Anyone hesitant to buy now?

[Exhibitman]

I am sure that some of the runs on marquee cards were manipulated by clever shillers and touts. Those gains won't hold. Many of the other price increases are genuine and will hold to some extent. For those here who aren't hobby old farts, just remember that this is not the first time prices have surged and fallen back. There were eras (late 1970s, early 1990s, mid 2000s) where prices on vintage and established stars went up then down. Usually the 'down' does not fall all the way back to the previous lows and stay there. Absent a black swan event, anyone looking for a 2010-era pricing structure on vintage cards to emerge and hold is likely to be disappointed.

What is different now than in say 1989 is data flow. Owing to social media and eBay, the speed of the rises and falls has increased, as has the prompt widespread understanding that something is going on. Pre-'net you could take advantage of all sorts of information deficits, like buying Yankees in Los Angeles and selling them in New York; now anyone can just look up the item online and get an idea of what it is worth in seconds.

One other factor that will stabilize prices is that people often will hold a card as it declines rather than sell into a price decline because they do not want to admit to the loss; as long as they hold the card they can tell themselves that it may make money eventually. Dealers do this too. I've had repeated conversations with other collectors about how some dealers frustratingly will keep cards at overpriced levels for years in their eBay stores rather than take a smaller gain and move on to the next deal. Excluding extreme rarities where it can make sense to hold out for a huge payday from a collector who wants the item and cannot find it elsewhere, a rational seller would liquidate stale inventory and reinvest the proceeds in new inventory, because moving money in and out of deals is more lucrative in the long run than tying it up in slow moving inventory that earns nothing as it sits.