Many of my previous posts are about getting attractive returns by efficiently utilizing little to no resources. That’s the tangible aspect of a wise business move. The intangible part is probably a lot more important. Most of us spend way more on pleasing our own internal selves than anything else. Much of our purchases and energy expenditures are impulsive. It has nothing to do with discipline and everything to do with pleasing ourselves. This is why you frequently buy things or order services you didn’t really need. From an optimization standpoint, there is probably always a better deal somewhere else but yet we frequently jump on the things we can easily get our hands on. Since many people work and have other priorities, spare leisure time is hard to come by and most people don’t have time to make the most optimal spending decisions. This is why it’s important to expand your hobby base by becoming more versatile through obtaining an extensive amount of knowledge about everything including collectibles.
Yes, I talk about a lot of things a lot including collectible cards. I also invest in many different investments including coins, stamps, banknotes, vinyl, DVDs and many more other types of investments, alternative assets or not. At the end of the day, you don’t always get to pick what you want to invest in due to timing, cash flow and opportunity costs among other factors. When you are at a yard sale, do you always know what is going to be available for sale and do you frequently not buy something because you don’t know much about certain items? When you do want to buy a huge lot of something, can you always buy that in one place all the time? The bottomline is you are more of a trashman than a corporate procurement agent. The things people are trying to sell are usually near trash in their heads otherwise they would have either sold those things in auctions or liquidated them to the big guys at heavy discounts. Let me repeat again, whatever you are buying as a regular person are typically trash in someone else’s mind otherwise they would not have sold those things to you at whatever price and you would not have bought those because you most likely either can’t afford it or don’t want to pay that price.
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Why collecting is more than meets the eye and how it actually makes you more successful.
The key here is the expectation and judgment arbitrage. As the little guy you will never get any good deals worth your time based on standard expectations. You make money at your level when you do this kind of things through expectation arbitrage. If people thought it was worth a lot more in that very situation, they would not have tried to sell it to you. Just remember, the most expensive things in life usually do not start out as being expensive. When it is expensive, you as the little guy will probably never be able to get an opportunity to own it. The lesson here is it is almost never about the nominal price, it’s about uncovering the hidden value. Most GDP reported numbers are inflation adjusted not based on the nominal growth. That nuance is critical not just because price does not always equal to value but the fact that it’s about purchasing power with or without the anchoring of the fiat currency. When people had to barter millenniums ago, the value of something had always been about value not the fiat medium of exchange money. The 1997 Barry Sanders Marvel Wolverine card was literally a dollar or two about 30 years ago, now it’s upwards of $10K USD in top condition.
The Nuts and Bolts and many of Jordan insert cards were literally a dollar or two 30 years ago and even then wasn’t too easy to sell at that time, now many of these cards are thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in top condition. That 1990-1991 Hoops two certain audience members in the background card was basically a common card years ago now it’s at least hundreds of dollars in top condition. You get my point? It’s almost never how much something cost, it’s about what you know or can predict with a high probability of success that arbitrages expectations and translate into value investing. On the other hand, if you invested huge amounts into 1989 Upper Deck Griffey or the other junk wax era cards, you probably didn’t do all that well. Why? Because the expectation arbitration didn’t consistently exist back then when everyone overvalued those cards by discarding economic principles. I wasn’t going to talk about this but since you are reading this, I will let you know something I believe may hold true in the future. In the future, when time and space become less of a limiting factor, digital real estate will likely become a thing. Right now the biggest hurdle preventing even more online activities are the lack of teleportation, understanding of the human brain neural network, unlimited energy, space and speed of light traveling, sensory experiences like smelling/touching/feeling virtually among other technological limitations. However, eventually capitalism is going to have the incentive to breakthrough those limitations.
This likely means digital properties will become more and more accepted hence more demand therefore more valuable. Regardless how technology progress, humanistic concepts like a door, space, portal and such will likely be needed. At this moment, all four letter .com domains have been taken and the 5 letter .com domains likely will be gone soon. People will always want a way to communicate ideas and such. Having a door that allows such communication especially with words that allow for such effective communication will likely be welcomed in whatever format, domain name or not. Obviously that’s just one of an iceberg amount of opportunities that may currently exist, I’m just saying it’s never about what is being believed, rather, it’s about what you believe may hold true and is later vindicated by such truth in your own conceptual image. No one is ever going to be always right forever, it has always been a probability game and a game of endurance and liquidity to get through the resource crunch. You only know what you know when you know and opportunity are only opportunities for those who sees an opportunity as an opportunity. You know what I mean if you know what I mean?