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Collectibles are terrible investments

fullstackeconomics.com

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Re: Collectibles are terrible investments

#71

Post by NavinF »

majormajor wrote: post #60
linkjuice4all wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

> which of things that 2022 kids are into should we be buying up for 20 years from now?

Streamer memorabilia: https://www.gwern.net/Startup-ideas#streamer-memorabilia

Tho I think the average HNer is too out of touch to make good investments in this field and would be better off asking their kids

Re: Collectibles are terrible investments

#72

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

Collectibles are a great investment if you're a dealer. Buy the collectible for 50% of it's selling value. Sell it to a collector for 100%. Pretty profitable, if you ask me.

If you are a collector, never buy anything less than the ones that are in the highest condition and very rare. Also make sure it's highly wanted by other collectors. Those are the ones that shoot up in value. Anything else tends to not keep up with inflation. I think that's why collectables are thought to be a bad investment.

Re: Collectibles are terrible investments

#74

Post by omginternets »

zenlikethat wrote: post #31

So funny enough, there _are_ some people looking at ways of generating cash flows with NFTs. For instance, some projects have offered a chunk of their fees from resales to users, or offer a token reward for staking the NFT. Or in Bored Ape Yacht Club's case, they just 'airdropped' a bunch of a new token over to holders, giving them free money essentially. Yes, just about everything out there still feels pyramid-schem…

> For instance, some projects have offered a chunk of their fees from resales to users, or offer a token reward for staking the NFT.

Something feels off about that, but I’m not sure what. It seems like a fundamentally different kind of “cash-flow” than what the article is referring to. It’s still capped by the total appreciation of the asset.

Re: Collectibles are terrible investments

#76

Post by bombcar »

linkjuice4all wrote: post #55
majormajor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 on…

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…

Some of those things have a floor - LEGO basically never goes under $10 or so a pound even used, so if you can get unopened sets for that price or so, you’re basically guaranteed to make money someday.

Probably not worth it as an investment however - I’ve done it and sure some of the sets I was able to sell for much more but many just sit there.

Re: Collectibles are terrible investments

#77

Post by SgtBastard »

djbusby wrote: post #58
Retric wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stocks have a positive bias above overall economic growth in dividends. In other words if you owned 1% of the US stock market in 1980 then without luck or skill you could turn that into owning more than 1% of the stock market in 2020.

Really? It just feels like dilution from IPOs would make it less percentage than the original stake.

I’d read it as being a combination of dividends being re-invested over 40 years (including indirectly for share buy backs) if you did basically nothing.

Re: Collectibles are terrible investments

#80

Post by blockwriter »

allturtles wrote: post #7

I 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, lends confidence to the earlier cards. MtG is further unique, at least insofar as I understand it, that a class of the earliest cards still see play in organized tournaments and are generally very powerful. Pokémon doesn’t seem to enjoy this same phenomenon, but I guess the games perpetuate the nostalgia for certain items in the first edition.

This is why I never understood sports cards. The literally have no utility, which is fine in itself, but I cannot see how this does anything other than produce a few highly valuable artifacts of the cultural phenomenon that is sports. I actually think that the major sports league should create an ever green strategy game, to which the collectibles are inextricably linked as game pieces. Then again, they already generate so much revenue, and they would not be good at all at designing a game, so I suppose anything derived from licensing is simply gravy.

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