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Posted By: barrysloate

A lot of good points have been made on this thread, and of course nobody knows the answer, not even me. Vetekbob regrets that there are no baseball card shops anymore and is thankful for ebay; the fact is ebay may be the reason that the baseball shop can no longer survive. Why pay high rent when ebay costs pennies to list and can reach thousands of people who would never even know your store exists? That is how the information age has altered the landscape. As far as a bubble bursting I feel that there can certainly be an exodus of well heeled collectors and investors one day if their collections aren't performing the way they would like, but there can't be a bubble bursting at the level of the dot.coms. When a stock tanks, you have nothing but a worthless piece of paper that says you own the stock. But if vintage cards lost value, you still have your collection and you can still enjoy it; and of course, some won't care and will continue collecting, others will have a bad taste in their mouth and bail out. That increases the supply, and lessens the demand, and there's your market cycle. It's like real estate- it seems to go up forever, but even if it went south, you still have a house to live in. I just think that the incredibly high prices you see for great rarities is populated by a very thin market; those cards are more volatile than a T206 in VG-Ex condition, which will never go too high or too low. But how about the guy who is buying a 1955 Topps common in PSA-9 for a $1000 for his registry set? After he's spent 150K to put his 55 Topps set together, where does he go to sell it when the market tanks? It's a matter of recognizing a good value and a bad value. The whole set registry craze is an amazing coup and marketing scheme for the grading companies, but that is probably the area of the market where someone is going to get his head handed to him. The N172's, T206's, and other classic sets will probably hold their value a little better. There's just something intrinsically appealing about them and they will always be collected. There can always be market dips but I don't think the classics will tank.