Winds Of Change In The Philatelic World

Try the Swiss PAX set ,I always wanted it growing up ,it cataloged about $800.00 ,when it went to $650.00 I purchased it at Kelleher in Boston at $220.00 MNH complete . Held them for 14 years and now selling for $60.00 to $70.00 , oh well that was the end of my stamp investment plans .

Great example Floortrader.

I took a look in Power Search for past sales results and looked at a bunch of Italian States stamps that sold in May of this year. They all had certificates and were four figure cv stamps. They all sold for between 5-10% of Scott and even lower than that percentage when using Sassone values.

Some of Sismondo's literature will be in their Jan 2024 auction, with presumably more later.

There was and still is a TON of Italian material on the market. Seems like it doesn't sell well at all, perhaps due to overpricing. Another observation is that many of the "blue chip" European countries have lost a lot of popularity so I am very careful when considering purchases. Other examples of countries with waning interest besides Italy would be Germany, Austria, Switzerland (per Floortrader's comment), Belgium, and most of Netherlands. Some of the Netherlands definitives from the 1910's - 1930's seem to still be somewhat competitive, especially if MNH. There are probably other examples but these countries stand out for me.

"Winds of Change" Thinking about Revcollectors comment on deals being had.

That is because the "Silent Generation" that occurs before the boomers are not all in the grave yet. 20-25% of them left and they have been dumping their collections to the boomers for the last 20 years or so. Boomers are in their financial APEX. The Silent Generation were devoted stamp collectors. The boomers are the lynch pin and then there are some X's. Once you hit Millennials, Y and Z in Western nations, look for huge declines.

That being said. Now is the time to pounce on buying collections. Their are many good deals to be had. And my generation is fooling around with bitcoin, ether, cryptos, NFTs and other worthless junk. The young person that buys real treasures is the one who will get ahead. My friends will be left with thin air. And I will have heirlooms.

I wrote junk and thin air - That was an insult to junk and air because even that has more value than cryptos and NFTs

As a student and teacher of history, I'd like to add this little factoid which is not directly related to stamps but seems relevant since this discussion includes a lot of references to demographic generations like "Baby Boomers" and others.

Saying that a generation is "dying off" is generally meaningless. Consider that a generation is simply a shorthand way of referring to people born over about a 15-20 year period. Certainly all the people born in that period are not suddenly "dying off". They may be gradually dying off -- that's always the case -- but you'd have to wait a very long time for them to be mostly gone if you wanted to reap some reward like buying their stamp collections. And it might be a very long wait.

One journal says this about the shorthand use of "generations" to discuss anything: "The divisions between generations are arbitrary and have no actual scientific basis . . . Naming generations and fixing their birth dates promotes pseudoscience and impedes social scientific research." In short, lumping people as generations has little to any real meaning -- and that includes talking about when a generations is "dying off".

Another source points this out about generations: "People born within [a certain] period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later. [But] This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations." So even saying "Baby Boomer" means very little, including about their stamp collecting habits, when they plan to sell their collections, or when they will die -- which could be sooner or much later.

The so-called Baby Boomers are a generation born from roughly 1946-1964, about 18 years. Those years were chosen for no reason I can think of. Well, 1946 makes sense as it was the first year of births from the veterans who came home. But what happened in 1964 that ended the Baby Boomers? It's just an arbitrary choice. And to me it's a silly choice because if you were born any time from 1960 onward, you experienced almost nothing a real Baby Boomer experienced -- moving to the suburbs, Eisenhower, Elvis and the music of the 1950s, the Beatles, "duck and cover" nuclear drills, the Civil Right Movement, and so on. All of those were well before you could walk or talk. So 1964 is just a convenient date, and that makes the 18 years of the so-called Baby Boomers just a convenient shorthand for people born in that era. More to the point, saying thay are "dying off" is a bit dopey. Obviously, people in their 70s and 80s do tend to die over some time but many live well into their 90s, for some another 20 years.

According to these dates, Baby Boomers today are those from 59-77 years old. Some are fairly old, some are not very old. Are they "dying off"? No more than any other group of old or middle-aged people ever die off. And you could hardly say people in their late 50s were soon going to "die off". That would be silly. So this shorthand habit of referring to a generation and what it thinks and does does not mean a whole lot, despite the media's incessant use of the term "generation" as if it did have some meaning. And the Baby Boomers are not dying off, but some are. And for these 59-77 year olds do die, it will take at least 20 years for the process to finish, maybe longer. There's no such thing as a "generational die off". People are not like lemmings going off a cliff. It takes years, even decades.

So anyone who announces that the Baby Boomers are dying off -- as if it were happening over just a few years and was right around the corner any day now -- either doesn't really understand what a demographic generation is, or they don't understand the length of time it takes for such a generation to die off.

Put another way, the last of the Baby Boomers will probably be dying in about 20 years -- or maybe it will be 25 years -- or maybe 30 years. If your financial strategy is to profit from that half-imaginary, extremely slow-moving development, good luck because it makes no practical sense. And you've got a long wait ahead of you.

Obviously the average person born in 1965 is of little to no different than the average person born in 1964, while a person born in 1964 is significantly different than a person born in 1946, but pick a person from the middle of one generation and another from the middle of the next generation or average over entire generations and there are clear social differences.
Obviously with a spread of 1946 to 64 in births and a similar (or even wider) spread in ages the people die, there is not a sharp cliff that a generation does off, but we have gotten to the point where significant numbers of boomers are passing.
So while things have a much mushier edge that hard labels suggest, change is afoot.

Eyeonwall, I have seen that several research organizations now divide the Boomers into 2 separate categories for the exact reason you've given- the sensibilities of someone born in 1946 are quite different than someone born in 1964. The most recent segmentation I've seen are 1 group from 1946-54, and the other group from 1955-64.

Mid-Century Modern

What happened is that 1964 was the last year since 1945 that the US birth rate was 20 per thousand, or greater. The boom is defined by that statistic.

DrewM - My point was that the Silent generation - which never gets mentioned are still around selling their collections off. These are the great deals the boomers are getting. It's a transfer of large collections to them. The boomers are still alive and kicking and it takes 80 years for a group to cycle out.

The young collectors in Western nations are slim. The young collectors are in Asia. Watch as stuff moves from West to East. A dealer told me 20% of all his sales go there from near zero earlier in his career.

Wind of changes - By the looks of the board topics recently discussed. It looks like +Topical collecting has overcome both Country collecting or WW collecting.