Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can rent out other collectibles too
Is the income from that comparable to the income you can get from renting out a house?
You may be able to with cars.
Collectibles are terrible investments
101–110 of 170 posts
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
$1 on Bitcoin ten years ago are worth over ten million dollars now. And I think people thought Bitcoin had potential, even back then. Definitely something you wouldn’t mind spending a few bucks on. But back in the day it was quite different for average folks without enough tech knowledge to mine or buy crypto.
Getting in early on BTC, ETH, or crypto of your choice from this bull run was probably a pretty non-reproducible fluke though. Once the leverage in crypto markets gets cracked down on (up to 100:1 leverage is definitely contributing to the wild moves including to the upside), the return profile won't look like that any more. And with NFTs, there's just this endless sea of them. Even within one collection, most of the…
why does 100:1 leverage contributes to upside, but isn't cancelled out by 100:1 to downside?
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s some predictability in terms of people trying to buy all the things they wanted as a kid when they finally have the adult income to afford it. Some examples include muscle cars, BMX bikes, LEGO sets, and other things that a large population of children were aware of and wanted. If you just stock-pile the big sellers or scoop up the used stuff when it bottoms out in value then you might be able to profit. The…
How are 90s baseball cards, pogs, and yo-yos looking? Or "regular" opened copies of NHL 94 or what have you? I think we often overlook all the shit we were into that hasn't gotten expensive. We'd have to basically index-fund this shit if we had really been trying to invest in it in 2000 or so, and I think the losers would be a big problem for our fund. Maybe you bought a 3000GT instead of a Supra because you didn't s…
Regular copies of NHL ‘94 aren’t worth much (because yearly sports releases have a lot of copies and are typically fungible with the year prior or later), but is still a fantastic game and worth the $17 market price. That said, 16-bit games have doubled to quadrupled in market price in the last 3-4 years and are becoming increasingly hard to find. I’m interested in seeing how a recession affects prices, but some rarer, low print games have been expensive for a decade add and probably won’t lose much value.
Obviously, who would have known, but at least in video games you can watch prices start to rise about 20 years after a consoles original life.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting in early on BTC, ETH, or crypto of your choice from this bull run was probably a pretty non-reproducible fluke though. Once the leverage in crypto markets gets cracked down on (up to 100:1 leverage is definitely contributing to the wild moves including to the upside), the return profile won't look like that any more. And with NFTs, there's just this endless sea of them. Even within one collection, most of the…
why does 100:1 leverage contributes to upside, but isn't cancelled out by 100:1 to downside?
Because you can't go below zero. There's a floor to how much you can lose, and it's "everything you've put in", not "everything plus additional debt".
...typically, anyway.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#105The math gets even worse when you consider the US tax rates for gains on collectibles. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/06171...
I get the impression that unless you’re going through an auction house or selling super high-profile items, there’s no 1099-Misc or whatever going to the IRS - in other words, cash sales and unreported.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#106I collect toys. I don't think of them as investments. I just enjoy them and think they're cool. I feel like this is the way with collecting. If it's all about the return then you don't really get the full enjoyment out of it and you set yourself up for disappointment when you want to sell and your precious aren't worth as much as you thought.
This is the way. I don’t know about pop culture toys, but I’m a caretaker of items that will outlast me. Preserving them is my responsibility. Cashing them in is only a last, last resort, and when you think about value appreciation over generations, it changes how you think about items - they can be relatively inflation proof items, a way to store wealth, maybe not grow wealth unless your time horizon is at least measured in decades. But I definitely think of my ownership as temporary.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
That relies on you being able to guess. You can retroactively see which collectibles gained value, but you are unlikely to know that ahead of time. If you somehow do know - congrats, you’ve hit the jackpot. Maybe you have a place in the art community that introduces you to rising artists before they hit it big. Maybe you have access to sales data for toys before it gets published. But if you’ve read about it in the n…
No different from buying random small name stocks. Sometimes you luck out and your stock grows 20x in five years. Sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, buying, say, Apple stock, is not much different from buying a first edition Charizard card or an unopened copy of Super Metroid. It’ll probably steadily grow in value over years and has been. But both could end up collapsing tomorrow for unknown reasons.
Individual stocks still have a positive average return, even if they have huge amount of risk.
Collectibles have the same risk but a zero or negative average return.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#108Wrong. As always, it depends. If you’re buying $50 million paintings then none of this article applies
A $50 million painting isn’t considered a “collectible”, is it? I wonder where that boundary is. A part of a collection isn’t necessarily a collectible.
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#109This is your regular statistical reminder:
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data"
Re: Collectibles are terrible investments
#110I 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…
To my mind, the top echelon of trading card games, really only MtG and Pokémon, have a different economy. The games are actively played and people do make a living by furnishing the card market, as well as the organized playing market. I don’t have a description of the exact mechanism, but I think the greater liquidity caused by changes in the meta game, and therefore which cards are valuable at any given moment, len…
I am pretty sure there are now sport card collectibles that are connected to online and offline games, e.g. Panini has produced collectible sport stickers (mainly European football) for decades, but now also produces trading card games using the same sport cards, the "adrenalyn" TCG. The EA FIFA imprint should have something too.