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Originally Posted by Rhotchkiss
Great point Jim. Put differently, if one cannot fathom spending $100k on a card, then if/when a card one owns becomes worth $100k, they should sell; and expect there are a number of people out there in this boat given where prices have gone in the past few years
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Ryan - I generally agree with this sentiment, although I would probably add a few caveats.
As a tax professional, my first and most obvious observation is that I'm always reticent to sell, just to hand over as much as half of the sales price to the tax man. To the average American, nothing seems to vex us more than paying taxes that could have been avoided by not selling.
Second, for many of these cards, they mean a lot more to us than just cold, hard cash. While in theory everything has a price, often it's difficult to part with something that is so meaningful to us. Although economists would prefer that we all be cold calculating machines, we humans are too full of emotion to ever really allow that to happen. Along these lines, I would further posit that when it comes to our "forever" personal collection, the price would need to be astronomical before we are willing to sell. $100k is good money and nothing to sneeze at, but for some impossible to find pieces that I've been approached about selling, I've seriously responded that it would take $10M for me to sell, even though they would probably only fetch a small fraction of that amount if I were to sell at auction today.
Finally, there's also the element of expecting that it's just going to keep going up. While it's often illogical to expect that cardboard that is at a multiple of its previous all-time high could really go up much higher, deep down to some extent, we're inveterate gamblers. And that can cause us to want to keep riding the hot hand, expecting that this is just the beginning, with another 10x leg up being right around the corner, so selling now would be folly.
Bottom line is that it's easy to declare our economic principles, but when it comes to something we cherish like these cards, it can be a lot harder to actually take the brave leap of actually selling.