october

Same boat. I was offered over $40k recently for a comic I paid $3k for a decade ago...but it's meaningless. I turned down $5k, then $15k, then $25k, and I will turn down $50k. I'll hold it til it's worth $3k again and I still won't sell it. Good luck to my kids. I would never, NEVER have held onto it for so long if I didn't love it. It would have been long gone, just like my FF 52 9.6, my Batman 171 9.6, my Flash 139 9.6, etc, all sold pre movie explosions at 1/10th their curent going rate because it was just stuff to me. Didn't care about them enough to do anything other than cash out as fast as I could.

That's the final rub, and not just that you will sell too early, it's that you don't want to sell at all. The comics I own that have increased in value 10-40x over what I paid I don't want to cash in on because I am too attached. I would have pulled the ripcord long ago if they were just "investments" gathering dust in a closet. It really takes a perfect storm. You have to A) buy cheaply before/after anyone else cares B) accurately predict it will be hot decades from then C) be one of the few people to recognize the opportunity D) hold onto what you bought despite having little/no emotional attachment and/or manage to part with it at the correct time if you do.

I bought then because I was twelve. In 2000 I was a sophomore in college and my priorities weren't exactly hoarding junk I wanted 8 years prior.

This Thursday and maybe Friday, I will be having a horror only sale. Dozens and dozens of super high grade DC bronze horror (9.2-9.6), some horror mags, and about half a dozen Atomic Age horror books....all just in time for Halloween!

A few more recent ones. The Spook is the Spokane copy. It's been a nice month or two for golden age pickups. It's not always thus.

He can let me know if he ever gets sick of it. It's outstanding.

Heard there was a trade for a NWC grey. I know which one I would rather have, but the future value trajectory winner isn't very clear to me.

The final irony is that correctly predicting future demand and choosing those one or two great things is not enough. Not only do you have to be right in order to cash in on something like a sealed Pokemon series 1 box 20 years later, other people have to be WRONG too. If everyone sees the potential future value and hoards them, the supply spikes and the price declines.

I'm not comparing the time windows. I'm comparing the difficulty involved in picking the winners. Nostaligia does drive value....but so what? Trying to correctly identify that one thing is INSANELY hard. Do you know how I know that? Because the things that are valuable now from 20-30 years ago (certain sealed NES games, gem mint 10 Pokemon cards, Alpha Black Lotus, unused Jordan 1's) are not just wildly popular, they are also generally very scarce. They are scarce because very, very few correctly predicted their value spike outside of a handful of people who were probably branded as nutjobs at the time. Everyone else was busy buying the "can't miss, no brainer investment opportunites". Trying to predict the future leaves you with cases of 1993 Fleer Baseball, boxes of post-Unity Valiant and rerelease Star Wars figures more often than not.

It doesn't ALWAYS apply, Dan. The things my friends and I wanted as 12 year olds are not, and have never been again, as collectible as they were when I was 12. Here's what we wanted. Not exactly retirement portfolio material: 1. Sports cards like Ken Griffey and Mark McGwire rookies. 3 through 20. MORE sports cards. 21. Air Jordans. 22. NES games, including a lot of sports titles (specifically RBI Baseball and Ice Hockey, or slightly later the Maddens on SNES/Genesis) 23. Starter jackets. 24. Starting Lineup figures. 25. Comics like Punisher mini series #1, Spider-Man #1, Wolverine #1, Ghost Rider #1, New Mutants 87. 26. Marvel collectible cards. Out of the above, some sealed NES games and the Jordans hold significant value (talking $1000+ here). Knowing that something 25 years from now will be popular is pretty worthless without a crystal ball, so yelling "rule of 25!!!" every time something goes up is about as helpful as yelling "stocks!!!" when an IPO succeds. Yes, obviously, nostalgia drives value, but so what? You still have to pick the one winner out of a VERY crowded field of losers and then wait decades to see if it pays off. Had my parents invested in the things my friends and I wanted, REALLY wanted, they would have significantly, disasterously underperformed the risk free rate. In fact, we did buy a lot of wildly popular stuff that my friends and I wanted during that age, mostly cards. It's kindling now.

The rule of 25 doesn't apply to a ton of stuff. Beanie Babies? Nope. The vast, vast majority of 90's cards and comics? Nope. Literally everything I collected as a kid is worthless. You can argue all of that stuff was overproduced, and it most certainly was, but interest is still next to zero for a most of it. Even hot collectibles like video games are mostly low dollar. If you owned certain games and if you kept them sealed, it's a goldmine, but the rest? Not so much. The majority of NES carts are still cheap (under $50 each for a good whack of the library) and even CIB stuff isn't generally that expensive. I agree that 25 years from now something will be popular and valuable, but identifying that thing is much much easier out the back window than the front.

Edited, took the wrong one. On my phone. Take 64.

Probably a Detroit Trolley copy.

That guy was one of the biggest dopes I've run across on here. Insufferable....and not because of his views on Hulk 181.

Couldn't be happier with my collection. I keep the things I think are awesome and actively purge/sell anything that is anything less. It's "only" ~1,000 books, but I love every single one. I allow no junk, fillers, run completion issues, placeholders or "eh, this is kind of cool" stuff into my shortboxes. Why waste time/money/energy on borderline purchases when I could focus on something better? It helps that I am not a completionist and have no interest in full runs.