Omnious sign in market?

[Snapolit1]

Just wondering if for your run of the mill nice $15,000 card, whether maybe there are 8 people really actively looking for one as opposed to 18 or 28 a year ago. Not that no one is ponying up, but maybe the number of people in the pool has dropped a good bit. Would make sense to me in light of everything else going on in the economy.

[Casey2296]

Originally Posted by Snapolit1

Just wondering if for your run of the mill nice $15,000 card, whether maybe there are 8 people really actively looking for one as opposed to 18 or 28 a year ago. Not that no one is ponying up, but maybe the number of people in the pool has dropped a good bit. Would make sense to me in light of everything else going on in the economy.

I get this feeling too. FOMO is gone, quick flip is gone, cheap money is gone. I also think the collectibles market is a 6-9 month trailing indicator. You also have these investment groups/consortiums that have pooled money to "invest" in cards, they'll start losing money after the promised returns don't materialize and they'll move on to the next shiny object.

A good real estate analogy would be that the all cash offers 150K above list are no longer happening.

And it can't happen fast enough in my opinion. As a collector I would much rather pay 5k for a card I want instead of 8k. Your Gehrig is a perfect example, I would guess the 1st buyer was an investor and the second a collector. Beautiful card and worth what the 2nd guy got it for, not what the 1st guy got it for.

In the restaurant business we have an old saying, it's always the second guy who makes money after the first guy goes broke spending all the money building it out and the second guy buys the assets for pennies on the dollar.