Quote:
Originally Posted by btcarfagno
What perplexes me a bit are the numbers of vintage collectors that were thrown around earlier in the thread. I mean...250,000 to 1,000,000 vintage baseball card collectors? There's no way on God's green earth that the number is anywhere close to those levels. I mean, you get literally two or three new collectors working on certain vintage issues and prices can skyrocket.
If you include even the most casual of collectors of vintage, the number likely doesn't approach 10,000.
As such, it wouldn't take much "new blood" into the hobby to keep things going. There will be ebbs and flows for individual issues or players as there always has been. But to think that the hobby would need to replace 250,000 or more collectors in order for prices not to bottom out is absurd.
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My estimate of 250K was on TOTAL collectors, not vintage. I base that on the fact that there are about 20,000,000 total graded cards. If you make a very general assumption that each collector has 50 graded cards (some have more, some have less, some have none), you'd get about 400K card collectors. Just some rough numbers based on assumptions, but at least they're grounded in some actual data vs. some of the other arguments made in this thread.
That said, I agree with you sentiment that, when it comes to the vintage blue chip cards on which the "market index" is likely based, I'd bet the number of collectors is far smaller. Probably far less than 5k. But that's just gut. I don't think it will take many people to keep prices of blue chips healthy. As for the raw VGEX '65 Orlando Cepeda's...I have no idea what the market will do for those.