Cornering The Stamp Market

Yes, there was an "investment" scheme. Yes, there was catalog value manipulation. But where are you getting "so you go to various governments and ask them to print stamps just for you" from?

Cornering a market is more of an ego thing than a fiscally responsible thing. As you acquire more and more of the stamp, the supply goes down, and your cost goes up. After you have the lion's share, the price is high. Now sell a few, and the price goes down in response. On the way up, the market consisted of the 'x' number of people that made up the market PLUS you. On the way down, the market then consists of the 'x' number of people interested MINUS you. There is less of a market when you are getting out than when you were getting in. I suppose the 'secret' is to create the market, but that's not the question. Unless you can CHANGE the market, cornering the market is a net money loser. But your ego would be stroked when you are at a cocktail party and you can brag about it to the hot divorcee (which probably has ZERO interest in stamps) who probably values the money you made (which would be ZERO) more than the 'interesting' story she's being told. Still, for 5 minutes your ego gets stroked. Yay.

And we are talking about the stamp market here not metals or rare earth or water in the desert or gravity in space......

There used to be advertisements from a company that sold one square foot deeds of land on the moon and later mars. In today's news let's see the first one to offer water rights on the moon. Now, if some podunk place will issue a commemorative stamp set with a $10,000 stamp to cover the going rate to ship one ounce of water from the moon back to earth?

Floortrader, you are correct in that Afinsa was selling shares of a massive stamp inventory that didn't exist. And surely that is the crime for which the principals were prosecuted. They also tried to manipulate Europa stamps and definitely affected the pricing on several Cyprus Europa sets of the early-mid 1960s.

"selling shares of a massive stamp inventory that didn't exist " But there was various attempts to build that inventory . They did put in huge orders with different postal authorities around the world to build a inventory and they even purchased Gregg Manning Auctions and did buy at his auctions to inflate the GMA stock ,and I was buying on the floor during his auctions and was a stock holder in his firm . They had tons of stamps from the indepenant countries of Africa and almost the whole inventory of Portugal -Azores and Madeira.

I think I purchased the stock at $3.00 and sold it on the down fall at $11.00 after watching it go to $34.00 . Me and Dr.BOB ,the Chicago stamp dealer talked about our holdings in the stock a few times at Gregg Manning while viewing lots and it was at this time David Kohl at Regency got the idea to issue public stock {limited shareholders} for Regency Stamps .

As I understand it Afinsa was basically a Ponzi scheme.

I'm sure there are lots of details about various stamps they invested in, but I think the essential detail is that they used investment funds from the new customers to pay interest to the old ones. All the other stuff would have just been to muddy the waters, to make it look as if some real business was going on.

The amount of money involved was way beyond what the stamp market could possibly absorb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afinsa