Investment Potential

[FrankWakefield]

ctown... I was bicycling in 1964, doing the same thing. Coke bottles brought 4 cents, Pepsi and RCs 3 cents. I could find them in ditches along roads... I'd check the ditches on Saturday mornings, and usually get enough bottles to get 6 to 8 packs of cards...

And I read the posts.

An old collector of motor cars once explained to me that the value of Model T's peaked a few years ago, when men reaching retirement with spare money could indulge themselves by buying an old car they'd once had... He said the demand bubble peaked with that demographic. And that as those guys died off, the demand for those cars decreased a bit, and prices fell. (I never drove a Model T as a kid or as a first car, so I'm not as interested in having one as someone who did.) I understand that it isn't the same with ball cards. None of us saw Christy Mathewson pitch. (My great uncle did tell me about catching a train up to Detroit to pick up a car to drive back down to Kentucky. He went to a Tigers game, he told me about seeing Cobb getting a hit off of Walter Johnson, and stealing a base...) So we'll still collect Mathewson cards, and the old cards. But there is a slight effect to card collecting. Will any of you admit that you draw the line at the 20th century, and don't buy Old Judges?

There are collectors out there who draw the line at 1952, because of the big Topps, and collect only forward from there. Those guys don't look at this board. We here aren't a fair sampling of ball card collectors.

The crass, hard-hearted, cynical side of me makes me think that if folks would invest in an education then they'd see that pouring money into a ball card collecton isn't investing. Not even if you want it to be.

[barrysloate]

Ctownboy- a bit wordy perhaps, but a lot of sincerity, something you don't see every day...and please call me Barry.

[bosoxphan]

I feel very comfortable in the demand profile for vintage cards over the next 10-15 years. After that who knows but are there really any investments outside real estate that you can forsee the future 20 years from now? Certainly not company stocks. The companies that dominated 20 years ago are very different than the ones leading the landscape now.

[Exhibitman]

Actually, Frank, I don't care for OJs; I just don't like the aesthetics.

I don't think the doom and gloom predictors or the endless market rise predictors are accurate. It is just silly to think that the hobby will crater (absent of course a total cratering of everything else) and it is equally silly to think that we will see T206 prices double in real terms over the next five years. We are not likely ever to see a National like the 1991 Anaheim show, nor, frankly, would I want to. The market for new shiny crap is 1/10 of what it was, but I have to question whether it ever should have been so crazy in the first place. I recall setting up with vintage cards at local shows next to guys selling 100-card bricks of Griffey, Sheffield and other hot rookies (Gregg Jeffries anyone?) in the early 1990s and knowing that there was something inherently wrong with the money changing hands on those deals. The only thing I've seen that was comparable was the real estate market in 2006-2007. The bottom line for the hobby is that about 70 million tickets are sold to baseball games every season. I do not see that pool of fans withering away. Some of them will read up on the history of the sport, will discover this site, and will become addicts just like us. I also see lots of collectors younger than me (more it seems every year I age) who haven't hit their peak earning years yet. They'll get there and the hobby will go on. Like those frothy heights, the current doldrums are out of whack and will pass as the economy passes through the rough patch. The same thing happened in the early 1980s. I know I'd be buying more cards at today's prices if I had the cash.

30 years is a long time, relatively speaking. It can be an entire career. Cards have a track record over 30 years of being pretty decent alternative investments. Like anything else, of course, there are some elements that are better than others and some that were just dum [sic] in the first place. The two constants, however, have been rarity and HOFers. Rare cards and memorabilia of the top players trump everything else for security and for return on investment.

As far as the question posed in this thread, in all candor, $5,000 is peanuts for investment purposes. At 10% year over year it would not even reach $90,000 in 30 years. And yes, I will take that ROI every day; my point is that $5,000 isn't going to make anyone rich or break anyone's back (if it might, don't risk it--put it in an insured account), so we're not really talking about big, life-altering money. If I was going to plunk $5K into the card market now without any real expertise in cards, I would look to purchase a variety of top-flight HOFers from rarer issues. I would avoid 'fad' things like rookie cards, modern gimmick cards, and high grade plastic (slabs), simply because of their volatility. I'd probably also take a chunk of the money and buy a Ruth check or a Cobb check if I could find a reasonably priced one. I really don't think you could go wrong with that. Now, if you want to gamble, my bet would be to go to the National and hunt raw cards for slabbing. I have spotted and slabbed some really high end commons over the last few years--nothing like pulling a few top slabs from raw commons to make your investment day--but it requires a good eye for what the graders want (education) and some luck and persistence slogging through piles of crap to get the few gems. I don't really consider that investment, though; more like placing a bet on a number in roulette.