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

If you spend $1000 on an investment grade auction, its worth $800, and you are at 640 to sell. So you need over a 36% bump in original sale price to make a single $. If you want to invest, buy tech stocks. If you want a fun hobby use your capital gains to buy stamps.

"as the stamps themselves are worthless"

Nonsense. If they were all worthless and only priced at cost of labor plus profit, they would all be priced at the same price.

"If you spend $1000 on an investment grade auction, its worth $800, and you are at 640 to sell. So you need over a 36% bump in original sale price to make a single $. If you want to invest, buy tech stocks. If you want a fun hobby use your capital gains to buy stamps." - True if you bought at full value. Best to buy it low from the auction house. I saw one dealer at a high end auction buy a stamp for 700-800 and now they have it for sale at 1400-1600. Dealers make money all the time on investing in stamps. Why can't the collector?

The labor argument is true for the Scott Catalogue. That is one of reasons that the catalogue is not as useful for collectors.

" I saw one dealer at a high end auction buy a stamp for 700-800 and now they have it for sale at 1400-1600. Dealers make money all the time on investing in stamps. Why can't the collector?"
That would make you another dealer, not a collector. Collectors collect. Dealers buy and sell.

If you have a buyer lined up to buy the stamp at $1400+, great, but if not you will probably sit on it for some time. The velocity of high end stamps is not super high, generally speaking. Now if you are talking about engaging in flipping overall, there are business models that work for that. Like anything else ymmv, and as someone else mentioned, it only takes a few rotten apples to kill profit. It has to be baked into your models.

Going back to the the original article, the dealer is trying to market and demonstrate the value and place of dealers in a broader ecosystem.

Disagree 100%. I know any number of collectors that either sell duplicates on ebay, or will buy a collection specifically for a few items for their collection, and then flip the rest. That doesn't automagically make them a dealer.

I am not saying it is a good investment. But anyone can speculate or invest in any collectible.
Stamps, baseball cards, trading cards, coins, fine art, jewelry, fine wine, gold and even worthless cryptos. Most people won't make any money. But some will.
You only need a greater fool to buy the item off of you. Stamp investing is taboo because collectors want cheap stamps and dealers don't want to compete with an investor.
Dealers need collectors to take losses on stamps to keep them in business. A dealer is a stamp investor.

FIRE!

Aim.

Ready.





We have all been there.

If they are being resold at or below their cost, then I agree with you, but as soon as you are trying to make a profit, you become a collector/dealer. I don't care if you then plow the profits back into your collection, you are still dealing.

Precisely. I've got a wide stock portfolio.My investment manager handles all of that. I don't spend hours just looking at my stock certificates. Those are an investment, meant to make me money. My stamps are not. Far too many people pretend that they "deserve" money for the ultimately worthless things that they buy and they just don't. Stamps are just pieces of paper with pictures on them. Supply and demand. Demand depends on who shows up to the auction with how much money in their pocket. There is no inherent value to any of this.

A lot of people buy stamps, just for the sake of buying them. They don't need them, they don't necessarily want them, they just want to be surrounded by stamps. A lot of those people aren't really collectors, they're accumulators. Then, they get too much and they have to dump them back on ebay where they got them because otherwise, they won't be able to move.

There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Everyone can do whatever makes them happy but I have zero interest in that. I buy what I want and only what I want and therefore, there's no need to sell anything. It's more of a hassle than I care to deal with.

My experience is that if you want to ruin a hobby you enjoy, make a business out of it. Every transaction has the potential to go bad and become stressful.
Don

Ding ding ding! Give the man a prize!

I wonder how many of you would give away your collection for free to a non-relative or non-friend if you had a collection that was worth at least 3,000-10,000. Probably not many.