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Originally Posted by calvindog
How can you suggest that collectors are not also investors?
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Easily! The two subsets of individuals have entirely different interests. Collectors want reasonable prices so that they can continue to accumulate while investors want prices to increase so that they can make a profit. The exception would of course be those individuals who have more than just a touch of schizophrenia. That of course may be more common these days than it has been historically.
Quote:
Originally Posted by calvindog
I've been a baseball card collector since I was 4-5 years old. I collected through my childhood, spending peanuts on the cards until I got an adult job, then a career, and began spending more and more discretionary income on the cards I loved. I never once bought a card for an investment purpose. I never once considered the cards I bought to be part of my net worth, or an asset. They were purchased in my mind, with the same money I'd use for recreational purposes. The money was spent, the fun was had, and that was it. And I steadily spent money on cards, month after month, the amounts increasing as my income increased.
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Yes, that sounds like a collector to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by calvindog
Now maybe some collectors never spent a large amount of their income over time on cards and were capable of exercising some self-control, limiting their collections to a rounding error on their net worth.
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The usage of the words "collector" and "self-control" constitutes an oxymoron (in most cases anyway). I see the collecting compulsion as an addiction like almost all others except that it doesn't wreck your health. If anything it's an addiction that extends one's life because you need to live long enough to get
that card which will then of course become another, and another! So how can you die?
Quote:
Originally Posted by calvindog
...and unless you're a communist, socialist or an idiot, the value of our collections matter to us.
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I'm absolutely none of those things but the value I get from my collection is purely psychic, i.e. delight, satisfaction, comfort. I'm not driven to adding up the dollars. Why should I be? I don't anticipate getting those dollars and if I do it'll probably be too late to spend them foolishly. I can see myself being like Angelo Savelli whose only question when approaching his final days was whether his collection was safe and intact.