Collectibles are terrible investments
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Collectibles are terrible investments
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Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#2Crypto isn't fully a collectable as it's quite hard to have hidden transactions using Beanie Babies or Picassos. The latter aren't terribly anonymous and only valued if known. It's also damned hard to e-transfer physical objects unless Musk or Bezos have their transporters working.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#3Crypto isn't fully a collectable as it's quite hard to have hidden transactions using Beanie Babies or Picassos. The latter aren't terribly anonymous and only valued if known. It's also damned hard to e-transfer physical objects unless Musk or Bezos have their transporters working.
Wired just had a big article about how the public nature of the blockchain enabled the Feds to track down a network of child abusers.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#4I get the urge to collect, and I totally get why people feel their collections are valuable. But having personal feelings of value are not correlated well with financial returns! Indeed, as the Beanie Babies example shows, the more people have feelings of value the more incentive there is for others to profitably reduce the correlation.
In high school I worked in a library. Every once in a while somebody would want to donate their National Geographic collection. (For those unfamiliar, it is a high-grade, highbrow magazine that has been published for more than a century.) After subscribing for decades and lining them up on the shelf, they really valued those well-made treasuries of knowledge. But we were a library, so we already had sets. At least then, there wasn't much in the way of a secondary market. So we had to break their hearts and explain that we couldn't help them.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#5As chance would have it, I'm at my parents and we were digging through beanie babies joking about how we could be sitting on a gold mine (sorry reader, we weren't). Even have that price estimate book.
We had one "rare" beanie, it last sold on eBay for 15 dollars. I can't image who was selling some for $1000 1 bid this year. If I had to guess: money laundering on eBay.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#6Crypto isn't fully a collectable as it's quite hard to have hidden transactions using Beanie Babies or Picassos. The latter aren't terribly anonymous and only valued if known. It's also damned hard to e-transfer physical objects unless Musk or Bezos have their transporters working.
Not sure exactly what you mean here, is it the idea of using NFT sales as a way of laundering money or such? (I'm making the same distinction as the article of talking just about NFTs vs crypto in general.)
Seems like any sort of physical collectible would be great for under-the-radar transactions - claim you found them in the attic or something when it's time to turn them into cash, nobody's going to expect original receipts. Anything on a blockchain seems far riskier. Using Beanie Babies would've worked better before the bubble burst and people would still pay crazy prices for common ones compared to now, of course...
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#7I find this argument very strange:
> But it is, because in the long run, assets without cash flows cannot increase in value more than the economy as a whole. If something appreciates faster than the whole economy in the long run, it eventually eclipses the whole economy, which is impossible.
No one is operating on an infinite time horizon in their investments, so this argument seems moot. You can certainly find collectibles that have grown faster than the economy as a whole over a period of O(decades), which is all any human needs.
e.g. a Black Lotus card from magic was about $15 in 1994 and about $11,000 (or more, depending on age and condition) in mid-2021. [0] In that same time period, the S&P 500 has gone up only about 10x.
[0]: https://infinite.tcgplayer.com/article/A-History-of-the-Pric...
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#8I find this argument very strange: > But it is, because in the long run, assets without cash flows cannot increase in value more than the economy as a whole. If something appreciates faster than the whole economy in the long run, it eventually eclipses the whole economy, which is impossible. No one is operating on an infinite time horizon in their investments, so this argument seems moot. You can certainly find colle…
The article is arguing that you aren't likely to be able to pick the ones that will grow faster than the economy as a whole over the time frame you intend, because it relies on an extreme amount of right-place-right-time luck. If you were looking for the next Beanie Baby for the last 20 years, do you think you would've found it?
I think it's also arguing that the particular appreciation you need to capture largely only happens at the "before you heard of it" part of the curve. I don't think it has quite enough specifics there, e.g. would buying a Honus Wagner card in 1990 compared to a bunch of stocks have paid off over the last 30 years? I haven't done that research myself.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#9I am sure NFTs perform terribly in the short term too, in aggregate. Most NFTs are not celebrity endorsed and will just languish even in the bull run. (Like most shitcoins).
Real estate is in between IMO - kind of a collectable but there is cash flow but it doesn’t have the upside growth of stocks, unless it is some kind of rezoning or redevelopment.
Gold is more like a collectable (no revenue stream) as is any other commodity.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#10Crypto isn't fully a collectable as it's quite hard to have hidden transactions using Beanie Babies or Picassos. The latter aren't terribly anonymous and only valued if known. It's also damned hard to e-transfer physical objects unless Musk or Bezos have their transporters working.
Wired just had a big article about how the public nature of the blockchain enabled the Feds to track down a network of child abusers.
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