[QUOTE=JustinD;1555630]Every bubble pops in time.
The laws of economics dictate that value cannot rise infinitely. Eventually the market settles and prices level. The extent of that pop is really the non-constant. But as in all things, ie: stocks, real estate, precious metals...everything, it will fluctuate. The true guessing game is finding the highs and lows and selling and buying accordingly.
Just a thought about this comment from Justin. Economic theory actually dictates that value is a simple function of supply and demand. I agree with Justin that prices established by true markets will fluctuate, but if the supply of something is limited and the demand is less limited, then over time prices will increase. Rookie Kevin Maas's (or is it Maases?) were in oversupply compared to the (non-existent) demand. I believe there could be some cards that will always be in demand and supply will not increase leading to increasing prices over time - think T206 Wagner - because no matter how negative "investors" get on sports memorabilia there will always be a large enough (albeit very small) number of well-heeled people wanting to acquire those (perhaps very) few cards. I also believe that where supply outstrips demand due to any number of very good reasons (people begin to watch roller derby more than baseball, baby boomers looking to sell their collections (or their heirs do), credit becomes scarce and the economy falters, etc.), then prices on many cards that are relatively plentiful (52 Mantle comes to mind - especially those mangled versions) will find an equilibrium. Hopefully I will be in a position to purchase some of those cards when prices do come down.
Here is an excerpt from an Economist article on bubbles and baseball cards from 2014 (
http://www.economist.com/news/christ...-card-bubble):
"Economists have wrestled with the question of whether markets are “efficient” or not for more than half a century. Eugene Fama was awarded a Nobel prize in 2013 for pioneering work demonstrating that markets quickly incorporate new information and cannot systematically be beaten. Yet others reckon markets often go haywire. Robert Shiller, for instance, showed that market returns could in fact be predicted at longer time horizons. He also reckoned people are prone to certain behavioural tics, misjudgments that depart from rationality and which can drive markets to heights of “irrational exuberance”. He was also awarded the Nobel prize, jointly with Mr Fama. Other economists have investigated ways in which markets can overshoot in one direction or another. “There are idiots,” Larry Summers once wrote in a paper on the subject. “Look around.”
Yet Mr Shiller, who warned of both the stockmarket bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the 2000s, has pointed out that it is often not just the fools piling into speculative frenzies but the experts themselves. The bankers putting together dodgy mortgage-backed securities at the height of the housing bubble were not simply corrupt or stupid: they believed that they had discovered new ways of capturing high returns at low risk—which is why they retained so much dangerous stuff on their balance-sheets. Neither did big institutional investors pile out of equities before the crash of 2000-01. The potency of a bubble is in its plausibility, to laypeople and experts alike, right up until the moment the game is over."