Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.
Thing is everything feels frothy because people haven't reset their mental model on what the dollar is actually worth. Over the past year or so the Fed took every pre-pandemic dollar in your pocket and made it worth about 70-80 cents. PPIA (Post-Pandemic Inflation Adjusted) the values on a lot of things are just fine.
Trading cards are cool again
41–50 of 94 posts
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#42I have around $5k MTG cards from 25y ago and no clue how to sell Thema :-(
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't use up trading cards like you do toilet paper. Neither are trading cards continuously produced like toilet paper.
Sure, that was just one (tongue-in-cheek) example. What about stocks?
Stocks represent fractional ownership of a future income stream - the profits of the underlying corporation. You can (in principle) buy a stock, never sell it, and get back more money than you put in. So you're not completely dependent on what others are willing to pay for it in the future.
Trading cards (and cryptocurrencies) are not like that. You can only make money if someone else is willing to pay more for it.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#44Does anyone ask themselves why they collect? I collect everything. I don't have the room to be a Horder, but my compulsion to collect us strong, with the exception of money. I should be collecting money, but that has been too hard for myself. I started off collecting snails. I would put them on my Tonka Truck, and they were workers. The guys on the roof were the bosses. The others placed all around the truck bed had…
I just want to say you sound like a cool and interesting person. I have noticed a lot of similar patterns in my life including struggling with depression. I'm not really sure the point of my reply, but I felt compelled to make it. Reading your post made me actually smile. I don't know maybe it's just feeling like I'm not alone. Thank you.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#45Absolutely everything is frothy right now. I wouldn’t make any long term conclusions from the markets today, since this seems like an exceptional time. That is to say, I think the “bull case” for many things atm are heavily tainted by irrational exuberance.
It's never going to be easy to distinguish between irrational overall exuberance, and enormous focused pessimism about currencies.
Bubbles of this magnitude are not caused by irrational sentiment. There is irrational optimism about market returns, but that's only a second-order effect from mechanisms such as low/negative borrowing rates and scheduled asset purchases (QE), monetarily incentivizing investments, which in turns incentivizes gambling.
Borrowing as much fiat as one could take and dumping it into assets was the rational choice, unless you were speculating on some black swan.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#46Off topic, but I quite like the choice of using a domain name for a single blog post. Who needs IPFS - we already have real content-based addressing here.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#47I have around $5k MTG cards from 25y ago and no clue how to sell Thema :-(
Go to your local MtG shop that runs Friday Night Magic and ask(people playing, not necessarily the staff). Find a Facebook group local to you and ask. You can just say you're looking to get rid of the entire collection if someone is willing to price it up for you, if you don't want to go through the effort yourself. That's how I see people selling their cards usually.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? Seems like something I’d enjoy trying as a side-hustle but never really done before outside of Pokémon
> Do you collect as a hobby or for profit? I never got the idea of being a hobby collector in modern times. Nowadays, everything is available on the Internet for sale, so completing the collection is only a matter of coughing up enough money. How is that interesting or exciting? I can still understand collecting items which aren't mass produced for the purpose of being collected - things such as history/war memorabil…
>rare books fro XIX century
The one thing I can truly say I "collect" is rare, first/early edition pre-standardization works from a specific Irish dialect. For me, though, it's not so much the collecting as having access to these books for the rich, natural (.i. non-standard) language that's contained in them. Eventually I might extend it to modern authors from the same dialect, but getting access to these older works is top priority.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#49From scanning this, it sounds like the author is specifically talking about sports trading cards, most characterized by baseball cards. This market certainly went crazy price-wise but then, as the author pointed out, tanked. It basically tanked because everyone started collecting the cards. Like any collectible market, it mainly took off to begin with because no one was collecting these things and keeping them in min…
> It's impossible to predict where this market will go just like any collectible market because it's so driven by market sentiment. As someone who knows little about trading cards or "markets" in general I guess, how is this different than any other market? Seems like everything is driven by market sentiment, even things like toilet paper from time to time.
There was a time when trading in equity shares was driven in part by the so-called "fundamentals". How the business was doing (and the outlook), if the company was making money (and would make money in the future), things like that.
Re: Trading cards are cool again
#50I have around $5k MTG cards from 25y ago and no clue how to sell Thema :-(
Either prepare to sell the whole thing for much less than 5k, or sell individually (which takes a lot of effort). I put my collection on eBay and ended up trading them for a bunch of SGI machines. This was back in 2003 or so. I had a lot more pleasure from these machines than the cards (worth much more, I est 3k EUR back then), but financially it wasn't a good trade. I am going to give away my Star Wars collection (cards from 4 to 6 only) to a Star Wars fanatic who is fan of 4 to 6. Its also why I knew spending money on World of Warcraft was not worth it (you can sell your entire B.net account only), same with Hearthstone. These are CCG but not tradeable. NFT are even more worthless. They give you nothing.