New Member Introduction

[k.crist]

Hi everyone,

I've recently gotten back into the hobby as an adult and plan on collecting vintage cards that I drooled over many years ago.

With that being said, I purchased a membership to vintagecardprices.com as a research tool and couldn't help but notice that a lot of the big HOF cards (Mantle, Cobb, Aaron) have gone up in value substantially over the last few years. What has caused this sudden spike in popularity and price? My gut reaction would be that the bullish economy is the driving factor, but maybe there has been a resurgence in the hobby as well?

Anyways, I hope to become an active member on the boards and look forward to learning more from you all!

Cheers,

Kyle

[Leon]

Welcome to the fray!! Economy can always have an impact on things.

[Arazi4442]

Hi Kyle, welcome to the board. There's a lot of great information and people on this board. You'll enjoy it.

Like you, I recently just got back into collecting. From what I can tell (mainly through reading discussions here) is that the price increases of the last few years have been driven primarily through an interest in the collecting market by non trading card collectors. It seems that a significant amount of people who are looking for high return investments vs. genuine collectors have entered the market and driven prices up.

You may also hear about manipulation of the market artificially driving up prices, but I'm still not in the mainstream enough to really confirm or deny.

ENJOY!

[joshuanip]

Hi Kyle,

Welcome back. I started over again too. I had amassed quite a collection growing up but had to sell it all last year. Got the bug back after selling all my stuff. Oh well, at least I kept the cards that meant most to me. My best cards were recently handed to me from my father; he sort of feels he’s passing the torch. I would still like him to collect with me, but I get it. I will keep it going with my seven year old sone one day. I digress, sorry

I suggest you look at psacard.com. They are a great resource in telling you population size (at that tpg, third party grader). SCG is the other Gorilla. Back to Psa, they also have a section where they show recent auction prices of any card, which I believe is a free resource. And I love this board, I love hearing people who have way more knowledge than me interject on this hobby. Especially since card shows went the day of the dodo bird and card shops stop selling cards and became group breaking youtubers.

I hear you on the prices, Nm-mt and mt is out of my price range as well. I mainly collect Nm and higher in less popular issues.

Regarding prices, everything, stocks art and cards, have a cycle. We are in an up cycle right now, probably due to a combination of things, economy with low unemployment and less need for “liquidity”, collectors transitioning from modern to vintage, collectors like you and me that are in the (hair losing) age bracket where we have disposable income to purchase our childhood wish list, Father Time (inflation/weak dollar), fungibility from tpg slabbing and assessibility from the change in our industry from card shops conventions to online auctions.

I don’t think there is market manipulation these are real hammer prices. And there will always be cycles, I held my cards through at least 2 of them as so as I can recall.