Pre-War big names are more resilient by this point, but I'm not sure about post-war. Most of the vintage 'investment' cards are post-war, and have massive print runs. When the generation with a nostalgic attachment to them dies and the hobby gets a massive influx of Mantle/Clemente/Aaron/Robinson/Mays/Ryan/Etc. I'm not sure there are enough interested young people to buy this massive quantity at huge prices.
Pre-War is greatly aided by the small surviving populations (there's a lot of T206, T206, Goudey, not much else), and the sets with a lot of examples are often the only commonly found card of that player. It helps Cobb's T206's that he doesn't have many other commonly found career contemporary cards, even though his T206's themselves are common. It's not the same with the post-war players. I doubt that, for example, Clemente's will completely crater but there are a LOT of 1955 Topps Clemente's being invested in, much less his many other extremely common cards. How many young people will think it's worth the many $K's 55 Clemente's cost when the generation who grew up with him all have their collections hitting the market? There will, sadly, be an inevitable massive influx of post-war materials coming as that generation reaches the end of life.
Another issue to factor if one's purpose is long term investment is, I think, shifting cultural standards and the tendency to remove from the public sphere of acceptability figures of the past that do not meet the standards of the present. On the other hand, this hasn't yet hurt CDV's (again though, a small population item that doesn't need very many buyers to sustain prices) of certain once-respected-and-now-reviled historical figures, so perhaps it won't, or could even stroke interest in there items (after all, villains in a narrative sell. Cicotte would be valued somewhere between Vic Willis and George Mullin if he wasn't a villain). I would factor it in as a possible big hit on certain guys if I was investing.
By this point, I think the great stat players who are undervalued will remain undervalued. I don't see Eddie Collins ever getting the dollar value of his statistical value. We've been talking about how he is undervalued for my entire life. Far more buyers care about narratives than who was actually the best, and I think the safest investments are those with the best narratives.
Personally, I'm going to continue to keep investing separate from cards. My stocks are not necessarily a better investment (indeed, if I'd bought T206 Cobb Green's instead of Apple, Google and Amazon, I'd be doing about exactly as well, but with the extra benefit of getting to look at baseball lithography instead of graph charts), but it lets me simply enjoy the cards as a break from the stress of life and finance.
|