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November HA OA auction
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493 posts in this topic

I typically track over 100 items in an auction.  For this one, I am probably closer to 200.  What I do is as soon as the auction opens, place  low bids on the items I am seriously interested in so the can easily be seen in my bids.  I usually scale down to 20 or less items.  Once I place those initial bids, I am done until the auction is live bidding where I may or may not place another bid depending on how high items are.  My observation is the first few days of an auction see some bidding then they go pretty quiet until just before the internet bidding closes and then again during the live bidding.

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4 hours ago, vodou said:

The only question anybody should be trying to answer is how best to position for the destruction of EUR (and corresponding sky-is-the-limit USD), collapse of all foreign paper denominated in USD, eventual break-up of EU and then...? 

Buy a hedge against the Euro. 

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11 hours ago, tth2 said:

But if you'd bought stocks at their peak in 2007, or OA when it was "molten" in the summer of 2008, you'd still have done very well for yourself.  

And if you bought stocks at their peak in 1989, you'd still be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay underwater.  

If you lived in Japan. 

If you bought stocks at their peak in 2007, you're still way underwater more than a decade later.

If you lived in Europe. 

If you bought OA in the '90s, you'd still be underwater.

If you bought Pogo strips.

The US stock market didn't get back to its 1929 high until 1955.  It didn't hold above its 1966 level for good until 1982 (actually much later than that when accounting for the terrible inflation for much of this period).  The stock market was at 1999 levels as late as 2011 due to the Great Financial Crisis.  The dynamic of things dipping and then always ripping back to new highs in relatively short order is actually something that has really only become ingrained in the American psyche over the past 30 years, and something that is applying to fewer and fewer asset classes as the years/decades go by. There is nothing magical or even inherently true in the notion that things always come back to new highs.  If prices get too high, if there are underlying structural changes, if there are tectonic shifts in demographics and/or if there are secular changes in (pop) cultural tastes, things may go down and stay down.  We see it all the time in other stock markets, as well as various art, antiques and collectibles niches. 2c 

Edited by delekkerste
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I dont know of any Marvel or DC super Hero art you could have bought in the 90s that you would not be killing it with today. Is there a single category of marvel/DC art that has gone down in resale value from 1998 to 2018? Or 2008 to 2018?

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1 hour ago, delekkerste said:

And if you bought stocks at their peak in 1989, you'd still be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay underwater.  

If you lived in Japan.  

*No need to trot out individual exceptions to try to prove me wrong, because of course one can always find individual exceptions. :gossip:

I was hoping my footnote would pre-empt your oft-repeated examples (okay, Pogo is a new one on me).

Ever notice how you always trot out Japan as an example of a stock market not reaching new highs after 20 years?  Could it be because it's the only such major stock market that you can find?

Remember when you always used to cite Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" as an example of a peak price that would never be surpassed?  Until it was? 

 

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2 hours ago, tth2 said:

*No need to trot out individual exceptions to try to prove me wrong, because of course one can always find individual exceptions. :gossip:

I was hoping my footnote would pre-empt your oft-repeated examples (okay, Pogo is a new one on me).

Ever notice how you always trot out Japan as an example of a stock market not reaching new highs after 20 years?  Could it be because it's the only such major stock market that you can find?

Remember when you always used to cite Van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" as an example of a peak price that would never be surpassed?  Until it was? 

 

You're messing with me again, right?  Europe hasn't been at a high for 11 years now.  China 11 years as well.  Even your local Hong Kong market - it made a brief new high this year, but, has since fallen well, well, well below 2007 levels.  Emerging markets?  Well below their 2007 peaks as well.  In fact, ex-U.S., the world stock market has been in a secular bear market for more than a decade.  Japan isn't the only example.  You seem to think that the behavior of the U.S. stock market over the past 25 years is normal (and the knock-on effects it has had on things like art & collectibles).  May you live long enough to see the error of your ways, that this was just the perfect confluence of secular factors that lasted a generation.  

I never used that Van Gogh data point as an example of a peak price that would never be surpassed.  That is idiotic - of course there is a lot of art that would have surpassed that level if it hit the market.  True now, and even would have been true had it hit the market at the nadir of 1996 (incidentally, there is still a lot of art that is well below its 1989 and 2008 peak levels). I said that the Van Gogh itself would probably never be surpassed if it resold (in inflation-adjusted terms).  Maybe with all the dumb money that's entered the market over the past decade that's no longer true...but, it still might be.  Fast forward a few years and I'm sure that inflation-adjusted data point still holds. 

When the secular bear market comes in comics and OA (not putting a date on it, but, it will almost surely happen over the course of the next generation), let's hope it doesn't take you 11+ years to figure it out. :baiting: 

Edited by delekkerste
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5 hours ago, zhamlau said:

I dont know of any Marvel or DC super Hero art you could have bought in the 90s that you would not be killing it with today. Is there a single category of marvel/DC art that has gone down in resale value from 1998 to 2018? Or 2008 to 2018?

Like I said in a previous post, the 1990s was the Stone Age for art.  That was the equivalent of buying Bitcoin for pennies. Bitcoin could fall 99% from peak (and probably will, eventually) and those guys would still be up a ton.  I mean no offense to all the dealers and collectors who were around in the '80s or '90s, but, let's face it - the market was not developed/mature at all back then.  There may have been a thriving niche hobby, but, at pennies on the dollar today...c'mon - those data points are truly irrelevant at this point, just like pre-2013 Bitcoin prices.  I mean, FFS, a lot of cheerleaders today claim the hobby is still in its infancy NOW.  If that's the case, the '80s and '90s were the equivalent of primordial ooze.  

As I say at the start of the upcoming FCA podcast, we're living in the Golden Age of Comic Art.  It has never been better.  But, where you will see problems is in the second derivative of the advance (technical) and the underlying structure/demographics (fundamental).  There isn't much that has gone down from 1998 to 2018 or 2008 to 2018.  But, there's a lot things where the rate of advance is deteriorating.  Even some formerly blue chip stuff which has been stagnating.  Forget about 1998 to 2018.  That's all rearview mirror action.  You want to know what happens from 2018 to 2038.  People who only extrapolate past price trends without actually thinking about changes in the underlying factors (demographics, cultural/tech trends, economic factors, etc.) I predict are going to be in a world of hurt down the road.  A lot of smart guys in the hobby are talking about these things behind the scenes as they see the behavioral changes in their peers' collecting habits, the collecting habits of the new generation, maybe even see that some of their favorite artists are falling by the wayside in terms of popularity and strength in their art prices. 

Specific examples and more discussed in the FCA podcast coming up later this month...

take-the-red-pill-james.jpg.98585aeac7c914e4d2db15fb857734fc.jpg

Edited by delekkerste
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3 hours ago, PhilipB2k17 said:

Case in recent point, the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix - which actually incorporates art from the comic series into its opening credits scene - may stoke interest in art from that book).

Strange TV show. Reminds me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in a way. How does Buffy art do?

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22 hours ago, delekkerste said:

Like I said in a previous post, the 1990s was the Stone Age for art.  That was the equivalent of buying Bitcoin for pennies. Bitcoin could fall 99% from peak (and probably will, eventually) and those guys would still be up a ton.  I mean no offense to all the dealers and collectors who were around in the '80s or '90s, but, let's face it - the market was not developed/mature at all back then.  There may have been a thriving niche hobby, but, at pennies on the dollar today...c'mon - those data points are truly irrelevant at this point, just like pre-2013 Bitcoin prices.  I mean, FFS, a lot of cheerleaders today claim the hobby is still in its infancy NOW.  If that's the case, the '80s and '90s were the equivalent of primordial ooze.  

As I say at the start of the upcoming FCA podcast, we're living in the Golden Age of Comic Art.  It has never been better.  But, where you will see problems is in the second derivative of the advance (technical) and the underlying structure/demographics (fundamental).  There isn't much that has gone down from 1998 to 2018 or 2008 to 2018.  But, there's a lot things where the rate of advance is deteriorating.  Even some formerly blue chip stuff which has been stagnating.  Forget about 1998 to 2018.  That's all rearview mirror action.  You want to know what happens from 2018 to 2038.  People who only extrapolate past price trends without actually thinking about changes in the underlying factors (demographics, cultural/tech trends, economic factors, etc.) I predict are going to be in a world of hurt down the road.  A lot of smart guys in the hobby are talking about these things behind the scenes as they see the behavioral changes in their peers' collecting habits, the collecting habits of the new generation, maybe even see that some of their favorite artists are falling by the wayside in terms of popularity and strength in their art prices. 

Specific examples and more discussed in the FCA podcast coming up later this month...

take-the-red-pill-james.jpg.98585aeac7c914e4d2db15fb857734fc.jpg

I hear ya, and no I think you know by now I'm not someone holding tons of material in the belief that this is a never ending gravy train of skyward elevating prices. Its odd, i remember art being everywhere in the 80s, i couldn't remember going to a show that DIDN'T have at least 5-6 dealers with good material on their stands to go with the comics. But, it was so cheap anyone could afford to have it. You could walk into shops and find pages in display cases and on shelves lol. Not in the quantities a dealer now might have, but 3-5 good known pages by good known guys. There was a market, and it had been somewhat established. But the price points were so low, so many more folks could play. It wasn't so life and death. I miss those times if I'm being honest. You could walk into a show and walk out with a page or two of Kane, or JRJR, and you could do it for like 20 bucks or less a page which almost anyone walking the show could spend without seriously impacting their show or personal budget. What was also so great is that the quality of pages was just always on point. Because good material wasn't so expensive there was no need to deal in anything but prime hero pages. The "one shot of the hero in the background in one panel" pages were still in the artists portfolios for 5-10 bucks a pop cause no one thought to spend the cash on them when so much better could be had for not that much more. It was fun times.

 

But to your point, yeah its hard to compare those prices to today. I will say though it was more on collectors minds back then to have a page or two of art. It felt like everyone did it. Now when you talk to most comic book collectors, almost none of them have art unless the specialize in it like we all do. The price elevation made it so you could only play this game if you had seriously financial reserves. The positive i take from that however is that I know when all is said and done, most comic book collectors WANT to be comic art collectors too if they think about it. They just don't want to pay the prices the good material costs now, and they have little interest in the lower tier "meh" pages that float around online so frequently. Because of those factors, art is hardly present at shows anymore so it sort of gets overlooked by comic book collectors which wasn't the case before.

 

If prices go down, this market will flood with new buyers I believe. It would probably be like the stock market, everyone is terrified when there are corrections but at some point the losses are so great people start realizing to look past their fear and understand this probably is a good buying opportunity to get back in at a discount.

 

Anyway, my 2cents. Fun Topic.

Edited by zhamlau
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I think when you're discussing 80s/90s prices and today's prices it can't be overstated what a game changer online availability has been for art.   

Your description of art being everywhere might be true for somebody in new york or whatever, but a lot of buyers in a lot of locales were shut out of the market.

Art was everywhere FOR YOU!  It was NOWHERE for some!

The ability for sellers to find buyers and buyers to find sellers as of, say, 2000, has meant a drastic revaluation of anything along these lines.     That's a one-time event.

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I know we all focus on the top end of the market, because the next top selling page evar(!) is more fun. 

But even in this "crazy" environment, there were a ton of pages in the latest Comic Link monthly under $200, published pages by DC/Marvel.  Heck, there were Marvel pages that were sub $30, pencils only, by an artist I'm not familiar with, but still published Marvel art for sub $30?

Even in this market, there really can be art for any budget.  But you might not be able to get that Kirby FF / McFarlane ASM / whatever gets you all frothy cover or splash.

Edited by Pete Marino
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8 hours ago, PhilipB2k17 said:

It’s more like Ash vs Evil Dead than Buffy, imho.  

Both shows involve the coming of age of a young woman and use the supernatural as a way to deal allegorically with the issues she faces. In Buffy's case, she did it from the "good side" and better in my view. In Sabrina's, it's the wrong side of the tracks, right down to the name on the train station (which is an old Hebrew word for where bad people go when they die, but is not always distinguished that way in English translations). 

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On 11/1/2018 at 5:30 AM, delekkerste said:

And if you bought stocks at their peak in 1989, you'd still be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay underwater.  

If you lived in Japan. 

If you bought stocks at their peak in 2007, you're still way underwater more than a decade later.

If you lived in Europe. 

If you bought OA in the '90s, you'd still be underwater.

If you bought Pogo strips.

The US stock market didn't get back to its 1929 high until 1955.  It didn't hold above its 1966 level for good until 1982 (actually much later than that when accounting for the terrible inflation for much of this period).  The stock market was at 1999 levels as late as 2011 due to the Great Financial Crisis.  The dynamic of things dipping and then always ripping back to new highs in relatively short order is actually something that has really only become ingrained in the American psyche over the past 30 years, and something that is applying to fewer and fewer asset classes as the years/decades go by. There is nothing magical or even inherently true in the notion that things always come back to new highs.  If prices get too high, if there are underlying structural changes, if there are tectonic shifts in demographics and/or if there are secular changes in (pop) cultural tastes, things may go down and stay down.  We see it all the time in other stock markets, as well as various art, antiques and collectibles niches. 2c 

I kinda trip out on that. I'm gonna sock the AF15 away for twenty years, you know, go for the long haul. What makes the long haul a safe bet I ponder while I sit at McDonald's all alone Thanksgiving night?  Who's to say or know that this exact moment is the time to sell and make the most money?

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