May Heritage Auction Really Shaping Up! 3 3

[Twanj]

I can see people asking to have their bigger ticket items removed.

Also wondering if any winners from the last signature auction haven't paid.

[batman_fan]

36 minutes ago, Twanj said:

I can see people asking to have their bigger ticket items removed.

Also wondering if any winners from the last signature auction haven't paid.

I paid and I got my package today !

[vodou]

2 hours ago, Twanj said:

I can see people asking to have their bigger ticket items removed.

No doubt HA has their answer at the ready for: "Can I put reserves on all my lots?"

[delekkerste]

On 3/18/2020 at 9:55 AM, vodou said:

GBP making all-time records lows against USD this morning. That's hard pain for obligations borrowed in USD!

Cable hit $1.05 vs. the USD back in 1985 at the height of the pre-Plaza Accord strong USD salad days. 

Edited March 19, 2020 by delekkerste

[vodou]

*not taking the hit when this entire thread gets nuked by Mods

Edited March 21, 2020 by vodou

[pkveronese]

Anybody remember anything from the auctions around the 2008 banking crisis? How did they pan out?

[Rick2you2]

1 hour ago, delekkerste said:

Cable hit $1.05 vs. the USD back in 1985 at the height of the pre-Plaza Accord strong USD salad days. 

I was wondering where you’d been the past few days. Work related, presumably?

[Ricksneatstuff]

On 3/13/2020 at 6:39 PM, batman_fan said:

I am liking this one !

No you don’t 

[glendgold]

14 hours ago, pkveronese said:

Anybody remember anything from the auctions around the 2008 banking crisis? How did they pan out?

I love doing deep dives like this and am looking right now.  You can play along too. But I got distracted by sorting "sold-Jack Kirby-oldest auctions first" and am now scrolling through 19 years worth of results. So much stuff I forgot about! 2760 Kirby results!  https://comics.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=52+1067+790+231&Ntk=SI_Titles-Desc&Nty=1&Ntt=jack+kirby&ic4=KeywordSearch-A-X-071316

[Bronty]

16 minutes ago, glendgold said:

I love doing deep dives like this and am looking right now.  You can play along too. But I got distracted by sorting "sold-Jack Kirby-oldest auctions first" and am now scrolling through 19 years worth of results. So much stuff I forgot about! 2760 Kirby results!  https://comics.ha.com/c/search-results.zx?N=52+1067+790+231&Ntk=SI_Titles-Desc&Nty=1&Ntt=jack+kirby&ic4=KeywordSearch-A-X-071316

I'm interested as well.   From what I recall, collectibles held firm for a while and then softened.   However, sellers knew they couldn't get what they wanted at current market conditions so they hung onto stuff until it rebounded.   So from what I recall, softness took a while to set in and once it did it was respond to with reduced supply

[jjonahjameson11]

2008 doesn’t seem so long ago, but it’s all one big blur and I don’t remember what I was buying or selling at that time.

thank goodness for Heritage Archives! 😉

[pkveronese]

I'll do some analyses and pop up the data if anything meaningful comes out of it.

[delekkerste]

51 minutes ago, Bronty said:

I'm interested as well.   From what I recall, collectibles held firm for a while and then softened.   However, sellers knew they couldn't get what they wanted at current market conditions so they hung onto stuff until it rebounded.   So from what I recall, softness took a while to set in and once it did it was respond to with reduced supply

That's a fair assessment.  The stock market peaked in October 2007, but, hard assets RIPPED into the summer of 2008.  That was when Albert bought the Steranko SHIELD #7 cover for a then-astounding $75K, oil prices hit a record $147/barrel, gold prices were still hanging out close to $1K/oz. (near a record at the time), NYC real estate was still defying the national downturn, etc. August and September 2008 was when hard assets started to give up the ghost, with the publicly-traded ones like gold, oil, etc. falling off a cliff.  Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" sale in September 2008 marked the top of the art market, though, it's well acknowledged that prices were propped up by those with vested interests.  The reality is that hard assets as a group peaked around July of that year.  

What you say about collectibles is spot-on (at least regarding comics/OA).  Sellers withdrew from the market, liquidity and sales volumes collapsed and the market was mostly just frozen for a while.  If the most powerful reflationary efforts of all-time hadn't kicked in relatively quickly (March 2009), the illiquidity would have eventually given way to obvious price losses.  But, since the downturn was sharp, but relatively short, we never got to that stage in comics and comic art.  Illustration art wasn't so lucky - go look up the results for the first HA Illo auction of 2009.  It was a TOTAL BLOODBATH, I mean, just shocking.  But, it rebounded astoundingly fast as reflationary efforts kicked in.  I still managed to pick up some of the best deals I've ever gotten in my OA collecting career in early 2009 (I'm thinking about 3 pieces in particular, all of which I've since sold at sizable profits and which I would not have been able to buy as cheaply in, say, July 2008).  

So, the bottom line is that collectibles can probably withstand a short-term downturn fairly well, but, they wouldn't be immune to a longer-term recession/bear market.  Also, the demographics now are worse than 12 years ago and prices are so much higher, so, there's likely to be more price sensitivity than in the past.  It cracks me up to hear people saying that comics and OA prices weren't affected much by external economic conditions in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.  Well, duh - when stuff was pennies on today's dollar, it's not like people were going to rush to sell their $5 comic books and $25 OA pages when the SHTF.  Add 3 zeroes to those numbers and age the collecting cohort 25 years though, and it might be a different story. The record amount of supply hitting the market isn't going to help either if we do get a prolonged downturn.  

[ESeffinga]

 

[LonelyPost]

2 hours ago, delekkerste said:

That's a fair assessment.  The stock market peaked in October 2007, but, hard assets RIPPED into the summer of 2008.  That was when Albert bought the Steranko SHIELD #7 cover for a then-astounding $75K, oil prices hit a record $147/barrel, gold prices were still hanging out close to $1K/oz. (near a record at the time), NYC real estate was still defying the national downturn, etc. August and September 2008 was when hard assets started to give up the ghost, with the publicly-traded ones like gold, oil, etc. falling off a cliff.  Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" sale in September 2008 marked the top of the art market, though, it's well acknowledged that prices were propped up by those with vested interests.  The reality is that hard assets as a group peaked around July of that year.  

What you say about collectibles is spot-on (at least regarding comics/OA).  Sellers withdrew from the market, liquidity and sales volumes collapsed and the market was mostly just frozen for a while.  If the most powerful reflationary efforts of all-time hadn't kicked in relatively quickly (March 2009), the illiquidity would have eventually given way to obvious price losses.  But, since the downturn was sharp, but relatively short, we never got to that stage in comics and comic art.  Illustration art wasn't so lucky - go look up the results for the first HA Illo auction of 2009.  It was a TOTAL BLOODBATH, I mean, just shocking.  But, it rebounded astoundingly fast as reflationary efforts kicked in.  I still managed to pick up some of the best deals I've ever gotten in my OA collecting career in early 2009 (I'm thinking about 3 pieces in particular, all of which I've since sold at sizable profits and which I would not have been able to buy as cheaply in, say, July 2008).  

So, the bottom line is that collectibles can probably withstand a short-term downturn fairly well, but, they wouldn't be immune to a longer-term recession/bear market.  Also, the demographics now are worse than 12 years ago and prices are so much higher, so, there's likely to be more price sensitivity than in the past.  It cracks me up to hear people saying that comics and OA prices weren't affected much by external economic conditions in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.  Well, duh - when stuff was pennies on today's dollar, it's not like people were going to rush to sell their $5 comic books and $25 OA pages when the SHTF.  Add 3 zeroes to those numbers and age the collecting cohort 25 years though, and it might be a different story. The record amount of supply hitting the market isn't going to help either if we do get a prolonged downturn.  

This one is going to be very different from the recessions of the past 50 years. It is unusual as economic activities are accelerating to a standstill due to the flurry of stay at home directives across Europe and US (with NY and California initiating this). Without work, demand will disappear. With interest rates close to zero, oil prices below US30, this may turn into a deflation which would adversely affect asset prices. Businesses are going to find it extremely challenging to cope with the disappearance of business activities and subsequently getting business back to normal levels - all these are going to take time. It is only just mid March 2020 but 2020 is looking very much like a write-off.  I am extremely  interested to see how the May auction pans out as this will be a barometer for the things to come. 

[cstojano]

3 hours ago, delekkerste said:

That's a fair assessment.  The stock market peaked in October 2007, but, hard assets RIPPED into the summer of 2008.  That was when Albert bought the Steranko SHIELD #7 cover for a then-astounding $75K, oil prices hit a record $147/barrel, gold prices were still hanging out close to $1K/oz. (near a record at the time), NYC real estate was still defying the national downturn, etc. August and September 2008 was when hard assets started to give up the ghost, with the publicly-traded ones like gold, oil, etc. falling off a cliff.  Damien Hirst's "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" sale in September 2008 marked the top of the art market, though, it's well acknowledged that prices were propped up by those with vested interests.  The reality is that hard assets as a group peaked around July of that year.  

What you say about collectibles is spot-on (at least regarding comics/OA).  Sellers withdrew from the market, liquidity and sales volumes collapsed and the market was mostly just frozen for a while.  If the most powerful reflationary efforts of all-time hadn't kicked in relatively quickly (March 2009), the illiquidity would have eventually given way to obvious price losses.  But, since the downturn was sharp, but relatively short, we never got to that stage in comics and comic art.  Illustration art wasn't so lucky - go look up the results for the first HA Illo auction of 2009.  It was a TOTAL BLOODBATH, I mean, just shocking.  But, it rebounded astoundingly fast as reflationary efforts kicked in.  I still managed to pick up some of the best deals I've ever gotten in my OA collecting career in early 2009 (I'm thinking about 3 pieces in particular, all of which I've since sold at sizable profits and which I would not have been able to buy as cheaply in, say, July 2008).  

So, the bottom line is that collectibles can probably withstand a short-term downturn fairly well, but, they wouldn't be immune to a longer-term recession/bear market.  Also, the demographics now are worse than 12 years ago and prices are so much higher, so, there's likely to be more price sensitivity than in the past.  It cracks me up to hear people saying that comics and OA prices weren't affected much by external economic conditions in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.  Well, duh - when stuff was pennies on today's dollar, it's not like people were going to rush to sell their $5 comic books and $25 OA pages when the SHTF.  Add 3 zeroes to those numbers and age the collecting cohort 25 years though, and it might be a different story. The record amount of supply hitting the market isn't going to help either if we do get a prolonged downturn.  

Can you point to specific 2009 lots from the illo sale? I don't know anything about values back then but 11k for a Frazetta caveman drawing seems pretty strong. 

[eewwnuk]

Lets hope i can pick up that dkr page for a steal!

[Rick2you2]

3 hours ago, LonelyPost said:

This one is going to be very different from the recessions of the past 50 years. It is unusual as economic activities are accelerating to a standstill due to the flurry of stay at home directives across Europe and US (with NY and California initiating this). Without work, demand will disappear. With interest rates close to zero, oil prices below US30, this may turn into a deflation which would adversely affect asset prices. Businesses are going to find it extremely challenging to cope with the disappearance of business activities and subsequently getting business back to normal levels - all these are going to take time. It is only just mid March 2020 but 2020 is looking very much like a write-off.  I am extremely  interested to see how the May auction pans out as this will be a barometer for the things to come. 

Too pessimistic, although we are due for an economic slowdown. In 2-3 weeks people will say the heck with this crisis and ignore anything that isn’t a hard law. People will congregate, there will be home parties, and the politicians will be under too much pressure to relent. Then, we will learn that the anti-malaria drug works, or the virus is not being spread as much because hot weather kills viruses (so I have heard), or maybe something like Rollaids gives immunity. By Memorial Day, this will be on its way to a bad memory.

[glendgold]

13 minutes ago, Rick2you2 said:

Too pessimistic, although we are due for an economic slowdown. In 2-3 weeks people will say the heck with this crisis and ignore anything that isn’t a hard law. People will congregate, there will be home parties, and the politicians will be under too much pressure to relent. Then, we will learn that the anti-malaria drug works, or the virus is not being spread as much because hot weather kills viruses (so I have heard), or maybe something like Rollaids gives immunity. By Memorial Day, this will be on its way to a bad memory.

I screen shot this and hope on Memorial Day to raise a glass to your prediction.

Hope you're right. But I think there's going to be a different outcome. 

 

 

[delekkerste]

3 hours ago, cstojano said:

Can you point to specific 2009 lots from the illo sale? I don't know anything about values back then but 11k for a Frazetta caveman drawing seems pretty strong. 

Look at the Gil Elvgren lots in the June 2008 Illo Sale and then again at the ones in the March 2009 Illo sale.  Everything was in the $60Ks to $200K+ in the former and then crashing down to the $20Ks to $40Ks in the latter.  One of the pieces that sold for $41K in 2006 before prices took off into the 6-figures crashed back down to $27K in the 2009 sale. 

I'm pretty sure Heritage has scrubbed the archive at some point.  I'm almost positive that one of the $200K+ Elvgrens from 2008 re-sold for 5-figures in 2009.