$1000 is handed to you to invest long-term in CGC Copper Age what do you do?

[comicalgems]

i don't see a lot of upside in buying slabs of these books, but I do think you can make a pretty good profit ST, MT and even long-term if you brought $1000 to a show and bought several boxes of choice copper material out of the cheap-o boxes. it would be a lot of work though.

 

Honestly, $1,000 nowadays would be enough to put together a pretty decent inventory of books from different eras if you want to become a junior dealer, have 400-500 items in your store and run some auctions.

 

Or if you pull them out of dollar boxes and slab them into 9.8s yourself.

 

Yes, that too (so you need to allocate a few hundred of your $1000 to slabbing fees), question is whether the good slabbing material key books are in the dollar boxes and how good you are at pulling 9.8s from the wild.

 

For example, what's the FMV on something like a 60 - 75 cent cover price layton generic iron man in 9.8? is there still money in that?

 

I would never do it like that. I may buy those books for the hope that I could get them SS'd in the future, but the ROI is not worth it. You want to get at least $50-$75 and hopefully more out of dollar box books after you have CGC'd them to make it worthwhile (at least for me). The key for me is almost always books that were hot at one point, or that are short printed. That is where the Copper bread is. And Dave Stevens books.

like Darkhawk 1?

[vane]

How about?

 

Superman #nn

Bradman Private Commission

 

 

http://www.recalledcomics.com/SupermanBradman.php

[Gatsby77]

I vote no. Bradman's a fun curiosity, but because there are fewer than 50, it becomes so hard to collect that many either give up or the few times it does show for sale, the price swings wildly. It's highly speculative at best.

 

Example: Last two sales I tracked were a CGC 8.0 that sold via eBay a year ago for $2,000 (believe via Buy-It-Now). However, a CGC 9.6 then surfaced in a Comiclink auction and sold for $2,600. I just don't see the long-term potential there.

 

Even if you were to pick up the 9.6 for $3,000, what are the chances that would grow to $5,000 in the next decade, a rate of return of only 66% over ten years? (or what--5.5% a year?)

 

If going after "limited to 50" books, I'd much rather risk my money on a Gobbledygook 1 for $1,200-$2,000 or even a Bloodshot 0 Platinum. While the Bloodshot's a far more minor character compared to the number of current or eventual '80s Superman completists out there, the rabid 100 or so Valiant collectors give it more long term potential, and a 9.8 recently sold for $1,300, far less than the Bradman (thus more room to grow).