Spend a little now.....make a ton later!

[ctownboy]

I don't want to be a Debby Downer but I kind of doubt very many, if any, cards will appreciate like the OP is asking about. Why? Demographics.

It seems most collectors get hooked on baseball when they are kids. Most of those kids don't have big money to collect so they start out with a basic set from a current year. That was the way it was until the early 1990's when the card companies burst the collector bubble with their greed and overproduction.

So, collectors who are retirement age or older have either inherited their cards, kept the cards from their youth or, when they had the money during their prime working years, bought cards they couldn't afford in their youth. Or all of the above. Thus these collectors have benefited from the explosion in prices (and may have even contributed to the explosion).

Collectors who are aged 40 to 65 didn't get burned out by the early 1990's modern card collapse because they started collecting before the greed fest happened and instead of continuing to focus on modern cards, they learned from the collapse and started focusing their money on the older cards. Thus their prime earning years have been spent buying older cards and driving up the prices.

I don't see very many people younger than 40 collecting cards and spending their prime earning years buying cards and driving prices even higher.

I have a niece and four nephews who are aged 16 to 25 and NONE of them care very much about baseball and they don't collect ANYTHING (other than the latest video game console and games and cell phone bills). I have talked to them and they say their friends don't really care about baseball or collect cards either.

This is WAAAAAYYYYYY different than when I was that age. When I was 10 years - old, most of my friends collected cards and by the age of 16 to 25 were trying to sell them because they wanted to buy a car or were trying to scrape up money to pay college bills. At the time they were selling they regretted doing so but thought the car (read getting girls) or paying college bills was more important.

I don't see a ground swell of youth coming up and supporting card collecting like has happened in the past. So, because of that, I don't see cards skyrocketing in price for very much longer.

I don't have a large collection and I also don't have a lot of money tied up in my collection so, if card prices tank, I am not going to be really hurt in a financial sense (other than the opportunity cost of selling the cards I have now at prices higher than what I am probably going to be able to get in the future). That can not be said for other people with larger and more valuable collections so I wonder what is going to happen when the retirement age people (or their heirs) start to sell their collections or when the people with large collections see the light and start to cash out before the collapse comes?

My guess is the values will hold for awhile until either the supply swamps the demand or people start to see what is happening and just stop buying ans start to sell THEIR collections.

My two cents,

David