The Focus On "Worth"

Gibbons and Yvert are still businesses selling stamps and issuing catalogues thereof.

There are fewer buyers for arcane/specialized material. Many less. Cherrystone has these types of lots often and they are a very tough sell. Give me BC over Lithuanian airmail perf varieties any day if I need to achieve a decent realization. Somebody pursues material that is not often seen but will not get in a bidding war over it and then expects there to be an upside? Huh

Rogdcam, noone knows what the future brings. If you are going to collect with a hint of future appreciation, outside of enjoyment, you are better off focusing on either quality, rarities or both. Let's say I own 1/50 type rarities. In 25 years from now will they all be gone? Might I have the best copy, that when the stamp collecting craze in 2030 in China, folks will pay 10x? Doubtful, but I know the upside possibility is better than buying 1000 200M printed stamps. Might the rarities be coveted or just more ebay fodder?

Are there examples of stamps that have appreciated across all avg to better qualities in major multiples? 5x 10x, 50x? I know the gem market is a specific niche case, but outside of that?

A rarity is only valuable if people want it. There are plenty of stamps that were issued in low quantity and always go cheap. Guam overprints come to mind. Stick with quality items that are popular and you will do ok.

Having bought and sold collectibles of many types over my lifetime, I believe that "value" is a way for a noncollector to be able to measure whether something is rare or not. It's a unit of measurement they understand without having to know the nomenclature or intricacies of a given hobby, e.g., "population" or "rarity scale".

Nice shirt Rev. Cost a lot?

It is natural for some people to focus on worth. You run into these types everywhere. In any conversation on any topic they are often talking about what a good deal they got.

Very true. I knew a guy that every time you asked him about his recent vacation, felt compelled to tell you in detail how much everything cost - the hotel, the meals, the airfare - and what a deal this or that expense was. Not about the interesting stuff - what he actually did or saw!

'
Maybe he was just trying to pre-empt the guy who would ask him what he paid, and then say "I could have gotten you all that for less".

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

I think the value side is important for a lot of people -- it certainly is for me.
Having said that, I'm rather poor so havent got the funds to buy the expensive items.
But the more I collect, the more I focus on various aesthetic aspects (but its very hard to divorce the financial aspect of these).
For example, there are some really beautiful stamps that are catalogued at 10p each, and there is no way I'd bother to keep more than few copies of them, whereas if some really ugly stamp has a CV of £100+, I'd keep (or sell) all the copies I could find.

A follow up to my post of the other day where I discussed the Wembley Stadium Smiler sheet with the "Emile" error, which is an example of a quite rare item with a fairly low "value". I paid about $100 for it, so using the current first class letter rate in the UK, and the current dollar to pound exchange rate, that's only about 6 times the face value, and only about 3 times the current price in the SG catalogue for the normal sheet (the error sheet is not listed in the Concise GB catalogue). So, I didn't pay a fortune for it and if worst came to worst I could sell them to my UK friends as postage and will not have lost that much. On the flip side is the iconic 5 pound Queen Victoria which is fairly common, but very expensive. There were nearly a quarter million of these printed, not that many fewer than a lot of recent Danish commemoratives, but as I write this there are about 30 or 40 for sale on ebay selling for anywhere from about $1500 at the low end to over $20,000, so there are two examples showing that there is a huge disconnect between scarcity and value.

The "disconnect", as you call it, is demand. That is the critical factor that outweighs all others.

As previously mentioned, iconic stamps such as dollar-value Columbians and sets of Zeps are not rare or even scarce. I can have my pick of them at any stamp show I walk into. All I would need is money. That's not rare. It's demand mixed with longstanding status as "key items" of philately.

I am in-process with assigning cover values for the new HPO catalog.

There are many HPO covers which are very rare, less than 200-300 hundred were originally cancelled and who knows how many still exist. Yet you can occasionally find them in the $1 boxes. So while the covers are rare, so are the people who want them. Hence, I am assigning a catalog value of just a few dollars.
Don

If you want what everyone else wants, stamp collecting is a rich man's hobby.

Q/ Guess what happens if you develop your own interests?

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who continues to rut about the dollar boxes, happy as a pig in slop)

Edited to clarify context.

Everyone wants to buy cheap and sell dear.