I loved those days. Back when we “collected” instead of “invested”.

I rarely sell any of my cards but buying is easy - I determine what the value is to me. I’m not concerned with what someone else valued a similar card at yesterday.

Value of a specific collectible is determined by a buyer and seller at that moment. If I buy a 52 Topps Mantle at a garage sale for 50 cents, the value of that exact card is 50 cents because that’s what I paid in cash for it. If I sell that same card for 1 million dollars, then the value of that specific card is now 1 million dollars because someone paid me that amount in cash.

throwing ethics out the window, you of course are 'allowed' to operate this way as an individual (because our legal system doesn't punish economic exploitation as long as it conforms to a few very basic marketplace regulations) but this isn't how market dynamics work. in accordance with that, you waive your right to be disappointed when your expectations fail to conform with reality in most cases -- which means a failure to get what you want, whether its money for your card, or a card for your money.

this logic model collapses quickly and consistently in a collective marketplace where you are forced to contend with real world factors such as objectively constituted, framed and reframed market valuation as a shifting valuation at a global level over time. it has nothing to do with what you think anything is worth. you are a node in that global market; your behavior is either an outlier (which is buying a mantle for 50 cents, or selling it for 500m$ -- both of which would be taking advantage of someone else's market ignorance), or you conform to the market at large by offering fair going rates and standards for your products and services: again, in conformity to the global market. markets determine value as an ecosystem; market valuation is a reality. just because you are able to buy, lets say, a 30k card for 5 cents at a garage sale from an unaware seller -- or sell it for 1m to an unaware buyer, this is a predatory approach -- created on a case by case basis by a buyer or seller who is dictating terms in a pseudo-vacuum to an unaware buyer or seller. i don't think it needs much explaining why it is predatory to buy a '52 mantle from an elderly woman for 50 cents at a garage sale then turn around and sell it for whatever amount.

you are, in both circumstances, willfully taking advantage of unaware buyers and sellers under the guise of 'the card is worth what its worth to me'. this is why being educated in economics is important in the current climate, because good faith isn't enough. this is why i advise that buyers and sellers of any good or service become educated in the going rates in their respective industries to avoid being taken advantage of. unfortunately, this kind of behavior is and can be quite common.

^^ this post is not meant to be offensive, but to speak directly from a deep economical foundation. i hope none is taken; cheers!

If I buy a 1990 Fleer Jose Uribe for $30,000 that doesn't mean it's worth $30,000, and if I buy a 1952 Mantle for 50 cents that doesn't mean it's worth 50 cents. The value of a specific collectible is its market price - the equilibrium price at which buyers are willing to buy it and sellers are willing to sell it in general.

That's a basic explanation which obviously doesn't work well for rare cards - but for cards like a 1952 Mantle, the market is what determines the price of a card - the general trend of sales, not a single sale.

well said; a 52 mantle is a great example of market determination precisely because it is a prominent, (relatively) widely available [compared to many other very, very scarce cards] and well documented good

As I noted, we spent a LOT of $$$ traveling the country pre-EBay days and a good bit even after EBay really got going circa 1998 so we got prices from sales lists, from seeing what people were asking/selling at shows and stores and as I noted with phone conversations with trusted hobby sources. We knew who would tell us the truth and who would, as the expression goes, blow smoke.

Were we checking on a price of a Sandy Alomar Jr. card from 1997 Topps, well not really unless we knew he might be catching fire. But we wanted to make sure we knew what the best cards and the best players were selling for. That got more important as inserts/autos/relics/parallels took over. But we did want to know which players were very popular. A good clue back in the day was there were always collectors for Mike Mussina and Cris Carter tougher cards as they had a group of collectors. Not all semi-stars were really the same and we tried to differentiate in cases such as that.

I can tell you when I went on show/store trips to an area I did not know I would ask someone (s) I knew to tell who the market makers were and how much I could trust them. You'd be amazed as how truthful some people were on that level. Plus, in the then burgeoning NY/NJ market I knew from before I went to work at Beckett the major dealers and they were very forthright with me

And we had a team of price guide people (18 at the peak) who were similar to me in gathering prices and helping to create the price guide (s)

Regards
Rich

I always imagined them all throwing darts at a board and see where it hit...

This reads like an economics textbook.

If I find a 52 Mantle at a garage sale and the seller wants 50 cents, how am I taking advantage of them? I gave them their asking price. I also collect vintage Pyrex and depression glass. If I buy a Pyrex dish for $1 at a yard sale and I value it at $30, am I taking advantage of anyone? Nope.

If the “fair market value” of a card is $10 and two buyers get into a frenzy and the winner pays $500, is that the FMV now for that card? No, it’s what the winning buyer felt that the value of THAT card was TO HIM at THAT MOMENT in time, otherwise he wouldn’t have paid that amount.

This is how I feel.
When I started this thread, I never imagined a VCP rep or owner (IDK)would be on here. Net 54 is awesome!

This board is great, but my original point still stands, especially for raw cards. They cannot track most sales that occur.
I only collect pure (raw) and have cracked out hundreds. I cracked out a 1952 Mathews two days ago for my permanent collection. That skews all of their data IMO, especially if I ever sell it.

If you buy a 1990 Jose Uribe for $30,000, then the value of that specific card (the one in your hands) to you is $30,000 because that’s what you paid for it in cash. That doesn’t mean that every 1990 Uribe is worth $30,000…just the one you chose to drop 30K on.

we can agree to disagree! my point is about ethics and economic theory at a macro/global scale. each individual entity within said system is allowed to do whatever they want within that context, but it doesn't change that context at large. you may make an impact within that context based on your individual/personal decisions, but by and large one person rarely if ever disturbs the market with outlier behavior.

it becomes a larger question about ethics and conduct within marketplaces + conscious awareness of how your behavior impacts others. markets collapse because of increasing lack of context, macroeconomic awareness, and consciousness of how individual decisions impact the global whole. its well precedented historically; ties, fascinatingly enough, into the history of the rise and fall of global empires. furthermore -- some people place ethics in a religious context, others in an intrapersonal context about good faith. your behavior and your decisions are always your own, i'm just providing the macroeconomic background to the microeconomic stage you're setting with your stance and decision making.

i have a ton of economics background, so i'm not surprised it sounds like something you might read in a textbook or a academic article or published document! hopefully it was helpful, even if you choose not to take any of it with you and proceed as you were. it is ultimately of no consequence to me, as i have no claim to nor desire to control human behavior, perhaps only create the possibility of influencing it for the collective human good!

cheers!
david

David,

You’ve mentioned ethics a few times now, and that troubles me. What is unethical about giving someone their asking price of 50 cents? Caveat venditor applies as equally as caveat emptor.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just buy and sell collectibles at what we felt they were worth instead of what everyone else felt that they were worth or what they read out of a price guide?

you raise a good point; i'm here for it. i think the primary thing we keep bumping up against here is the reality of market value. its something that neither you nor i have any significant influence over. your mantle example is a good point. if i feel that a mickey mantle 52 topps in VG/EX condition is worth 50 cents, and the old woman who is hosting the yard sale also feels the same, we have a theoretical match right?

this is where ethics comes into play. both you and i know that that 52 topps mantle is worth far more than 50 cents. the woman who is hosting the yard sale is 'market unaware', or, in street terms, 'prepared to be taken for a ride'. we both objectively know the real value of a mantle; the reason we know it to be thus is because we live in a market ecosystem of transactions which verify said value.

this is a really interesting point, because it gets us to what constitutes value. i can buy a de kooning right now for hundreds of millions of dollars. insane, right? because objectively to me de kooning paints like absolute shit. but everyone has their opinion. knowing, and having context for this market reality, i can demand my real price that its worth to me, $5. and i may actually in a wild subjective context get that, like a 50 cent 52 mantle at a garage sale.

however -- here's where philosophy of ethics and economics collide -- i am acting in patently bad faith pretending like that de kooning is worth only $5, just as i am pretending that that mantle '52 is only worth 50 cents. it may be worth 50 cents to you because you hate mantle or don't care about baseball cards, but the market does not value it the same way. so you have to ask yourself, in a deep philosophical way, why am i buying this card if its worthless to me?

perhaps, like a rare few, you are simply buying a piece of junk to play with it for awhile then toss it. but if you know that mantle is worth five or even six figures and you buy it from an old woman at a garage sale for 50 cents, you have to ask yourself if you are really standing in good faith. each person is entitled their individual action in a marketplace, including, as we well observe, theft and exploitation which goes unpunished by legal systems around the world. markets survive and thrive because of regular good faith transactions, even among patently exploitative ones, like destroying an ecosystem to prop up a national economy. markets collapse because of regular bad faith transactions -- they erode trust and destroy the concept of collective value -- which philosophically is tied directly to meaning. here, you get to the root of the problem. market value, like meaning in nations and communities -- is collectively constructed. it is a composite of individual beliefs of value. the whole thing, as your question reveals; as i sometimes wish i wasn't so aware of, is constructed entirely of a tapestry of belief -- perceived meaning en masse.

philosophy of ethics and economics -- as above, are intimate bedfellows. to act in 'good faith', here, is to pay the old woman what her mantle is worth -- knowing what we know about the market value of the object itself: even if she doesn't know it; even if we think its only worth 50 cents. otherwise, we're leveraging market knowledge over someone else who is unsuspecting and doesn't know any better. you could call this hoodwinking, exploitation of lack of awareness, et cetera. but it is ultimately the fact that you know the true collectively constructed market value that creates duality here -- this duality being 'good faith' or 'bad faith' transaction. ethics is human conduct with and towards one another. markets are human transactions of goods, services, materials, and knowledge with one another. the two are absolutely, utterly, profoundly inseparable.

i admire your question and willingness to inquire further here. what your question really reveals is the difference between subjective value and objective valuation. its part of why, personally, i enjoy baseball cards so much. that tip top bread 1910 common that everyone passes by is something easily obtainable for me -- because it holds a hotbed of deep historical and philosophical meaning that the market doesn't yet understand or is not yet aware of. is this exploitative? perhaps. and that begs a deeper question about what real value is and how markets understand it and attempt to contextualize it. van gogh sold only a couple paintings in his lifetime; for pennies considering what his work is worth on the global market now. was he swindled out of those paintings (looking back)? definitely. but in and at the time he sold it? they were the bare few paintings he could sell! ethically, without a doubt, all of those transactions would be constituted as in 'good faith'... in fact, they even helped a desperate painter! he lived in a world that thought his paintings were worthless at the time... so much that they couldn't be sold, really, for any amount. if only he could see the way that the collective imagination changed; reconstituted that market value. if i were to buy what i knew to be a van gogh for pennies from an unsuspecting inheritor of one of those paintings he sold in his lifetime... we're in a very different world ethically!

is my 1910 tip top bread common worth more than what the market values it at? i think so -- but this is the depth of questioning into philosophy, ethics, and economics that makes this conversation so provocative and thought-provoking. (i even have to ask myself -- am i imagining that this 1910 tip top bread 1910 common is worth anything at all!! :)

You're certainly welcome to buy and sell at what you think something is worth. The problem is you have to find someone else who agrees with your desired price, which, if you're wildly different from what other similar cards have recently sold for, will probably be difficult to do.

That is very true, and I have accepted that fact. I still only buy at values that I’m comfortable with.

That's true for me as well, and I imagine for most collectors. However, the reality is those values are generally being based on comps to other sales of the same card in similar condition.

this is a noble point -- and it actually really deeply connects back to the issue that was raised in the other thread about shill bidding. markets are regularly inflated by people who are actively manipulating them with false signals; distorting data and driving untrue price inflation -- or deflation -- for perceived personal gain. and a lot of what that thread ended up discussing is what happened to people who thought that this was a viable or ethical or practical way of engaging with the community. these conversations going on seem to be about is how that impacts us as collectors; people who genuinely love baseball cards; seek to act with integrity and consciously; participate in community surrounding our passions -- not merely ruthlessly conquer piles and piles of photos or cards -- regardless of what it does to us or others, what have you. many people in this hobby seem to have met their demise by descending into a total greed to possess what really is nothing more than pieces of cardboard (really cool pieces of cardboard, mind you) at all costs. it reminds me of reading about what happened with type 1 photography in some of those early auction days in jim chapman's book.

there are people who both buy and sell in this hobby with deep reverence for our community and baseball history as a whole; there are people who do the same with the idea to extract every single possible dollar out of a card, meaning be damned. to me its a sort of illness or disease -- the people who do that and live that way. we are here for meaning and the love of the cards. there is another faction which is here to extract monetary value from them. there is no real love there; thus, no real community built around genuine passion and connection with/for them.

our community, which was i think at one point in history more resembled a small group of passionate kids -- has been in many ways 'hijacked' by people leveraging cards as tokens and assets; we've seen the way the hobby as a whole, particularly in modern, has adopted this hyper modern method of pumping and dumping '1/1 super gold supreme' cards like shells. its like the introduction of a stock market to a sandlot -- a cold calculating hand; as you mentioned earlier jim, the juxtaposition of trading with your friends back in the day. there's a warmth to that; a commonality. its much more human. its ultimately a big part of the reason that, for me, baseball cards are such an important thing.

there's so much to be said here, but it ultimately comes back to the integrity and the passion that i think we all have here on the forum for cards and the game and history. and how our community has been turned into a market for stock turnover and pumping inflated values into something which was always about something far deeper than that. however, i think there are still plenty of us out here who still reside at that level of care. and i often see that reflected in the right kind of relationships where i'm buying, trading, selling, communicating -- all of the above.

Guy finds a Mantle at a yardsale for .50. Can't stomach taking advantage of the lady and offers her $1000. She thinks, oh my if he's willing to pay $1000 maybe he's willing to pay $10,000 and instead decides to keep it.

This is 100% what would happen to me if I found a .50 Mantle at a yardsale.

LOL -- ethics gone wrong... or right? :D

Were I to ever run across a cheap, magical find at a garage sale, dealer's booth, etc., I would buy it at the low price, and then (after knowing their address or a way to contact them) send them a 'more proper' amount of money.
Sadly, though, incredible crap like that never happens to me!!

If you offer a 52 Topps Mantle for 50 cents and I accept. ...that's where the story ends. I'm the hero and you are the villain. I'm the good guy and you are the bad guy, not the other way around. Are you serious with all this philosophy stuff? It's baseball cards. What do you want for your Bo Diaz Rook?

you're allowed to do whatever you want! if you read my posts you'll see what i'm saying. what you said in your comment isn't what i'm saying at all -- i'm just giving you the logic that either makes markets function or fail. its simple!

you're allowed to do whatever you want! if you read my posts you'll see what i'm saying. what you said in your comment isn't what i'm saying at all -- i'm just giving you the logic that either makes markets function or fail on a mass scale. its simple! none of it takes away your free will. collective value is an imagination and we either decide to exploit it for personal gain when we perceive windows or openings to take advantage of other people or participate in it respectfully of others, regardless of whether or not they understand it.

now imagine that old woman is your neighbor and she finds out you took her for all she was worth, knowing full well what you were doing. there's the community impact of your decisions in real time!

and accordingly, that creates, fosters -- or erodes and destroys -- social trust. it has nothing to do with heroes and villains. it has to do with whether we wake up tomorrow and our market still exists!

I think there is a spectrum and everyone draws the line at a different place.

There is the "old lady" example where you are taking advantage of someone else's ignorance who has no reason to know better. I wouldn't tell someone what to do in this case, but I think some of us would tell the old lady what the card was worth and that she should auction it off somewhere (or offer her fair market value). But only up to a point. For a '52 Mantle maybe. For a '52 Forrest Main, we would probably just buy the card. Anyway, if this actually happened, the card would probably be a a reprint!

Then there is the example of going to a card or mall show, sifting through a group of 1957 commons, and pulling out an Ashburn because either the seller didn't know he was a HOFer or didn't want to search through a pile of cards looking for the better players. I think most of us would just buy the card at the price offered because the seller "should have" known better.

There is also the case of something being offered at auction as a generic cabinet or postcard and you, as the bidder, knowing or suspecting that a better player was pictured...say Joe McGinnity on a factory team. I think most of us would just bid on the item and not tell the AH to update their listing. Because they and the consignor should have done some research, and because we like the idea that our knowledge/research is going to be put to practical use.

I haven't experienced these, so I can't say what I would do. But I do have a flexible approach to getting too much change. If I am at a farmer's market that I go to regularly, and someone gives me an extra $5 in change and I notice it, I will tell them. But if I am at a McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts, I tend to keep it. My justification is that I am dealing with a big company and I like the idea that I am benefiting because I can do simple math in my head. But whatever the justification, I am stealing their money. Not that anyone still uses cash.

Similarly, if I am at a supermarket and I notice that something rang up at a higher price, I will tell them (sometimes to the annoyance of the people behind me on line). But if I notice that something rang up at a lower price...not so much.

great input here michael. absolutely a spectrum. the old lady mantle example is great because its clearly taking advantage of a massive discrepancy in market value and relative perceived value. its taking advantage of another individual who doesn't know any better for personal benefit. and thats what collapses markets. it helps elucidate the concept quite clearly. as you so astutely stated, corporate 'theft' on behalf of the buyer is so often already corporate theft on behalf of the corporation ;) --- that's a broken exchange from the start!

so much of this, as we're talking about with corporations, already goes on and is well documented and goes un-prosecuted. so people think ethically that its fine, then are surprised (or at least feign surprise) when markets destabilize and collapse -- regionally, nationally, or globally. there are real factors at play in market collapse -- and these include many of which were discussed in the bid shilling post. history consistently tells the tale; as we can see, erosion of trust dictates what happens in stock market stability (or lack thereof) or bank runs. markets run on it; when its gone, so are markets. cue descent into primordial chaos. rapid inflation or deflation of collective value systems by bad actors is the end of the stories we tell ourselves about what is valuable and why. and when those stories go out the window (our implicit and explicit agreements as markets of truth, so to speak), so does a large part of what creates the foundation of our relationships and conduct in the polis. ie -- social contract(s).

as i was saying in the above comments, ethics isnt some abstract thing. it has real consequences when you have enough market literacy to clearly and unequivocally understand and state that they run on trust. silk road, early native american trading posts, debt in the roman empire (and american empire)... human history is rampant with examples of the precarity of trust and destabilization of markets.

well reasoned and level headed input in your comment. nice.