So They Tell Me The Stamp Market Is Crashing?

https://stampauctionnetwork.com/y/y116355.cfm
50 years ago(I was 7 or 8 at the time)An old man told me " No one ever went broke buying mint stamps in the best quality possible " Check out the realizations in THIS sale. I think the Cat. Value might be headed north a little! Thank God I listened to him!!
Stu
P.S hope I copied the URL right,kinda a rookie!

Older classic stamps in the best possible condition have mostly always sold for much more above their catalogue value. There was the original never hinged gum trend craze where this was the biggest factor and now there is the grading centering craze and its grade census by some stamp grading certifying organizations/companies.

Someone paid $850 for this stamp

On the Roosevelt stamp above, what is the 20m in the upper left at the perforations?
Thanks,
Robert

It says "zoom". It is the photo.

It says 'Zoom' and is part of the screen capture of the stamp image.
Don

That's a zoom watermark from ebay display

It gets worse. Someone paid $1800 plus 18% for a two cent Columbian. And $1200 plus 18% for a 279. And $850 plus 18% for a 319. But something genuinely rare, a 356 line pair only brought half catalog because it wasn't graded.

Don't the people that pay these amounts look at perforations?

Obviously they don't care that the stamp (in the case of the Roosevelt) has 3 short perfs down the left side (plus others that are ragged, etc).

For myself, that alone would disqualify it as a premium stamp example.

It is interesting that the not only is the centering graded and counted but it is also separately given a value too.

Sadly, at the end of the day, this new centering craze will only hurt the hobby!

I think of two famous quotes when I see people overpaying for these graded stamps. " A fool and his money is soon parted" and PT Barnum's, "There's a fool born every minute" They are pleasing to look at but you will never get that money back if you decide to eventually sell. Some people just have too much disposable income. But I guess I should just follow Pope Francis and admit " Who am I to judge"

Although I agree generally, those perfs would be considered "nibbled", not "short".

This was a wonderful collection of excellent stamps and I participated in the auction. The bidding was at times thrilling and there were several bidding wars which took realizations way over SMQ even before accounting for commission. I was able to get two stamps in the gum condition and grade that I had been wanting (for below SMQ even after adding the commission) but had not seen on the market for at least 5 years but I whiffed on several others since I did not want to get caught up in a bidding war and have to sell the house - lol! IMHO we should be celebrating the health of a hobby that has such a wonderful secondary market and defined values and not bemoaning the fact that stamps in this exquisite condition sell for much more than their more ordinary counterparts. As for Mr. Barnum's saying, stamps like those in this collection generally sell for 70% to over 100% of their cost at auction. More ordinary stamps generally do not recoup anywhere near that percentage of their cost. So as for "money parted", who is the fool?

One problem I have with the grading thing is when it drives people to cut up imperf multiples or break up perf multiples that are then gone forever all to have the "perfect" stamp. That does not help the hobby at all in the long run.

There were 1,464,588,750 two cent Columbians printed. Which means that if only 1/100th of 1% look anything like this one that is still more then 146,000 examples. Even assuming 90% were used, that still leaves over 14,000. The only reason they seem scarce is because no one looks for them seriously, because it is such a common stamp and no one is going to spend their life looking through millions of them. So the only way they are found is when someone happens across one. And since this is a very thin market, no one knows what they will bring in 5 or 10 or 20 years. It's just certificate collecting for ego gratification.