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

Mystic stamp catalogue? Okay how many of you consistently buy from mystic stamp catalogue? Seriously what does it make up <1% of your collection. Mystic is good for supplies and now and then at the high end they have some one of a kind items. But the retail stuff, I really feel for some of you. If you like them great. Now and then they will have some deals. Stamp prices have fallen off a cliff when you count inflation. The catalogs were the last to find out. Na! I can read a full post well. Some of you I agree with and others well good luck. Look many collectors don't care to lose money. They virtue signal to the world that they don't care. The truth is that stamp collectors had to adjust to the stamp catalog prices and not the other way around. And as bad as the US catalogs are, the European catalogs just make me fall off a chair. The sad thing is that many people are conditioned to accept it. Let me give you all a hint. There is a reason why hipstamp and SAN make you pay for this information. ebay advanced only lasts 3 months which is not bad. You have to pay to get the real records from 3rd party sites that keep the records. Those are prices folks. Like it or not. One can defend the catalog prices or practices all you want, and if you want to pay them great. But the stamp dragons would sign up for a catalog with market prices instead of what we have now. At best the catalogs are just a reference and for those posters I agree with. The other stuff. emojii :)

Even some of the auction catalogs are more realistic than the traditional catalog companies. Let that sink in. The reason why is that they have to be. They won't be in business otherwise. Now not all auction house are the same. I write this as a general statement as some are better than others.

Are you kidding me? Many auction catalogs are wildly off the mark in their estimates, both low and high. Some out of ignorance, but many (one might argue most) do this purely out of intent, as they know that artificially inflating or deflating estimates will cater to different clientele: Low estimates attract bidders that think "they don't know what they actually have" and high estimates attract people that think they're getting an especially large bargain.

It's a marketing tactic more so than any semblance of accuracy, other than when specific established catalogue values are quoted for individually lotted items.

"Are you kidding me? Many auction catalogs are wildly off the mark in their estimates, both low and high. Some out of ignorance, but many (one might argue most) do this purely out of intent, as they know that artificially inflating or deflating estimates will cater to different clientele: Low estimates attract bidders that think "they don't know what they actually have" and high estimates attract people that think they're getting an especially large bargain.

It's a marketing tactic more so than any semblance of accuracy, other than when specific established catalogue values are quoted for individually lotted items."

- Yes, which is why I said some auction catalogs. And I wrote realistic. The auction catalogs almost always list below US and European catalogs, so in general yes I think that most auction catalog price estimates are better. The times when the auction catalogs are wrong and when the stamp catalogs are wrong is when a stamp is really rare or prices have suffered from a Western bias. For example, South American stamps in the past have been looked down on by stamp collectors and the catalogs are now wrong. ie Tastes have changed and the catalogs are still behind the trend. I pay a higher percent of cat for South American stamps than say some European nation's stamps.

I bought a ton of cool pretty old stuff for a bargain payed just 30 euros far as I know and I am completely new there are no extremely rare things but tons of great unused stuff from 1927 and up very excited might look to buy more of these auctions got at least 5000 stamps from all over the world il start sharing everything I think is cool on here and who knows mayby someone will point out something they are interested in

DutchNewbie - Yes, now is a great time to buy stamps. Many can be had for a song. Lots of collectors passing their stamps on to the new generation.

Stampgreendragon - when compiling actual transaction prices from common marketplaces such as ebay, how do you account for the fakes selling for far below market value?

"Market value" is whatever the stamp is actually selling for in the marketplace. It is literally impossible to be below "market value". This is why value is such a complete waste of time because value is whatever someone is willing to give to you at the moment you are selling.

The mistake here is believing there is a single "marketplace": a place where all buyers and sellers meet and exchange goods. This is a complete fiction.

There are many market places: ebay; Hipstamp; Stamp Auction Network; Stamps shows, etc. Each one of these can be broken down into even smaller markets. On a given day, for example, there may be different buyers/sellers on-line.

Each of these different market places will establish a different price point for each item that is traded within that marketplace. We all know that a Scott #1, graded 100J will get a vastly different price on ebay than at a Seigel Auction. Same stamp, different market places, different prices.

Catalogs try to give you a rough idea of what the average is between all these marketplaces.

'Market Value' is a real, quantifiable thing. Yes, it is ephemeral over time, but at any given snapshot in time it can be identified. It simply takes a decent data set to generate. But you can get a 'market value' for your house, your car etc. today and it can be used to make good decisions. And I do not agree with those who might argue that there is not enough stamp/cover data to generate market values. I think that 30+ years of online philatelic transactions is plenty of data. The rub here is, of course (and as Alub touches on above), is if you could get those that currently own that data to play nicely and sell or share it.

And I would also say that yes, there is bad data embedded in large online transactional data sets. For a philatelic dataset, you would have bogus transactions (i.e. Ryle British cartel sales) and other outliers. But statistically these are accounted for when generating any 'market value'.
Don

Decept it isn't. That's why Jim Demsey got $85k for his $3 million inventory. That's what someone was willing to give him for them at the time. In an alternate universe, with a different auction and different buyers, he might have gotten a different amount, maybe more, maybe less. He couldn't just go to the buyer and demand $3 million because that's what it's "worth". Nope, not to the buyer it isn't.

Yet you get people saying they have $5 million in stamps. Not unless someone has $5 million in their pocket that they are willing to spend on the day that you're trying to sell. At best, you can take a guess, based on what things have sold for recently, but that doesn't guarantee that your stamps will sell for that much. It depends on who is looking for what on the day. Data doesn't mean much in reality, it only shows past performance. It doesn't predict future results.

I wonder how much of the data covering online philatelic transactions exists.

I'm pretty sure ebay would not have stored 30+ years of data

ebay most certainly has collected transactions virtually since its inception and has access to it for sale to anyone who is willing to pony up the money. This includes any ebay Partner who would like to better understand how to list and sell on the platform. ebay offers access to their data on a number of levels all depending on how much you would like to spend.

In many ways, the overall value of a company like ebay is its data.
Don

More Info on accessing ebay transactions for its Partners



Edit:
I think that Noble and a few other philatelic companies are already Partners and are already tapping into ebay transactional data and compile them to offer 'Trends' services/newsletters.

Don,

Your response prompted me to look a bit deeper.

Your view of how much data ebay hold is much closer to reality than mine. 8-)

I am surprised just how much data they have accumulated. Impossible to get an exact figure but we are talking many petabytes.

I'm coming around to your way of thinking that the data is certainly there ready to be mined.

My only concern is that collecting stamps is very much a visual hobby and we all see things differently. Take the term "Fine used" for instance. If you trawl thru a few sold listings for a particular stamp, say a UK 1948 Silver Wedding £1, this term will have been applied to items that range from what I PERSONALLY would consider an attractive CDS to what I PERSONALLY would consider a hideous smudged blob.

How would that be catered for when compiling information from the raw data?

Gibbons catalogue has examples of what they consider Fine Used for all eras, so you know what their value on that stamp relates to. Fine Used on ebay can cover, in reality, almost anything.

Interested in your thoughts on this.

[quote"Market value" is whatever the stamp is actually selling for in the marketplace. It is literally impossible to be below "market value". This is why value is such a complete waste of time because value is whatever someone is willing to give to you at the moment you are selling.][/quote]

Sorry, but that is totally wrong. If, for example, you have a nice used U.S. #1, say an 85 with a typical red grid, it would normally sell at auction in the $325-$350 range. That is "fair market value". If someone is foolish enough to sell it at $150, they did not get "fair market value", just because someone was willing to buy it for that price. The concept of "fair market value" absolutely exists.