Dealer? “Dealer”/Collector? Or Collector only!

[steve B]

Originally Posted by bnorth

I haven't been a actual dealer for a long time so maybe it has changed. New expensive cards are for quick flips and old cards are great for long term. The biggest thing when selling is not the sale price but what you pay for the cards to resell.

^^^^ The stamp dealer I hung out at gave me a few bits of advice when I told him I was thinking of actually becoming a hobby dealer (Not just one hobby, both harder and easier to do) Advice in blue.
The first was "you can make money on anything if you buy it right"

The rest was also simple obvious stuff that has to be pointed out because it's so easily missed.

Learn as much as you can about as much as you can- which leads to
Become a good guesser.

I may not know exactly what something is worth, but have a fairly good "feel" for underpriced stuff.

Don't marry your mistakes.
Everyone buys stuff that simply won't sell for a profit.

Example, he had a monster box of pro set football cards. Not a great lot, just large with a few stars. He had it priced at $100, I looked, wasn't interested at anywhere near that much. He told me to just offer what i would pay. No, I'm so far under I don't want to insult you. Seriously, i never should have bought them. You cant insult me. Ok then, $20.. sold. I did do ok, selling batches of 400 junk era cards on Ebay before people stopped buying them. I made a little, but probably not enough to cover my time. I probably eventually got a couple hundred, but it was more than 10 hours work.

I'll add a couple he didn't.
Use networking.
He did really well by buying stuff for other dealers, or for particular collectors he knew would buy. Almost any weird angle you could look at a stamp, coin or postcard from, he knew someone. Even other stuff. One day I stopped by the shop, and he was out but the sign said he should be back fairly soon. He arrived on time and was glad I was there as he had some van unloading work for me Several boxes of stock certificates, all in binders, all from the same company. Something like 15000 of them. When i asked what he was going to do with that many, he told me they were already sold! He called his stock certificate guy who started to pass until he told him he would take 200 for everything. Which was cheap enough the stock certificate guy figured he could just give them away as surprise bonuses with every order.
(The company was moving, office workers found a closetfull the boss said to throw away. They said the stuff might have value. Ok, sell it by friday and if it's not huge money just split it. He paid 100, which got the office a nice pizza party.

Know yourself and decide if you're a good fit

I'm pretty good at spotting stuff and buying it. I'm not good at taking risks on more expensive stuff, which is a problem. I can pretty easily find stuff I can get 2-5x as much for. But getting 5x on a $1 item is still just four bucks.
And to some extent I have occasional trouble letting go. Plus some ADD which found me hitting an organizational wall at around 20 items a week. Some people can handle hundreds with none falling through the cracks, but that's not me. So all that was self limiting at a few hundred a week. Some big scores, but not enough.

Which now I look back on it is a little amusing.
I've never been someone who would pass on a big lot of stuff if there was something in it that I wanted. Or enough stuff in it that I liked or needed.
So I ended up with lots of extras, mostly cheap junk.
And probably from hanging out in a couple shops way more than I needed to, my overall attitudes were more dealerlike. I've had dealers ask me for my resale number and been surprised I'm not a dealer more than once, and in the early 90's would routinely get asked where my shop was.