensive but common" stamps, but as the demographics of the hobby change the particular set of stamps in that category will shift around as well. The best way to buy these IMO is to buy from uninformed sellers, which you might find (if you're lucky) on ebay or Craigslist or the occasional local estate sale or even garage sale. Informational asymmetry is your friend: it's what can make the specialist get a good deal from a general collector or dealer.

As to the narrow point: catalog prices may be the least helpful information, but they are also certainly the most often cited information from a catalog.

Howzabout we sit with SCF for a few hours, and I'll pay you a dollar for every time a catalog is cited for a perf count, and you pay me a dollar for every time a catalog is cited for a market value, and we'll see who quits first?

As to the broader point, every winning auction bid is one increment above the next highest bid; who is taking price information from whom?

While there is a good argument to be made that every one of us is born with an inbred moral compass (citation to follow), there is no basis for arguing that any stamp has any value other than the money that people are throwing at it at any given time.

In this, then, we are all price takers.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/m...abies-t.html ... 2010 ... in fairness, I should say that this NYTimes piece is the only one I've read in full

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...lity/281567/ ... 2013

http://www.scientificamerican.com/a...e-of-babies/ ... 2013

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...d-165443013/ ... 2013

Edited to add: Perhaps I should modify my offer (above). There are certain threads (eg Colecting By Engraver) and certain sub-fora (eg Topicals) where perf counts probably get mentioned more often than catalog values ... surely, my point stands?