What Is The Hottest Country To Collect ?

Yesteryear's garbage is tomorrow's treasure!! Draw conclusions today, and you will be wrong, wrong, WRONG down the road with many of these collecting areas. I recently spent serious money (well, for me, anyway) on a Qatar collection. 20 years ago, I would have turned up my nose at it. Today, it is something pretty special to me.

As my uncle told me, "It doesn't matter what you collect, as long as you enjoy it."

I don't think that anyone was denigrating Mongolia Collectors. I do think that it is fair to question why somebody was willing to pay enormous sums for material that is readily available outside of this Kelleher auction for its actual market value. The $200,000 Mongolian purchases are real head scratchers.

Per Don's comments, I am guiltly of denigrating Mongolia as a "mediocre (philatelic) country." Not my best moment, but like Rogdcam I was driven by the astonishment that any grouping of Mongolia could be worth over $90K (with BCs).

shermae, I think we are all scratching our heads over this one. No negativivity intended. Just wonderment/awe. It's like someone paying $80K for a run-of-the-mill 8 year old Honda Accord. Who does that?? There's nothing there against Hondas. Was there really something in that lot that we all missed, including the lot describer at Kelleher? Is the buyer trying to 'make' the market? Does he have some pathological fascination with anything Mongolian?? Curiosity makes us all ask, but we may never learn the story behind the story.

MOOT ---If you read the lot description , First it is MNH material, different than all the CTO material most of us see .Second they say there are IMPERF. sets. Third ,they say there is Scott unlisted material. So someone or two or three people believe the material is very rare .

Absolutely, floortrader! No argument here. My analogy using a run-of-the-mill 8 year old Honda was based on the Kelleher description that estimated the value at $2000-$2500. I can see missing an estimate by 2 or 3 times. Maybe 10 times (on the outside) on some truly eclectic specialized material, and with a few of that material's specialized collectors in the audience. But 40 times??? Based on the realizations for all the Mongolia lots in that sale, it appears that Kelleher needs other lot describers. I wonder what they based the $2000-$2500 estimate on? Why not $1000-$1500, or $10,000-$15,000, or (call me crazy) $75,000-$100,000? It appears to me that they pulled their # out of a very dark place and ran with it. I find it hard to believe that there is no history to this type of material so that the lot would sell within, say, 500% of their estimate.

If their estimates WERE based on real-world activity - which I doubt, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt - what did these 2 or 3 bidders know that the rest of the world didn't? What real-world activity was their bidding based on?? Or wsas the whole thing a stupid mistake? Overseas bidders calculating exchange rates all wrong? Two agents doing the stupid thing of accepting 'buy' bids from their clients? Drunk bidding? Two bidders simultaneously spilling soda on their keyboards causing the 'Enter' button to stick?????

Still, I'd like to know the story behind the story. I will keep an eye out for insanely high priced Mongolia and see if it goes anywhere.

About 6 months ago I bid on ebay on a similar but smaller lot. It was a run of MNH with unlisted and imperf materials, a few of the gold/silver foil stamps etc. There were a few watchers and it sat around $50 for most of the auction. I put a bid in for somewhere around $250 and thought I had a reasonable chance of getting it. The lot sold for about $2500. I was pretty surprised at the time because I didn't know anyone had that much interest in the more modern Mongolia/ The material is listed all over the place. Scott revalued Mongolia material a few years back coming up with some ridiculous prices for relatively common stamps. You'll see the imperfs listed on ebay for $20+ a set and usually no buyers, so I don't know how anyone would recoup the 80K price tag. Stunning.

I follow Mongolia closely--I lived there in the 90's for 3 years teaching English and have a Minkus Album for Mongolia.

Jackie

Very well said Don

I collect Wold Wide and embrace all countries. I get exited when I get stamps to start a country. I have purchased collections from Poland and Korea for next to nothing and it brings me great joy to fill my albums no matter what country I am working on.

Dianne

As a general FYI, two major auction houses are holding December sales, including all sorts of collections. Will be interesting to see if their action follows Kelleher & Rasdale. Did not quickly see Mongolia collections.

Cherrystone: Dec. 15-16

Schuyler-Rumsey: Dec. 14-17