If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.
My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I’m more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:
Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.
They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly.
Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.
If you remonetize them, you don’t pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market.
If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won’t get into), it can be easily avoided—illegally and probably legally as well.
You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person / auction house.
Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.
No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.
The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).
Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards.
(If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.
If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don’t sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.
The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).
Those don’t seem like substantial downsides, and ones that would be incurred already by a lot of smart philatelists.
The efficient markets hypothesis asks: why can stamps be a decent investment compared to something like an index fund? Especially since there are things like hedge funds for collectibles, and stamps are a leading suspect (along with wine and art and comic books).
I strongly advise against following this plan. Collectibles are not a good longterm investment, stamps included. That is, they tend to underperform stocks, real estate, and other investments, substantially so once transaction and carrying costs are factored in. The Wall Street Journal recently polled a number of experts about this. Their opinions were essentially unanimous, differing primarily in how bluntly each was willing to say, “Don’t do this.”
Did you consult a tax attorney on this? I have no idea what you’re referring to when you claim you don’t pay “extra” taxes on selling your stamps. Selling your possessions is certainly income and would at least be subject to income tax (and the rate would be higher than a capital gains tax rate on stocks).
I’m from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other “art” formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don’t pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.
I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a “medium” range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.
This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he’s enthusiastic about this but he wouldn’t warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.
Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I’m not really familiar with US tax law.
The main point I’m making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you’re from.
I wasn’t aware you’re not in the US. If your country has high capital gains taxes compared to income taxes, the balance might be different in the US. However, stamps and other collectibles have many problems:
-- Stamps can get stolen, lost, or burned in a fire. It’s hard for this to happen to stocks (unless you’re behind the times and have them as a pile of paper certificates)
-- If you buy a type of collectibles that you’re actually interested in, your desire to keep a co
llection of something you’re interested in may lead to poor decision-making on a financial level
-- When buying stamps and other collectibles, you generally have to pay retail prices, and when you sell them, you only get wholesale prices. And you can sell a stock any time; selling a collectible is a big deal and takes effort.
Also, I find it very doubtful that stamps aren’t subject to inheritance or estate taxes.
I agree. It may be easy to avoid paying tax on the gain in value, but that does not mean one is complying with the tax law.
That said, if one is holding stamps as an investment, it is plausible that gains would be taxed at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary rate (in the US).
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn’t do any legal research. Don’t rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don’t rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I’ve known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don’t know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I’ll say some outrageous hypothesis:
Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen.
Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god.
There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don’t.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don’t come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come—there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What’s also interesting is “catastrophy mail”, that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I’m quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first “reliable” long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There’s always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there’s an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone—logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.
If you have a reasonable ammount of money that you would like to save long-term and (potentially) remonetize 10+ years later on (for example for your retirement or whatever) then decide against playing the stock market (duh) or putting it in low interest bank accounts and buy the right stamps instead.
My dad is a passionate collector, but I have hardly any interst in collecting useless historical artefacts because I’m more interested in the future of humanity than its past. However even without any historical interest in the particular subject, stamps are an amazing thing to put your money into, because:
Few stamps ever fall significantly in value, some remain stagnant and most rise significantly over time. So having many rather than a few really valuable ones is good and in a timeframe of decades many individual stamps can easily double or triple their value.
They are very small, light and portable. Unlike most other art-objects you could potentially remonetize quickly. Much lighter than coins or anything else, really.
If you remonetize them, you don’t pay extra taxes which you may have to pay for gains from playing the stock market. If there will be a tax on that at some Point in the future (which is unlikely for some reasons I won’t get into), it can be easily avoided—illegally and probably legally as well.
You can remonetize them very, very quickly for a very good price by knowing the right person / auction house.
Unlike numbers on a bank account they are inflation proof.
No inheritance tax, your significant others will get all the dough if they remonetize it themselves.
The downsides are that you have to put some significant time into this topic to know what a good deal is, learn how the market and auction houses operate and to build a diverse or highly specialized and sought-after collection that is very likely to rise in value compared to other possible collections you could compile (which overall will almost certainly rise in value too, but maybe not as much as a collection you put some thought into).
Also you obviously need to keep them safe from theft and environmental hazards. (If you want to make the collection a one-time endeavor instead of an ongoing process, you can finish up your collection and put it in a small or medium safe deposit box in any bank.) Consider optimal storage conditions as well, since stamps are essentially made of fancy paper.
If none of this interests you, then at least take this advice: If you ever inherit a stamp collection, don’t sell it on a flea market, inform yourself and sell it properly. Just recently a friend of my dad asked his advice on a collection he was about to sell for low double digits to learn that it was worth at least 20000$.
Those don’t seem like substantial downsides, and ones that would be incurred already by a lot of smart philatelists.
The efficient markets hypothesis asks: why can stamps be a decent investment compared to something like an index fund? Especially since there are things like hedge funds for collectibles, and stamps are a leading suspect (along with wine and art and comic books).
I strongly advise against following this plan. Collectibles are not a good longterm investment, stamps included. That is, they tend to underperform stocks, real estate, and other investments, substantially so once transaction and carrying costs are factored in. The Wall Street Journal recently polled a number of experts about this. Their opinions were essentially unanimous, differing primarily in how bluntly each was willing to say, “Don’t do this.”
Did you consult a tax attorney on this? I have no idea what you’re referring to when you claim you don’t pay “extra” taxes on selling your stamps. Selling your possessions is certainly income and would at least be subject to income tax (and the rate would be higher than a capital gains tax rate on stocks).
I’m from Germany, here they tax gains in stock trade with a higher rate and the government tried to extend this higher rate on trade with stamps and other “art” formats multiple times, but realized its unfeasible and for now gave up. Currently you pay a whopping 25% in taxes on capital gains over ~1000$ and have other substantial losses. A few years back it could even climb as high as 50% if you were unlucky. Also you don’t pay any special taxes here if you simply sell your private collection.
I think the current US tax rate on capital gains is at 0% if you earn little, 15% if your income is in a “medium” range and it can climb to 20% if your wallet is really thick.
This is not based on any personal research but on what my father told me, yet seeing how much time he is (and especially has been) spending in this field, that he keeps up to date, and that generally speaking he is a reasonably smart man, I have no reason to doubt his expertise in this topic. Naturally he’s enthusiastic about this but he wouldn’t warp facts. Every time I visit I unsually tend to leave with more insight in this field than I really want to. He also keeps close track on how the value of his private collection rose over the past, how it still rises, and I know what the figures look like.
Back on track, I should have made the disclaimer that I’m not really familiar with US tax law. The main point I’m making here however is that it is a very safe long term investment that is practically guaranteed to pay out substantially more than what you buy it for in the long haul. This should hold true regardless of what country you’re from.
I wasn’t aware you’re not in the US. If your country has high capital gains taxes compared to income taxes, the balance might be different in the US. However, stamps and other collectibles have many problems:
-- Stamps can get stolen, lost, or burned in a fire. It’s hard for this to happen to stocks (unless you’re behind the times and have them as a pile of paper certificates)
-- If you buy a type of collectibles that you’re actually interested in, your desire to keep a co llection of something you’re interested in may lead to poor decision-making on a financial level
-- When buying stamps and other collectibles, you generally have to pay retail prices, and when you sell them, you only get wholesale prices. And you can sell a stock any time; selling a collectible is a big deal and takes effort.
Also, I find it very doubtful that stamps aren’t subject to inheritance or estate taxes.
I agree. It may be easy to avoid paying tax on the gain in value, but that does not mean one is complying with the tax law.
That said, if one is holding stamps as an investment, it is plausible that gains would be taxed at the capital gains rate instead of the ordinary rate (in the US).
Disclaimer to any reader: I am not your lawyer. I am not a tax lawyer. I didn’t do any legal research. Don’t rely on my opinion for any reason. Definitely don’t rely on this opinion to try and pay less taxes. If this is a real issue for you, hire someone to do the research, or do it yourself.
I wonder if Magic Cards (Specifically the Power Nine cards and Beta Dual Lands) are not a good investment? They have multiplied by about 10 in price over the last ten years. I’ve known people who had 300 Serra Angels, a terrible investment whose price decreased from 8 dollars to about 1 or less over the years.
Magic is both a collectible and a game, I don’t know how that factors in expected value return.
Usually the top 0,3% (in future relative scarcity in Type1 and Legacy) increase steadily in price no matter what, top 1% unless they are reprinted (in which case both up and down can happen) and most of the rest goes down. But only with years and years of experience can a player tell whether a card will belong to the select few. Svi may have informed opinions on that.
Just to spend some time calibrating future-me confidence in Magic price calibration, I’ll say some outrageous hypothesis: Up: Time Vault, Mana Drain, P9 except timetwister, FOW, Karakas, Fetch, Duals, mutavault, moxen. Down: All non-tribal creatures pre-2008, jace, all dual trual lands except above, baneslayer, wrath of god. There you go future 2017 me, stop trusting yourself that much and never invest in what you mind thinks it is superexpert at without much evidence.
I wouldn’t know about magic cards, sorry.
Stamps would be my choice because they have many advantages over other types of collectibles. Magic cards may share many of the benefits stamps have over other collectibles considering the similar format, but stamps surely have special perks magic cards don’t.
Stamps have the advantage, that they are the number 1 collectible in Germany and many other parts of Europe and they have been forever. Coins and other things don’t come close in terms of how widely they are collected and the bigger the demand, the easier it is to monetize if you have a worthwhile collection that is interesting to the collector base. There are stamps which one can assume will be interesting for many decades to come—there is for example a deep fascination with the Third Reich so stamps that came from Germany and the occupied territories during that time are generally sought after. What’s also interesting is “catastrophy mail”, that is mail that was delivered on planes or zeppelins that were destroyed while the letters themselves could be salvaged from the wrecks.
There are many nieche topics that stamp collectors could choose to base their collection(s) on, which may indeed suffer from vaning interest over time in the collector base, but there are also some other topics that will probably remain interesting in the very long run and thus demand will always be there and fluctuate less than the demand for other topics.
I know that magic is huge but will it remain so for another fifty years? (Assuming the absence of apocalyptic scenarios). I’m quite sure stamps will be there because they are carrying historical information and are an integral part of the first “reliable” long distance communication technology humans managed to make work (apart from books perhaps, though they usually had no specific individual as recipient in mind and thus really are quite a different communication technology).
What I have taken from this is any time I travel abroad I should get in touch with my stamp investing friend and form a strategy for finding good local deals that have a likely long term value, possibly in other markets, and also I should try to make more friends expert in such collectibles investing for the same reason. I have not concluded I should expect to beat the market without a similar effort.
If you are much better than the market at predicting how cards will trend, you should probably be working for Star City or some other secondary market giant.
Probably the continuous uptrend in the P9 et al. can be understood as rational if the continued growth of the game is uncertain. There’s always the black swan possibility that Wizards will catastrophically fuck up in some way and hence let them tumble down. In addition, the growth of eternal formats is itself limited by the availability of staples. I would suspect there’s an upper limit to how expensive the Moxen and friends can get on this basis alone—logarithmic growth of the game entails linear growth of Vintage and Legacy. This is, after all, why they created Modern, for which Modern Masters is possible.