If you would have waited at 14K, when the market had nearly doubled in a few years, you NEVER would have had another opportunity to buy at a better price and you would have missed 7 or 8 years of opportunities. And you would have sold, or at least not bought, AMZN at 100 which it never saw again. So it really wasn't so high after all even though it seemed so at the time.

I did not mean to misquote you. I really can't speak to the internal management of either mutual funds or hedge funds knowledgeably. I can't fathom a firm would pay a fund manager to say "the market is high right now, don't buy. Hold cash for the next work economy and buy then" and not do any work all year.

That doesn't make it bad though. There is a 0% chance I can outperform my current strategy by buying during market highs instead of waiting for the cyclic falls, which the basic charts tell us all are or are not happening.

Like I said, my position is to hold for the long haul for my future, not to sell whenever the market goes up. That is stupid, and isn't what I'm advocating. Don't realize gains anytime you have a gain. I sell if I see a bad future for that specific stock, otherwise I'm holding for the long haul and advocating that. Buy during the dips that repeats over and over and over through stock history. It goes up over time. But my gamble, that the economic high would not last forever and I'd see a better buying opportunity after months of setting records, was a very safe one. Records everywhere = high, down 20-25% = low.

Things go up and down. It has never gone inexorably up without dips. We are in one right now, and everyone knows it. It may dip more in Q4, or Q1 23. But it's down a lot, and I've made a ton of profit by the simple gamble that the market has cycles and to buy when everything is setting records is foolish. I'm not saying sit out the market for 15+ years and miss all the gradual gains. I'm saying some big record points are not a smart time to buy the blue chips and indexes. They will go down again in future, and lower your floor and raise your eventual profit.

I am in a much better position for my future safety by not buying at the big up spike points, which we know and identify in real time.

My final summation, and I've enjoyed the discussion, is that I disagree you can know spike points or much else in real time )2014 looked like a spike point in real time I am sure), but I think you are buying the right things and therefore you will do fine over time. But I think that will be a function of what you own, not of your timing in buying. Read Eugene Fama if you have not. :)

Though not something I would even begin to invest a large amount in (cardboard-wise), a very interesting project and maybe something fun to do on a smaller scale.

The 101 Jordan true RC would certainly qualify there.

I like our debates, thank you for the good faith fun.

Greg, if I understand what you are saying you buy when the market is weak and sell when the market is strong, or at least don’t buy then. Following that strategy you would have entirely missed the post 2008 financial crisis bull market. What am I missing?

I don't know anyone who has $15k to spend on baseball cards, other than the folks who post on this forum. I would have to sell cards I have to raise that kind of $$$. Sorry, but that is how it is. The regular work a day people are not in that league. I love this forum and the amazing cards posted, but it isn't a hobby for regular blue collar people anymore, only for the well-heeled card investors.

I am too young to have bought before the 2008 fiasco (I was 17 and broke as a joke in my dorm eating whatever I could scrounge up for $2 a day then), so all of my buying has been since this period.

We had a bull market, in the sense that it has gone up a lot from 2008-2021 and was very good overall when looking at the block of time. In 2031, we will probably say the same thing about the period after it. But within that period, there were dips and buying opportunities that were evident at the time. Obviously if I could see the future I'd do a lot better. Some times I have gone riskier than others. I bought in 2016, when there was a lot of doubt in the market though the year ended very well. I bought a lot in 2020, when Covid killed the market because I believed that the state would not actually commit suicide over the virus. This one was a very safe conservative bet.

There are some periods of time where things are stably going up year to year, and this was one of them. 2021 was very different; with records being set constantly, recovering quickly and then skyrocketing to be almost double the low in a year. Thus, I held off buying (I am speaking of blue chips and index funds, I have a relatively small amount in non-blue chip specific stocks I think will outperform and are less about the economy as a whole).

You can't always wait for a dip like the one we have right now (though most knew this particular one was coming and the incredible spike was not sustainable), but there are lots of periodic dips. When everything is breaking the record set last week, which broke the record set the week before, it's usually a bad time to buy.

That said, with blue chips and index funds, I have no doubt Peter's method will produce a fat profit in the end too. I'm just up 20% right off the bat by knowing the Trump boom wouldn't last forever. In 6 months I might be down 10%, it ain't a science but I think it's pretty easy to separate boom times from the normal times from the lows where everything is at a steep discount and you can buy in with a much lower floor risk.

*I am not a financial advisor or smart.

EDIT: Selling timeframe varies for everyone. I am 31, I intend to 'sell off' for retirement in addition to my IRA's, 401K and social security. I don't do stocks to feed myself tomorrow or next year, and keep more cash on hand than most financial advisors would probably advise. One should sell when times are good, not during bad times like right now, as a general rule. If I live long enough to retire and it is in an economic downturn, I won't sell them until we're recovered (and surely won't hit the peak, but I'll be selling in a better good time rather than a clear bad time). I do sometimes sell a specific stock because I see a bad future for that stock and I want to divest and pocket what I've made off it (or lessen losses, depending how well one picked). I usually don't manage to time the peak exact, but I try to know the specific stocks I own well to sell off when the red flags hit.

I will agree that to drop $15k on a card is a lot of money, at least in absolute terms. Certainly with many hard working Americans taking 3-6 months to earn that kind of cash, it’s a lot. To save that much, for many it would take even longer. And considering what else you could acquire with that kind of cash (like a semi-decent used car), it’s also a lot.

But I suspect that many of us spending that kind of cash on cards are still very much working for a living. At least I am!

At the same time, it’s fair to admit that I’ve been greatly blessed with tremendous resources to have the option to lavishly spend that kind of money on a luxury such as this. While I have worked hard to get here, paid my dues for many years, and gained some very valuable skills that I now use in my business to make a living, and with an income now at the top of the charts and a tax rate over 50% to go with it (part of the joys of living on the left coast) my situation is obviously different than the vast majority of Americans who do not have available cash to lavish on such luxuries at the same scale.

Is that a bad thing? Is it a good thing? Not sure that I have answers to those questions. I’m also not going to get into a political scrum about it, because that’s the best way to make any activity a lot less enjoyable.

Personally, I think there is very much of a hobby for the blue collar still. The blue collar can't buy the very best items, but I bought cards for entertainment even when I made $60,000 a year in the Bay Area, California (which is almost nothing with the cost of living here) when I was starting out. You can't buy the 1% cards, but you can build a fun and awesome collection of low grade less popular cards with the same or better aesthetic appeal as the investment pieces. If it isn't viewed as competition, but building a collection for personal enjoyment, I think the blue collar have a much better time than the white collar actually. The blue collar 'I just enjoy these cards I gather' seem to have a lot more fun and less stress than the $$$ collectors who are primarily interested in their profit from the hobby. As I buy for personal enjoyment and entertainment and budget my card buys accordingly as my 'beer money', I would consider myself in the blue collar class here as well. I'm not dropping what it takes to buy the cards that have 1,000 threads about them.

Discussion centers around money and the rich, that is absolutely true. The poorer collectors don't tend to be active in the forums and like nearly as much, for reasons we could speculate on but I don't think could prove. Probably would be an interesting topic to examine if everyone behaved for another thread.

I would invest in the best possible versions of these cards that you can find which can be done for 15K. Both are blue chip cards and both have great long term potential.

I'm going to disagree a bit here James, I'm a working class guy in a blue collar business in a HCOL area. I'll be the the first guy to admit I've been fortunate enough to collect cardboard pictures of little baseball men.

When I got back in I built a list of 300 cards I wanted to reflect my collection, never mind the price that's what I wanted my collection to look like. Within that frame is always economics, I'll never be the guy who can spend his way through, but I did sacrifice for my collection, sometimes when I shouldn't have but that's the nature of this fantastic hobby.

I'd love a Wolverine Cobb but that's above my pay grade right now, maybe someday, but I don't fret over it because I have other collecting goals and am happy with my current collection.

It's really never about the money, it's about the passion for collecting, there's guys here who can buy whatever they want, there's also guys here who sacrifice to spend $250 on a card. I'm happy for for both of them when they reach a collecting goal and post about it here.

For me it's always about the relationships formed with fellow members here, which if graded by any TPG would be a Gem Mint 10 or whatever they call it...

An attempt to put some context to some of the prices changes in some of the cards mentioned on here that could be purchased with ~$15K

My apologies for any mistakes and this is not meant to say one card is better than the other. And it is not an apples to apples comparison as I am just working off data that is on PSA's website. I'd need a more recent sale of a PSA 5 T206 Red Cobb for instance. And I'd need an earlier sale of the Mays rookie to be an apples to apples comparison Mantle's rookie.

For the record, I think people should buy what interests them, and they should only do so with discretionary income.

Note that the annual return is between each sale. Only the total is calculated from the final sale to the first sale.

I would stay away from mainstream cards. They're not bad; they're beautiful. But, BUT, they're too bountiful. I would stick with immediate post-war regional / food issues. If it was me, and I had the 15 grand, I would go to EBAY or a major auction house, and check on a 1959 Bazooka Johnny Unitas. Or, a 1947-49 Bond Bread Jackie Robinson in at least a 5. Or, a 1954 Briggs Franks Mickey Mantle.

Friend, this is honest advice. I do not own any of them. However, as a regional / food collector, I would be instantly, intensely interested in all 3. You might only be able to buy 2 of them with your whole wad; however, I feel the upside is very substantial for all three. Right now, the Bazooka Unitas is ungraded, but looks MUCH BETTER THAN USUAL. It is also one of Johnny's most beautiful cards, period. The 1947-49 Bond Bread Jackie has slowly gained a considerable amount of respect among hobbyists. The issue has a fascinating background story, and nice examples are rare as hen's teeth.

Now, the NON-mainstream crowd is relatively few compared to mainstream. Still, mainstream is dime a dozen, but heavily in demand. There's a deep undercurrent of demand for the scarce and often rare regional / food issues. Some were ugly; forget about them. However, some are so beautiful to rank among the player's best and most desirable cards. The 1959 Bazooka Johnny Unitas is indeed a good example. Sure, if you don't care for football, forget about that one. There's plenty of tough desirable baseball cards around to such up that $15,000 you have, and then some. If you love hockey, just try hunting down a ROYAL DESSERTS GORDIE HOWE. Rots a ruck, guy. However, if you were able to track one down, the Gordie Howe guys ADORE THAT CARD!!!!!!!

WHAT EVER YOU DO, TAKE YOUR TIME DECIDING WHAT YOU REALLY LIKE AND WANT. Of course, I always did terrible buying cards that I thought would appreciate. Be that as it may, the cards I bought because I absolutely loved how they looked----THOSE TENDED TO BE THE ONES THAT IN A FEW DECADES BECAME WORTH MORE THAN WHAT I HAVE MADE OVER THE COURSE OF A WORKING YEAR, BELIEVE IT OR NOT. That was then; this is now. Hopefully, you'll find one, two, or three cards that command your attention, as well as the attention of some future collectors when it's time for you to sell. Sadly, this can be a cruel hobby that way. The player that's red-hot today can get a more than red-hot injury some day. That's why you must still with the Babe, Cobb, Gehrig, Jim Brown, Johnny Unitas, a rare beautiful Michael Jordan or better, Wilt Chamberlain, the Mick, etc.

I probably rattled on too much---sorry about that, Chief.

For the most part, time is on your side. You might want to wait and see what the economy is going to do. A very bad recession will knock the wind out of most all collectibles. You might need that dough for something essential. Just sayin'.

Until then, be patient, prudent, and picky. I wish you the very best.;) --- Brian Powell

Reason for my suggesting it goes back to last year, and a thread about prices some M101-2 Sporting News Supplements were suddenly bringing in the Memory Lane auction in August of 2021. Turns out that unbeknownst to pretty much everyone reading the thread, PSA apparently had suddenly started grading these supplements only a year or two before then. Most serious M101-2 collectors really weren't into grading them at all, especially since up till then only Beckett graded the M101-2 supplements. SGC never has, and I didn't see any on CSG's pop reports, so I don't know if CSG also doesn't grade them, or if it is just no one has tried submitting one to them yet. Meanwhile, PSA's pop reports show that as of today they have still only graded 137 M101-2 Sporting News Supplements in total. The M101-2 set has 100 different supplements in it, so PSA hasn't even gotten close to grading every different supplement in the set yet.

It would seem that with the influx of new collectors/money into the hobby these past few years, and the attraction and desire they appear to have for low pop/high grade PSA cards and items, getting in on the ground floor of a set/issue PSA suddenly starts grading items of may not be a bad idea. Though PSA and their Registry are not my personal cup of tea, it certainly seems to be for a very large number of people in the hobby. And the money that follows shows it.

I've wondered in the past what would happen to the prices and values of items in other such sets/issues were PSA to suddenly start grading them. Like the S74 silks, BF2 Ferguson Bakery pennants, and B18 felt blankets, for example. There are Cobbs, Wagners, Joe Jacksons, and other HOFers and star players in such sets/issues that I've often thought they are way undervalued due to a (for lack of a better term) perceived stigma that may follow them because of a perception then of their not being deemed worthy of grading by PSA.

Great chart, but does the typical way one talks about annual return take into account some notion of compounding, in which case the annual returns would be somewhat lower?

I’m sure you get tired of me pointing it out, but does the chart also assume zero selling costs?

There is no discount rate, interest rate, inflation rate, nor any other assumptions

Am I right or wrong on the first point, you're a numbers guy and I'm just a lawyer? :)

Just based on a quick look, the math appears to be an annual return.

For example, for the first item, going from ~$1,500 to ~$15,000 from start to finish would be about a 1,000% return in the aggregate. So since we’re dealing with about 16 years, it’s going to be a lot less on an annual basis with annual compounding. I would have expected less than the 137% quoted here, but certainly a return approaching 80-100% per year.

Maybe when I’ve got my laptop handy, I can double check the math instead of just trying to do it in my head. Or one of the other math savants loitering around here will beat me to it.

Fair enough, and not my area, but I thought when people speak of annual rate of return for investments they're considering compounding so just dividing by the number of years in the period would overstate.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/geometricmean.asp

And don't forget the taxes! :D

So, some bad news here. Looks like my quick and dirty math in my head overstated the annual returns, and not by a little.

The annual return on that first one, factoring in compounding, is 15.4%.

Like me, you are probably thinking, WTF!!!

Just seems really low when your item goes up about 1,000%.

But I ran the math a few times and reverse engineered it. Investing that sum for that 15.4% rate over about 16 years gets you the final value.

Just another example of how your returns on cardboard might actually be less than you expect. Admittedly, not every investment in the stock market is going to generate 15.4% per year for 16 years.

And the return on cardboard is calculated before even factoring in selling costs and taxes. Although admittedly often investment returns are quoted on a pre-tax basis.

I agree with what you say, Phil. It would nonsense to try to argue. And I would say I have seen a great many of your cards posted here. You have stated that you have sacrificed at times, selling in order to get a certain pick up. Thanks for making me see the light.

Right. It's geometric, not arithmetic. Those are still nice returns but we need to keep it in perspective and apples to apples. I doubt there is any investment that generates a 70 percent annual return over time.


https://www.investor.gov/financial-t...est-calculator
The beauty of compounding, illustrated.

And most of that return came during the pandemic. Prior to that point, your return was low to mid single digits on an annual basis.

Oh well.

Not if you bought at the top, and sold at the bottom.

2016 was faraway, so not surprised people don't recall Clemente rcs going over 100k in psa 8 only selling for 20k through 2021.

2016 was IMO clearly a manipulated market on certain cards anyhow. I fondly recall the "buying group." Those were fun threads.

Just for fun, I attempted to recreate the spreadsheet above. Basically you buy at the first price point, and then we calculate your return as if you had sold at the subsequent dates. So just for example, with the 51B Mantle, you buy in 2005, and then sell in either 2011, 2015, 2019, 2020, or 2022. Then I calculate your return as if you had sold at any one of those dates.

Because we often have selling costs, I also added in some math to calculate the return based on 0%, 10%, and 20% selling costs.

And the results are better than I expected, even before the pandemic. For the most part, you're looking at mid to high single digits through the mid to late teens, even when we're talking about the 20% selling cost mark. Which isn't bad! It's not amazing, but certainly not bad.

And if you factor in the pandemic, then they pretty much all get into double digits. For people who like to look at spreadsheets on screens, here's the details.

Note: Please ignore the fact that the first price point is negative - that's just part of the fun when calculating XIRRs with excel - the first number needs to be negative, since that's what you're spending to buy it. Please also ignore the fact that I'm not factoring in taxes. Since most investment products are evaluated based on pre-tax results, that seemed appropriate here as well.

What was the annual return of SPY in the same periods, can you add that in for comparison? At least for first to last dates.

Now the sales are totally legit,!

LOL of course.

Shh, any examples of 'top cards' going down are not to be spoken of ;). Inexorably and forever up! Money printer go brrrrr

I will never forget a certain one time major AH owner telling a dealer friend of mine, I can show any price realized I want. I also recall cards that had "sold" in that AH showing up literally within a week on ebay -- with a guy I knew to be close to the AH owner -- at 70 percent of the sale price or less. Dirty industry, always has been.

Those cards weren't paid for.

But they were reported by the AHs, certain ebay sellers, and VCP.

Welp!

I'm a bit hesitant to share the results, primarily because someone might draw some conclusions based on data that is selective and only representative for the window presented.

Additionally, the cardboard pieces presented here are not necessarily representative of the entire cardboard market, as these are hand-selected major pieces from HOF players. At the same time, if we're being honest, these cards are likely to have a fairly robust market in terms of trading volume, so the market is unlikely to be manipulated by spurious outliers, at least in general barring shenanigans. I also haven't dug into the data presented by the earlier poster to evaluate whether there was any cherry picking of cardboard data points that might influence the data here.

Part of the fun is that if you bought stocks in 2007, you were buying high, and it took a while to come back after the great recession. Another part of the fun is that stocks have performed poorly over the last 6 months, so your returns are down if you're selling today.

There were certainly some windows where stocks did better here. And some where they did worse than these specific cardboard pieces. Maybe in another decade, we can look back at people who bought cardboard in 2021 or 2022 and see how they did relative to investing in the market. We might very well get some different results considering the relative current strength in these markets.

Without further ado, here's another sweet spreadsheet to stare at on your screen, until you go cross-eyed.

I would bet a lot that a basket of higher graded elite prewar cards and Mays and Mantle rookies and 52 Topps would best the S&P 500 by significantly more. Yeah you can qualify it in a hundred ways but it's still pretty damn interesting, isn't it? Thank you for the charts btw.and to Charles for the first chart.

I’ve been investing through my employer's 457b plan 100% of my allocation in the S&P500 ETF Low-Cost Vanguard Fund since I was 23 in 2005. I’ve been increasing my contributions once or twice a year depending on if we get a cost of living or not. I maxed out said contributions this year at $20,500. If the government allows me to keep increasing I will until it’s maxed. I’ll stay fully invested 100% allocation into the S&P 500 until I’m 55. The last 7 years will be far more to safety. Will retire at 62. So far I’ve been very pleased with my returns.

I think John Bogle, founder of Vanguard, and whose book really was an education and wake up call for me, would approve.

Agree with Peter. There is a saying well known by those investing in the stock market : Avoid catching a falling knife. Seems to me various markets are fluctuating, including gold coins, stocks, real estate, and employment. And baseball cards (but not all of everything!).

Think it through, do what you are comfortable with and what you like. Just my humble opinion.

Oh yeah, keep asking the Net54 guys questions. The dumb question is the one you do not ask and costs you...

Yes he would!!

I read that book and one other whose name I can’t remember now but which was along similar lines, and bagged the person who had been advising me as I realized he was full of it.

Yeah but:

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...e/franklin.jpg
https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...us%20cards.jpg

Definitely my favorite prewar card.

https://photos.imageevent.com/exhibi...uth%20port.jpg

Prego.

By all means, be my guest and bet on any cards you want. Hopefully they pay off for you.

I’ve got 25% of my assets tied up in cardboard right now, mostly due to the recent runup in cardboard values, and that’s already uncomfortably high for me, so I expect that percentage to decline in the coming years, simply through investing more in other asset classes relative to cardboard.

I agree about the Jackie. It's my favorite card. Unfortunately though, there have only ever been 9 dead centered copies without creases of the 52 Jackie to ever surface on VCP out of over 1,000 copies sold despite it being "double printed". I'd settle for a "good enough" copy of you can get one at a decent price.