What clouds this issue a bit, as has been cited, is the amount of material that gets recycled, again and again. There are plenty of collectors who after they drop 100K in an auction, consign 75K of duplicates to the next one. So if you say that every year these big auction houses sell tens of millions of dollars worth of material, you shouldn't underestimate how much of it has appeared two or more times in a short period of time. I'm sure there is someone who buys a T206 set only to merge it with the one he already has, then consigns his duplicate set to a future sale. So much of this stuff goes round and round that it's hard to get an accurate gauge of how much collectors really spend.
If I buy a card for 10K and then sell a different one for 10K, that's 20K worth of sales, but I in fact have spent nothing.
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