tth2

I think the point is more that very few things appeared cheap at the time they were up for sale. As X% of average income back then versus Y% of average income today, perhaps they were cheaper in relative terms back then, but by the same token it would've felt crazy at that time to spend more than X% of average income. It's only in hindsight that things appeared to be cheap.

I agree that selling non-descript graded books on Clink is just as good as Heritage. In all seriousness, there are a lot of types of books that I would never sell on Heritage, even with preferential terms. Marvel SA, any BA, any CA, etc. Clink's clientele for these kinds of books is just as good as Heritage's (probably 95% overlap anyways).

Rough rule of thumb for any issue of Mystery Men is take whatever you think it might be worth and then multiply by 3.

I remember the good old days of seeing, uh, "enthusiastic" younger collectors marveling at a book being in NM/M condition... from the 1970s! I didn't have the heart to tell them that they never saw super high grade copies of these books at conventions and such because it wasn't worth the hassle of bringing them, not because they were genuinely rare.

Remind me to never stand next to you.

Everyone's coming back! I've seen more long-lost boardies posting in the last few months than in the last 10 years!

Man I love this hobby!

This is actually one of the least problematic parts of creating such a fund. The ownership of the books would sit with a special purpose investment vehicle, which in turn could be owned by a trust or other ownership vehicle. This is simple nuts and bolts for investment funds, ETFs, etc. Physical storage and management would be relatively easy too. There are numerous storage facilities for high dollar items that legally sit in a customs no man's land in places like Switzerland, Singapore, etc. where billions of dollars of art and other items sit already. Collectors deposit their collections there and go see their collections there, because they don't want to pay the customs and duties to bring the items into their countries. You could also hire any number of perfectly reputable custodian services to manage the physical custodianship of the items. The problem is that all of this infrastructure costs money, and to Richard's point, the total universe of comic book assets, even including OA, simply isn't big enough to sustain the cost of maintaining this infrastructure year in-year out. A 2% management fee on a investment fund with AUM of $200m is $4m. So the fund's gross profit has to be at least $4m otherwise it's going to have to sell off "principal" just to pay for its operating costs. A really successful Heritage Signature Auction is what -- US$7-8 million of gross proceeds? And there are 4-6 of those per year? Throw in ComicConnect and Comiclink on top of that. This assumes we're talking about an "ETF" of many comics. If we're talking about an "ETF" of individual books, or even comprised of the same issues (e.g., an "Action #1 ETF"), the size issues I've described above are going to be compounded because there simply aren't that many Action 1s and their aggregate value simply isn't big enough.

Never understood buying albums in cassette form. It was much cheaper to borrow a friend's LP and then record it on a blank cassette! We would pool our resources by figuring out who was going to buy which LP, and then everyone would record everyone else's LPs onto blank cassettes. And you would of course record your own LPs so you could listen on your Walkman, boombox, car stereo, etc. Voila, impressive music collection!

I am willing to accept the hedge fund industry's standard 2/20 charge on $200 million as part of an experiment to see if this could take off. I've always been selfless like that.

Yes, but you'll only get fractional points. It'll be the Robinhood Registry.

Completely missing my points, but okay.

Isn't that exactly what's happened in the animated film cel market?

That's a very good point, but I thought we were talking about published versus unpublished art. So the better analogy would be if movie collectors collected the original negatives used to make the movie (I'm just making this up, I have no idea if such a thing exists), and people found negatives of footage that was cut during editing and never made it to the final screen version. I would guess that similarly, the negatives from the cutting room floor footage would be less valuable than the negatives of the film that was used in the final screen version. (with obvious exceptions such as if the footage was cut because it showed Sophia Loren's top dropping off).