Quote:
Originally Posted by cardsagain74
You keep conflating "collecting lots of a card cause I like it" with hoarding one w/ only the specific intent to drive price way up. Yes, I feel the latter is a different situation. And those are the spots I'm referring to.
No, the examples like Bartirome and the '57 Paul Smith from my link are not being done by people who just do it for the love of the game. Look at Cole Bartiromo's past. And as mentioned before, the Smith guy has been very vocal in FB groups about hoping to corner the market and drive the price up for a pump and dump.
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Cole was an absolute nutter, but he doesn't seem to have seriously attempted to make money off his bizarre 1952 saga, unless there is a piece I am not aware of. He did like that card, he doesn't seem (again, I am happy to be corrected) to have sold off his collection even though he doesn't appear to be buying it anymore. He never reasonably stood a chance of making a profit even if it was all a very clever price fixing attempt with the prices he was paying.
Paul Smith is easily and readily available for normal pricing for a card from the SP series:
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_fro...&LH_Complete=1. I don't know anything about this one but if this is what he is trying to do, he is completely failing and seems to not buy a great many of the cheap copies of this card.
Most hoarders are hoarding because they like that card and have a fun time seeing how many they can accumulate. I am still waiting an example of a hoard that led to a profit or could reasonably have been expected to lead to a profit for these hoarders. It costs the hoarder money to publicly hoard a card; it seems there are 0 cards identified where this alleged dick-move-price-fixing-for-profit has ever worked.
EDIT: You said "Hoarding anything in a marketplace at the expense of everyone else is a dick move." - that isn't exactly in line with your new position that doing it with intent to profit is terrible. It quite specifically specifies that
any hoarding of anything for any reason is being a dick.