The Focus On "Worth"

The value of my collection -----At night after working all day and just need time to relax I would sit at my desk and work on my collection .

As my two daughter were going thru grade school and then high school ,they would come into the room and sit and look what Dad was doing ,we spend many hours talking about everything . These sit down talks with my girls are some of the most important times of my life ,me and my two girls just talking together before they went off to sleep ,their ages are 5 years apart so it was a time they had their years with Dad .
Now they live far away and are married but the stamps and my girls sitting across from me makes it extra special.....that is the real value my stamps hold .

Agree

I have a few, mainly British stamps that catalogue for a fairly high value, but I certainly don't expect to be able to put them up for sale on ebay and get even a fraction of their catalogue price, but the amount of joy they give me is something you can't really put a price on. Statesman had it right when he said that something is only worth what someone is willing to pay. And rarity is only a small factor in this. I have a good example, a couple of years ago I purchased a so-called Smiler sheet of British stamps. The exact item is listed in the Stanley Gibbons GB Concise catalogue as LS 39, and is a sheet of 20 1st class stamps originally issued for the 2002 World Cup match, but with labels depicting various aspects of the history of Wembley Stadium, which, in 2007 when the sheet was issued, was undergoing a complete rebuild. An early issue of the sheet misspelled the name of Czech long distance runner Emil Zatopek. A few sheets (estimated to be about 100) were sold with the name misspelled as "Emile", this was eventually corrected, but the error sheets remain in circulation, and while this is technically not an error on the stamp itself, rather on the selvedge, it is nonetheless quite rare. As rare, in fact as the 24 cent inverted Jenny (only 100 of those are known to have ever reached the public), but obviously "worth" only a tiny fraction of the Jenny stamp. One factor of course is demand, very few people collect these smiler sheets because they are a poor investment, you pay a premium up front, they are difficult to store in bulk, and they are really no better than the equivalent in postage, and of course even then you have to live in the country where you can use them as postage, but, still I like to think I have something out of the ordinary, and one day I might be able to recover what I paid for them.

"Are any of them worth a lot?" is the only real reaction I've gotten from non stamp collectors. Usually it's a "so what" blank stare reaction. No doubt the same reactions I'd have looking at someones' match book collection.

I have the same experience. I sometimes reply, "Oh yes, you could buy a car with the catalog value of just what is on this page." I typically do not mention that catalog value is meaningless.

Don

I get this quite often and usually respond with - "They are worth a lot to me"

Monetary wise, no, but there's so much more to this hobby that they don't understand.

'
Given the spirited discussions we've had about catalog values - where they come from, where they ought to come from, where they are going, etc - it might be a little rich to look down on folks who cannot think of anything to ask other than price.

It is rather like death: folks always ask how someone died, even though this is always none of their business. I've been training myself to ask other questions, and have been surprised how hard that can be, as most questions are inappropriate at least some of the time.

My go-to answer about stamps (and other collectibles) is:

"Their value is in transcendence. They take me to another place, another time ... sometimes, a whole other life."

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

ikey pikey—if I gave someone an answer having to do with transcendence I am sure the person hearing it would wonder whether I am on drugs, or alternatively thinking maybe I should be on drugs. If we ourselves enjoy the hobby then what is the big deal and why do we have to explain anything? Everybody has things they like and dislike. That's what makes people interesting.

Drugs? Possibly. Colleagues with whom I worked on a long-running government programme used to complain that "we can never get back the time we've spent on this". I pointed out that recovering time was only the taste of a madeleine or the sound of a Vinteuil sonata away. They didn't understand either ...

VALUE as a stamp collector -----Growing up collecting was fun as I got older my albums kept getting bigger and bigger . After awhile the albums then got more and more volumes to my stamp collection .

I started to notice other people's collections had the same stamps my collection had and more interesting they had the same naked countries or blank pages I had . That is when I started buying stamps from countries that others and specially me had nothing to show or display from.

As my collection grew and I got older and the dollar values increased ,I also notice the stamp auction catalogs year in and year out had mostly the same stamps or the same countries. At that point I made it a study of what showed up rarely at auction and what countries came up for auction less than others in the auctions that had country collections ,that is what I went after .

Over the years that part of my collection held my interest ,the collecting of the out of the way stuff you don't see every year coming to market ,that is where a future buyer of my collection would see most of the value .

Nice post floortrader. There is no substitute for knowledge and experience. Even the best catalogs can lead you astray when it comes to relative scarcity or value.

floortrader - your observation is very similar to mine. Looking at other folks 20th century mint, and random scattering of 19th used in the US was the norm, with all the usual high end holes.

So I started looking at availability, and tracking.

So instead of country diversifaction towards market rarities, I decided to go minor catalog listing for modern stamps. It is proving to be quite a conquest. Sure there are expensive stamps, but there is much to be had from $25-$1000, that are now forming a really awesome collection. I reached for some stamps, like the Lennon error mentioned in Linns, but I believe stuff like that is going to be a darling of a stamp sheet folks will want in a few years (<20). I think a lot of value can be ultimately realized by buying what other folks aren't but understand that could take a very long timeframe. I'm ok with that, because for me, the search, the haggle, the environment, the package tracking, everything including the final envelop exacto knife unsealing make it all worth it.

My interpretation of the last 2 or 3 posts above is reminiscent of market timing in the stock market as opposed to buying either a blue chip stock or fund on the one hand vs a very aggressive stock or fund (small cap) on the other. Speculating on what other people don't want may be a strategy for some but not for me. In the end there is no guarantee that either strategy will lead you to the promised land but if I were collecting presidential manuscripts for example, I would put my money on George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and leave William Henry Harrison, James A Garfield, and Zachary Taylor to others even though there is an ample supply of the former and the latter 3 (in office) are the scarcest. Every autograph collector covets the former group; only the specialist appreciates the latter group. Sometimes supply and demand do go hand in hand and the universe of people interested in your item is wider. Just my humble opinion.

Personally, I view stamp collecting as a hobby. It has zero connection with any assets held as investment. It is done completely on my "wasted time".

We probably spend more money on sports club/gym membership than on stamps.

There are at least three fundamental differences between the stamp market and the stock market that make direct comparisons like these difficult.

First is fungibility; any two shares of the same company and voting class are the exact same thing, completely interchangable, with the same value and the same voting rights. Two stamps might be from the same issue, but due to condition or features like cancellations that can be different on every copy, rare stamps generally aren't interchangable. You can find comparable sales, but that's usually the best you can do.

Secondly, while informational asymmetry features in both markets, it's much, much easier to benefit from specialist knowledge in the stamp market. No amount of expertise will tell you when the stock market has hit a local minimum/maximum, and trading in a specific stock while possessing material knowledge unrecognized by other investors may actually be illegal. OTOH, picking through stamp dealer stocks or auction lots looking for valuable unrecognized varieties can be extremely profitable if you have knowledge of the area, and the SEC will not punish you for being successful.

Finally, the stamp market is illiquid -- perhaps not quite as illiquid as real estate but nothing at all like the stock market. Even popular "high volume" stamps can take days to sell, and even VF MNH modern sets, perhaps the closest thing to fungible commodities that exist in the stamp market, will sell for different prices in concurrently-running ebay auctions for no reason other than the audience of buyers differed (i.e. lack of volume). The stock market, OTOH, has many big-money market makers offering to purchase or sell shares of almost any stock at any given time, nowadays even when the exchanges are closed, and typically you can dump thousands of shares at the bid or purchase thousands at the ask if you like, and regardless of which MM actually fills your order, the book is the book. Can you imagine a stamp dealer that offered firm prices at which they would immediately sell or purchase sound copies of any stamp? The closest anybody came to that in the stamp world was John W. Scott way back in the 1890s, when his catalog was an actual dealer price list and he stocked copies of (almost) every stamp from every country, used or unused. That must have been pretty amazing back then, but nowadays there isn't really anything similar.