The Biggest And Most Destructive Lie In The Hobby Of Stamp Collecting

An interesting stamp blog post from several years ago...thoughts?

https://canadianphilately.blogspot....-lie-in.html

There are some very useful observations in that blog.

Catalogue prices in the US and Europe (or any other region) differ. So 10-30% of Scott is a useless remark if you talk about a European stamp sold in Europe.
Quality does matter. A washed out, damaged stamp with a smudges cancellation or a perfect cancelled example may both fall outside that range.

Looking to add to my Dutch collection, I follow online auctions. I note that most winning bids are within that range (relative to the NVPH catalogue). But certain stamps time and again make 40-50%. I see something similar with certain Spanish stamps.

Is it completely untrue to state that you should expect stamps to sell in that range, in the home market of the catalogue? I think it is a good indication, as long as it is made clear that you are talking about stamps of average to very fine quality (whatever that means) and 10-30% of Scott does not work in Germany for a German stamp.

Is a catalogue useless if it persistently quotes a price that is 1,000% of the 'market price'? No! If that would be the case, the catalogue is extremely useful. Divide by ten to get that true value.

So, whatever way you look at it, the catalogue price provides information and, consequently is not useless.
Other than that, a catalogue is a helpful list to understand what there is.

The blog is excellent. It's about 75% correct. The catalogue values are wrong though. I wish I could debate this person. Though
I do agree with most of the authors points. In the end, most stamps never sell for anything close to catalogue value. And that is
just the truth of the market. I have bought some South American stamps at 3x catalogue value, but that is because the catalogues are wrong.
Catalogs are just relative value. Scott needs to start over and start with real prices for retail. The multiplier can be applied afterwards for pristine stamps.
As it stands now the author has lots of wishful thinking of what stamp prices should be. Near Zero collectors pay catalogue value for anything.
Scott for example would sell more catalogues to retail if they just posted some actual prices. The rest of the catalogues I see from other countries, are even more absurd. As it stands now catalogues are barely useful and just laughable. If I was running a staff, I bet I could make a catalogue that had real prices in it. It's not really that hard to do.

Hipstamp does not post realized prices but they should and one could work out getting access to that data. ebay could be used and a knowledgeable collector could figure out relative price. What actually sells is the retail price. Period. There is no fantasy involved. Though auction houses can be discount. Many auction houses are not really action houses but are retail in disguise. The bottom line is that zero catalogues for all of time to my knowledge ever posted a real value of a stamp. And that is the true damage to hobby. As far as the collectors who say value does not matter. Yeah the author is spot on. They have been brain-washed by the dealers of whom it benefits. Stamps do have value as a collectible. Common stamps unfortunately although they are collectible have little value as the collector base dwindles.

I like to break up my posts. Overall, this is a blog that every collector on this forum should read. I may disagree with some of the points, but that does not negate some of the excellent points and thoughts in the blog. A++ insights from me. Well written and well thought out.

The points in that blog post are interesting and I think I've seen posts from that author on this site so maybe we can engage him in a conversation.

In my opinion, 'catalog values' are dinosaurs and will soon become extinct.

Many collectors already use online resources to glean actual real-time market values. I think this trend will continue as it becomes more and more easy to understand real-time market values. Work remains to done including making the data more accurate and including improved filtering capabilities (i.e. stamp condition), but the tech needed for this already exists.

So if you can quickly determine a real-time market value for your stamp in hand, why would you ask me (or a catalog publisher) for an opinion on what it is worth?

There are folks who may either desire or benefit in having inflated catalog values. Some collectors, for example, like believing their material is valued highly. Some dealers like having high catalog values to use as a sales tool, 'the CV of this stamp is $500, but I'll sell it to you for the low, low price of $50'.

From my chair, it appears that there are multiple reasons for catalog publishers to maintain high catalog values and few incentives to adjust them to be closer to actual market values.

This is why I think that the traditional 'catalog values' will soon (probably when the current generation of collectors turns over to the next generation) be replaced by market values. I think that smart catalog publishers will have already been working toward changing from catalog value 'opinion' and more towards actual value 'data'. In addition to this, they should also be working on developing value trending models. Imagine an online catalog which not only displayed real-time market values but also real-time trending charts for a stamp.

For me, the hand-writing is on the wall; debating the pros and cons of traditional catalog values is moot because they will become extinct.
Don

One thing I've never understood is how the catalogs come up with their valuations. I think I read on one of the threads here that it is based on sales. Whose sales? Are they actively collecting sales data? From where? That would seem to be an impossible task to do with any kind of scope that would yield something close to accurate. And the number of stamps involved would make data collection on sales even more difficult.
So is it some folks sitting around a table using their best/expert judgment?

If you sell stamps as well as cataloguing them, as Yvert and (these days to a lesser extent) Gibbons do, you will have your own data, which can be combined with auction etc information.

"Work remains to done including making the data more accurate and including improved filtering capabilities (i.e. stamp condition), but the tech needed for this already exists."

While tech may exist for centering and for detecting short/pulled perfs, not so much for NH vs H vs regum, reperfs, creases, tears, scuffs, stains, thins, favorable vs unfavorable cancels, etc, never mind that ebay image quality varies greatly.

If Scott were to suddenly educe catalog values ti whatever you consider "true" market values, mass chaos would result. You might want to review what happened in the past for a taste. (it was some time in the 80s as I recall). And t when the market was only retail and conventional auctions and was not further complicated by ebay etc. Sorry, but prices are not consistantly the same across all three.

I disagree. The data only needs to know the description of what was sold, how much it was sold for, and the terms.

This is already being done for a myriad of other things such as cars, houses, travel, vacations...

For example, used cars exist in all kinds of types, age, optional equipment, mileage and condition. And you can get not only a quote, based upon what they know about 'sold' market values of like cars, but also an actual firm offer.
In my opinion it is just a question of having enough data.

For our hobby, the data which has been and will continue to grow larger and larger with every passing minute, hour, and day.
<shrugs>
Don

and I disagree.

If you want to buy a crappy condition stamp for an average price that includes nice sound stamps or sell a nice one for a price that includes crappy ones, have at it.

Is stamps have resale value, Walkman82.

The vast majority of stamps have no value at all and especially less value than what is used to hold or contain them. What you are paying for for those worthless stamps is not the stamp itself but the labor and associated costs to provide you with that worthless item. This of course does not apply to the mint stamps which still have validity as postage stamps on current mail, then they may be worth up to face value but definitely face value when used to pay postage and fees.

Are there some stamps which may have value, yes, but just a small minority of them and overall they a an insignificant percentage such that any random collection likely does not have them.

It is like lottery tickets, each is a potential winner until they are not. And the vast majority are and never will be winners. But a tiny few do pay off and that keeps hope alive.

I interpret Scott this way for US mint catalog values: Stamps they consider to be not worth collecting (vast majority), will get a value of roughly 2x face value. Stamps they deem to be potentially worthy of investing in will get a value of 3x or greater than FV (small minority). The greater the multiple above FV the higher the "collectibility". For most stamps of normal denominations, I see this pattern in Scott's catalog values. What do you guys think of my interpretation?

By the way, I'm not talking about modern stamps with extremely low denominations. I definitely don't think a 1-cent stamp with a CV of $0.25 has "appreciated" in value 25x in 2 years.

It's true that most stamps have little to no value. That said, if you collect in complete sets, in very high quality (for example MNH without flaws or significant centering issues), your collection can have significant resale value. The high values drive the total value of the collection, bolstered by the low values that create the complete set. I suppose high denomination or high catalog values, in top quality, can also have significant resale value.

Complete MNH sets can be sold on ebay for 40-50% of Scott in most cases, not the 5-10% typically quoted. And in some cases, Scott is clueless/useless about actual retail value, especially if they don't list MNH prices for that set. An example would be Netherlands and Colonies long definitive sets from before 1950 or so which sell for a multiple of Scott due to their scarcity.