ebay finds that PWCC engaged in shill bidding?

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Snowman

Bob is not out on a limb at all. Not even remotely. There is a MASSIVE faction of this market that treats their collections as assets. They have no emotional connection to these cards whatsoever. Not wanting to sell a card at a loss is a completely irrational behavior that is only held by true collectors, not investors. Try putting yourself in an investor's shoes as opposed to your collector shoes for a moment. Instead of it being a Mayweather RC, imagine it was an investment in General Motors stock or Pfizer or pick some other random stock. Say 2 months after you bought it, the market crashes and you want to move some of your money around. Maybe you want to put it in gold or silver or into bitcoin or some other investment opportunity. Are you really not going to sell that General Motors stock for its current market price because you paid double what it's worth today? Really? Are you really telling me that nobody does this?

"Nope, I'm not selling my Pfizer stock until they net me a profit! I don't take losses, God dammit!!!"

This isn't some guy who's been saving up his paper route money until he finally had enough to land his holy grail Mayweather RC. This is someone with money to invest with no emotional connection whatsoever to their cards. He was never going to keep that card. He probably never even saw it in person. Just bought it on eBay, shipped it to his vault, kept it there, and then sold it from his vault so he could put the money in Bitcoin instead.

Or it could be a person who is both a collector and an investor who still wants to keep the card, but sells it say to realize a $50K capital loss. They wait 31 days then before going back to try to buy virtually the same card they just sold, for hopefully no more than what they had just sold it for, and if really lucky, for even less so they have some cash from the sale left over. So they end up still owning the same card, but now when they do their taxes they maybe save upwards of $14,000 ($50K loss X 28%) that they otherwise wouldn't have had to buy/invest in other cards, or whatever else they're now interested in.

FYI. I mentioned waiting at least 31 days before trying to buy a similar card back because in sales of stocks, if you sold 100 shares of a particular stock for a loss, but then bought 100 shares of that same stock within a month, either before or after the date you had sold the 100 shares, you would not be able to claim the capital loss for tax purposes under what is known as the wash rule. Now baseball cards are not exactly the same as a company's stock, especially graded cards with their own unique cert numbers, etc. But cards can and are now also considered investments, and I don't know if an IRS agent would argue that one PSA 10 Jordan rookie is the same as another to be able to invoke the wash rule against someone selling one at a loss, and then buying a different PSA 10 Jordan rookie just a couple weeks later. Don't know of any cases out there, but why take a chance if you don't have to, just wait for the month to pass to be sure. Throwing this out as general knowledge for anyone reading this thread.