Cornering The Stamp Market

"I have heard stories of modern error dealers trying to corner markets. (Which I assumed to be about dealers who work in collusion with printer employees who were slipping printing waste out the back door.)"

That isn't cornering the market, that is creating it out of thin air.

Error dealers often are able to corner the market on an error because often there is only a single find of the error, so they one have to buy out one person. Langs was drawn to errors and essays because many of them exist in very small numbers. There are people on this board who have admitted to buying from him despite his insane prices because they could not find the item anywhere else.

As I recall, there was a firm in Spain (Afinsa?) that in the late 90's or early 2000's attempted to corner the market on Cyprus Europa sets. This may have involved other countries Europa stamps, but Cyprus is the one I remember. The Europa sets from c. early 1960s saw heavy buying here in the states and the story line was that these were all heading for Europe.

Prices soared and to this day many Cyprus Europa stamps, while not rare, have high cat. values in Scott. An example is the 1963 Cyprus set, Scott 219-221 which catalogs in my 2009 at $50. There are 74 such sets for sale on Hipstamp and at least 34 more listed on eBay. I don't believe any of these sets are in any way scarce.

C3a might be an easy corner candidate.

At around $200,000 each, I don't know where to start.
($200,000 x 100 stamps = $20,000,000)

Redwood Randy said: "I did corner the market on the Colombia Special delivery. I am/was the market. There was/is no market."

For us "Big Blue" Scott International #1 1840-1940 collectors, it has been written about in "Filling Spaces" and in Jim Jackson's "Big Blue Blog" that Colombia's E1 is the 2nd hardest stamp to find in the Intl #1 Album.

I probably overpaid, but found this stamp on eBay a couple of years ago for an unused copy I think for Scott CV or maybe a little more, and I jumped on it. Glad I was able to find it when I did, and plan on keeping this one!

Turns out there are more out there than thought of the Scott E1. Once I started driving the price up they came out of hiding in stock books. I did not buy for speculation. Just a quest to find the at first elusive stamp. Antonius Ra came up with a "unused" half sheet. Used stamps are much more difficult to find.

Some may have tried with the Canada 1992 World Philatelic Youth Exhibition signature souvenir sheet variety (1407ai) but with 10,000 issued it is still a lot to go for.

Randy ---That is a name I haven't heard in years . I understand Mitch {Antonius Ra } went thru some hard times .He had health issues which got worst and lost his home to fire .

Did you ever sell off all you Colombia E1 's , would like to see a reference page made by you of real used cancels because the cancel stamps are worth more but some of the cancels I seen are just a black smear .

There is story about Warren Buffett, the dean of American stock market investors, in which he is described as having tried to corner the market on the blue 4 cent airmail stamps back in the 1950s. The best story I found (surprised there were not others) was on Glenn Stephens website, but rather than offend by including a link, try a Google search with these keywords: "warren buffett airmail stamp market".

I cannot vouch for the veracity of the story, but recall having heard or read about it several times in the past.

Mike

What an interesting and informative thread!!
Thanks for posting.

Floortrader. Alas I do not have the scans. Dang it. I did sell off the 55 copies and 5 used copies that I had obtained. I have not heard about Mitch since 2016 saying he was recovering from severe injury while trying to work on remains of house. He did save his 300,000 stamps collection.

Mitch posts occasionally in Stamporama forum. In the last year or so he has not posted as regularly as he used to but he last visited on Sep 14.
Don

Great to hear about Mitch.

Three of my former Colombia E1 stamps that I sold all to the same person are for sale on eBay. He bought all 60 and has been selling them off for four years now. I did have a couple of better cancels than the stamp shown and three blocks of four.

Images of Mitch's world stamp collection are still online; google or bing "antonius ra world collection".

Randy -Thanks for that sample and brings up my point ,how do you confirm a USED copy when the cancels are black smears .