Giant Size X-Men #1 for investment? 3 3

[WolverineX]

5 minutes ago, ComicConnoisseur said:

Simple answer invest in both stocks and key comics. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

With comics just try to pick 4 or 5 keys each from

silver age

broze age

copper age

modern age

You most likely won't do as good as the stock market but those 4 or 5 keys from each comic age will beat leaving your money in a savings account in a bank or a bond.

Also

Number one place to invest is your health. It doesn't matter how much money you have if your health is extremely poor.

I had two uncles both millionaires who died in their early 60s recently because of smoking related diseases. All that money they had couldn't beat cancer.

So health would be the number one investment.

Agreed about health.  Take care of it and especially your teeth. 

[oakman29]

6 minutes ago, LordRahl said:

Well of course you will. I’m in no way saying to not invest in a 401K. Quite the opposite, you should. I max mine out every year. But what you are describing is very different from putting in x amount of dollars into a fund today and waiting for it to multiply 20x in 30 years.

BTW, I’d love to know where you work that matches 401K contributions dollar for dollar with no cap. I need to go get a job there. 

Let me tell you Western Exterminator has been very good to me. Of course I get my azz kicked just about every day. I have a route that generates about 30K per month, and I'm always tops in selling accts.

I'm not behind a desk everyday and my time is my own. 

[WolverineX]

To be honest, OP should have bought bitcoin and sold last January.  He would made a killing.  That being said, there is no one investment that's perfect.  Diversify.

[WolverineX]

Also, did Hulk 181 or other key drop at all during the great recession from people selling off assets?

[WolverineX]

10 hours ago, the blob said:

Put the $800 in an IRA In an index fund of large or mid cap stocks.In 30 years, depending on the market, you probably have $15-23k. Do you see any of these mid or low grade books being worth that much? Only in a world where a hamburger costs $75.  With that said, I would be hesitant doing that right now as the current stock market is likely inflated. Same can be said of comics though.

So what would you do with your investing money right now in this inflated market?

[the blob]

16 hours ago, Wolverinex said:

So what would you do with your investing money right now in this inflated market?

I am tempted to move my 401k into a money market. If the market takes a 20-30% hit I go back in. Wish I had been able to time better in 2000, 2007, etc. Of course, if a lot of people do this right now we are sure to have that 20-30% hit. Also, remember. My perspective is different from a 30 year old. More worried about short and medium term. I am seriously considering semi retirement in 11 years at 57. I will have a kid in college, but if he goes to a state school it can be doable. Anyway, don't take specific advice from me, I don't know diddly other than it is good to start early and that over 30-40 years things tend to even out and you should do fine. Unless we are all under water and the average temperature is 97 degrees, nuclear war, etc.

Edited September 9, 2018 by the blob

[the blob]

15 hours ago, Wolverinex said:

Also, did Hulk 181 or other key drop at all during the great recession from people selling off assets?

Hulk 181 has been fairly recession proof. The issue in this thread is its growth over the next 20-30 years. There are so many out there. Criminey, how many 183s do I own!

Edited September 9, 2018 by the blob

[the blob]

15 hours ago, Wolverinex said:

Agreed about health.  Take care of it and especially your teeth. 

Teeth for sure. I ignored things and now I will be getting hammered.

[the blob]

15 hours ago, oakman29 said:

Let me tell you Western Exterminator has been very good to me. Of course I get my azz kicked just about every day. I have a route that generates about 30K per month, and I'm always tops in selling accts.

I'm not behind a desk everyday and my time is my own. 

It is a perk a lot of people overlook. It is free money. It took a lot of screaming from me for my wife to understand how dumb it was for her not to try and maximize her match when she had one. All she saw was money coming out of her check and short term financial inconvenience.she is a frigging scientist, but has no financial sense.

[delekkerste]

On 9/8/2018 at 6:46 PM, LordRahl said:

I’m not suggesting investing in comics. All I’m saying is the silly 20x in 30 years type numbers that people on this board throw out as what the stock market will return simply aren’t realistic. Your 401K has tripled since 2005. That was 14 years ago. Do you really think it will go another 15-17x in the next 16 years? That’s what it would need to do to reach your $800 invested now becoming $15-23K in 30 years. I get the anxiety over investing, I’m in a similar position as you. I don’t know the answer but I do know that stocks aren’t returning 20x your investment, at least not in my lifetime. I think using 80-90 year historic numbers isn’t realistic. Everything is very different now than it was in decades past, the room for growth that we saw just isn’t there. 

Agreed. Using 80-90 year historic returns is totally unrealistic, especially when your starting point is one of the 3 most overvalued periods of all-time.  11-12% return expectations is fantasy given that we didn't even hit those kinds of numbers over the past 25 years (S&P 500 from 8/31/93 to 8/31/18 = 9.7% compounded returns incl. reinvested dividends).  And that's encompassing a period where we started from lower valuations, where interest rates were in a multi-decade secular downtrend, where valuations detached from historic norms and where technology reshaped every aspect of our lives. Not to mention an endpoint that stops right at an all-time high!  

That tells me that even Blob's more conservative 8-9% projections are also likely to be way overly optimistic over the next 30 years.  Also, all of these returns assume no fees/slippage, a 100% allocation to the S&P 500 and that you are young enough to even be allowed to shelter your money for 30 years tax-free in an IRA (if you are over 40 1/2, as probably most people here are, the answer is no).  Not to mention, that you don't puke out your stocks during one of the several corrections/bear markets we are bound to have over the next 30 years.   

If you invested on the cusp of the 2000 bubble high, you would have earned about 6% compounded over the past 18 1/2 years or so.  But, that's only because you got bailed out by the current Everything Bubble, so, I would not consider that to be a good barometer of one's potential worst case scenario.  In the scenario where you invest at high valuations and then the market stops the bubble-bust cycle that we've had over the past 20 years and normalizes at more reasonable valuations, you might only realize, say, 4% in stocks over the course of two or three decades, with hellacious volatility along the way.  Not saying that's the most likely outcome, but, while most traditional rear-view looking financial planners would dismiss this possibility out of hand, I think it's probably more like a 25-30% probability outcome (and there's probably a 10% probability of even worse outcomes).  

[Mr.Mcknowitall]

40 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

(if you are over 40 1/2, as probably most people here are, the answer is no).  

Could you expand on this subject?

The rest of your comments I think I grasp the basics. Doing the math, it seems the best a person could do now (without matching 401K) is 4% or so, unless a Pro involved in hands-on investment on a day to day basis and buying and/or selling multiple stocks that can return 4-20% in a short period.....a week or 2?......and then re-investing. Is that more or less the issue? 

As usual, I always find your posts on the subject interesting, and learn something, and the posts do not contain a lookatme aspect. That is refreshing.

[delekkerste]

3 minutes ago, Mr.Mcknowitall said:

Could you expand on this subject?

You have to start taking mandatory withdrawals from your IRA once you hit age 70 1/2.  The govt. does this to discourage people from accumulating assets tax-free in these accounts and leaving these funds as inheritance.  So, if you are over 40 1/2, as many of us are, you will hit the mandatory withdrawal age before you hit the end of Blob's 30-year period of tax-deferred IRA investing. 

[Mr.Mcknowitall]

10 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

You have to start taking mandatory withdrawals from your IRA once you hit age 70 1/2.  The govt. does this to discourage people from accumulating assets tax-free in these accounts and leaving these funds as inheritance.  So, if you are over 40 1/2, as many of us are, you will hit the mandatory withdrawal age before you hit the end of Blob's 30-year period of tax-deferred IRA investing. 

Ah, I see the reason for the comment. I thought it may be another issue, like GDP year over year, or wage projections, etc.

[the blob]

55 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

You have to start taking mandatory withdrawals from your IRA once you hit age 70 1/2.  The govt. does this to discourage people from accumulating assets tax-free in these accounts and leaving these funds as inheritance.  So, if you are over 40 1/2, as many of us are, you will hit the mandatory withdrawal age before you hit the end of Blob's 30-year period of tax-deferred IRA investing. 

I was assuming the OP was younger than 40 given that people over 40 are usually not thinking about a 30 year investment. My second round of calculations that got the $800 to $13000 using a 9% or so ROR used a calculator that took into account fees. When trying to guesstimate where I may be in 11-16-21 years I use 7-8%. I point to S&p 500 because that data is more easily available. Other groups may do better or worse. Expecting 4% returns going forward for the next 25-30 seems overly pessimistic. Heck, not THAT long ago my money market was paying 5%. Maybe in real dollars if we have inflationary periods 4%. I understand we have had mediocre market stretches before (mid 60s through early 80s). My father worked on Wall Street during that period. You had to pick individual stocks to really get ahead. If you see bond rates at 10%+ jump on it!

[the blob]

With that said, I don't disagree that jumping into this market right now could screw you up for years if/when there is a correction. I put in for 2 years before the market crashes in 2000 and it screwed me up for a bit. And then kept on putting in until we had the 9/11 drop. And then after that through mid 2004. I made up for some of that buying a lot of QQQ at its absolute bottom (outside my 401k) in 2001 and selling in mid 2006 when it had bounced back. So maybe it evened out.

For me personally I think it worked out well as I save money when I was young and had a good income before I had kids and a big mortgage and couldn't save. I doubt I would have had the foresight to buy all the right keys in 98-2001 that probably did better than the stock market.

Edited September 10, 2018 by the blob

[fantastic_four]

I bought a CGC 9.4 copy in 2001 for $1000.  At the time I bought it and for at least a decade afterwards I figured I wouldn't earn any appreciation at all on it due to the huge supply, but today's it's worth roughly $2100, which is an APR of about 4.5%.  Not great or as good as a mutual fund or in comic terms a similarly-popular but lower-supply key, but better than I expected at the time I bought it.  For comparison's sake I also bought a CGC 7.5 X-Men #1 in 2000 for $3300, and the current market value of that is about $11K which is an APR of about 7%.  Those APR calculations assume I sold today at the current GPA market value.

[delekkerste]

5 hours ago, the blob said:

I was assuming the OP was younger than 40 given that people over 40 are usually not thinking about a 30 year investment. My second round of calculations that got the $800 to $13000 using a 9% or so ROR used a calculator that took into account fees. When trying to guesstimate where I may be in 11-16-21 years I use 7-8%. I point to S&p 500 because that data is more easily available. Other groups may do better or worse. Expecting 4% returns going forward for the next 25-30 seems overly pessimistic. Heck, not THAT long ago my money market was paying 5%. Maybe in real dollars if we have inflationary periods 4%. I understand we have had mediocre market stretches before (mid 60s through early 80s). My father worked on Wall Street during that period. You had to pick individual stocks to really get ahead. If you see bond rates at 10%+ jump on it!

Ask people in Japan if 4% sounds overly pessimistic! How many people at the end of 1989 would have predicted that, nearly 30 years later, their stock market would be lower, not higher? 

Looking at the starting point for valuations, the long-term demographic trends, and all the cans that have been kicked down the road which will have to be dealt with in the coming years/decades, I don't think 4% compounded in the US is necessarily too pessimistic. Heck, it could be too optimistic! Even predicting 1% annualized returns at the end of 1989 in Japan for the next 29 years would have been overly optimistic with the benefit of hindsight... 

Edited September 10, 2018 by delekkerste

[the blob]

44 minutes ago, delekkerste said:

Ask people in Japan if 4% sounds overly pessimistic! How many people at the end of 1989 would have predicted that, nearly 30 years later, their stock market would be lower, not higher? 

Looking at the starting point for valuations, the long-term demographic trends, and all the cans that have been kicked down the road which will have to be dealt with in the coming years/decades, I don't think 4% compounded in the US is necessarily too pessimistic. Heck, it could be too optimistic! Even predicting 1% annualized returns at the end of 1989 in Japan for the next 29 years would have been overly optimistic with the benefit of hindsight... 

We'll try to inflate our way out of things before that happens so you'll get 5-6% on money markets if need be! (It may not be a "real" 5% because your hamburger will cost $75, but..)  As for Japan, the Nikkei went up 600% in a decade before evaporating. [You tend to point at right before the crash price points, which could possibly be relevant now, but was it 3.5 years ago when he posted? That is a good way to skew the numbers and doesn't really show how years of steady investing may pay off, only if you go all in to the market right before a crash] We don't have that here. Plus, the Nikkei (like the DJIA) is a price weighted index. Apparently, it is just the average of the prices of stocks in the index, it does not factor in market capitalization or anything useful unless I am misunderstanding. Toyota was weighed equally with the 225 least valuable company on the list if they both had the same share price even though Toyota may have 100X the market cap. Not even sure if it factors in splits. We look at these numbers and I am not sure what it means.  the Japanese stock market may not have recovered, but I really wonder if the market cap of the companies in the Nikkei 225 is lower now than then. Possibly, a lot was predicated on Tokyo dirt being worth as much as gold. The 29,000 Nikkei number does not tell you that. The S&P 500, on the other hand factors in the relative market capitalizations if I understand correctly. Anyway, I was chatting about this with a guy who manages about $500 million in private equity (I know, not a big number in the big picture) who laughed when I was referencing the DJIA as some sort of barometer of anything. He asked me if I knew how it was made up, I assumed it was market cap weighted, it is not. Anyway, he refused to give a view on the current market and whether I should get the heck out (although it was clear he views it as overvalued...although not HIS investments!) Sure, the heavy hitters in the DJIA will have a big influence on the S&P 500 if they go up or down, no doubt.

 

 

[delekkerste]

1 hour ago, the blob said:

We'll try to inflate our way out of things before that happens so you'll get 5-6% on money markets if need be! (It may not be a "real" 5% because your hamburger will cost $75, but..)  As for Japan, the Nikkei went up 600% in a decade before evaporating. [You tend to point at right before the crash price points, which could possibly be relevant now, but was it 3.5 years ago when he posted? That is a good way to skew the numbers and doesn't really show how years of steady investing may pay off, only if you go all in to the market right before a crash] We don't have that here. Plus, the Nikkei (like the DJIA) is a price weighted index. Apparently, it is just the average of the prices of stocks in the index, it does not factor in market capitalization or anything useful unless I am misunderstanding. Toyota was weighed equally with the 225 least valuable company on the list if they both had the same share price even though Toyota may have 100X the market cap. Not even sure if it factors in splits. We look at these numbers and I am not sure what it means.  the Japanese stock market may not have recovered, but I really wonder if the market cap of the companies in the Nikkei 225 is lower now than then. Possibly, a lot was predicated on Tokyo dirt being worth as much as gold. The 29,000 Nikkei number does not tell you that. The S&P 500, on the other hand factors in the relative market capitalizations if I understand correctly. Anyway, I was chatting about this with a guy who manages about $500 million in private equity (I know, not a big number in the big picture) who laughed when I was referencing the DJIA as some sort of barometer of anything. He asked me if I knew how it was made up, I assumed it was market cap weighted, it is not. Anyway, he refused to give a view on the current market and whether I should get the heck out (although it was clear he views it as overvalued...although not HIS investments!) Sure, the heavy hitters in the DJIA will have a big influence on the S&P 500 if they go up or down, no doubt.

The DJIA and the Nikkei 225 are both price-weighted, and price-weighting is stupid, yes, but, the reality is that it doesn't affect the conclusion at all.  The capitalization-weighted Topix index in Japan also remains well below its December 1989 peak (and the DJIA manages to track the U.S. market pretty well despite its structural shortcomings). 

Even if you went 3 1/2 years before the peak (June 1986) to the present, you'd still only have returned 1.9% annualized in Japan using the Topix as your benchmark.  Bottom line is that it is very possible - probable even - to see much lower returns over the next 30 years than we have seen over the previous 30 years here in the U.S. and Western Europe.   

[the blob]

15 hours ago, delekkerste said:

The DJIA and the Nikkei 225 are both price-weighted, and price-weighting is stupid, yes, but, the reality is that it doesn't affect the conclusion at all.  The capitalization-weighted Topix index in Japan also remains well below its December 1989 peak (and the DJIA manages to track the U.S. market pretty well despite its structural shortcomings). 

Even if you went 3 1/2 years before the peak (June 1986) to the present, you'd still only have returned 1.9% annualized in Japan using the Topix as your benchmark.  Bottom line is that it is very possible - probable even - to see much lower returns over the next 30 years than we have seen over the previous 30 years here in the U.S. and Western Europe.   

What other mature markets have had a stretch like Japan's? I know we had a stretch in the late 60s through early 80s where the market was mediocre when adjusted for inflation, but I still think investments grew. You are pointing to one weird anomoly. Although the current regime might be a problem if we are worried about an aging population and having a young workforce to support them.