I have to disagree. In the case of bootlegs entering the market. One collector being able to get those bootlegs for a cheaper amount is not tied at all to the person who loses money on the value of the originals. The only commonality (and the cause of both) is that the bootlegs are being made by a 3rd party.
You can't say because Joe collector bought some cheap knock offs that his purchase has caused Jane collector's original value to drop. The cause of both instances is someone bootlegging the items. Trying to assign responsibility or to correlate the two is an incorrect assumption.
One action (bootlegging) causing both results. But neither result is directly tied or attributed to each other. The bootlegs are already made even if no one ever buys any. And in this instance, I am going to take a gander and say that he has at minimum 200 sets of these due to them being injection molded. Although I will agree that the more people who buy the bootlegs will have an effect on how many more are produced. But the blame lies entirely on the bootlegger, not on the collector.
Although truth be told, even if the correlation were correct, it's not Collector A's responsibility to worry about the value of Collector B's toys.
Again, I have to disagree. Using toys as any type of "safe" long term investment is really not a good idea. You'd have a much better time buying precious metals or stock in a solid company. You'd also have an easier time liquidating it. Some lines will hold their value for a while, but some are very flash in the pan. Toy prices are almost completely driven by demand. In 10 years, do you honestly think that there will more demand for Laser Beasts than there is now? The ones driving up the demand are guys our age. When we are nearing 50, do you think the demand will still be there? Nah.
Short term, you are correct. Especially if you can get stuff at retail prices or less (i.e. Transformers). But long term, you are better off buying gold and silver.
And I'll disagree right back on both points Jon. Simple example, if there are 10 people in the marketplace looking to and willing to bid on a Kickback gun which for the sake of this example we will say sells for $100. A bootlegger from China begins selling exact discernible duplicates for $10. How many of those 10 buyers would you think would still be willing to pay for an original now knowing that no one will be able to tell whether it is original or not. If your response is any number more than zero, you have effectively removed that buyer from the marketplace and by default lowered the value of the original gun. This process will continue until the value of the original gun and the identical reproduction are equal which I am guessing is somewhere around... $10. Therefore I can not see how your conclusion that the bootlegs are not tied to the owner of the original losing money? The collector is the enabler as, like you said, the more that are bought the more will be produced thus exacerbating the effect. As to your point about Collector A not needing to worry about Collector B's toys, I agree. We do live in a What's In It For Me economy and look at where it's got us...
As to the second point, I never said it was the safest investment, I said it was the most fun. Collectible toys by nature are not a very volatile market and the very high market value items are generally do not see a ton of fluctuation unless a game changer which breaks the rules like this comes along. I also see a different outlook for the future of collectible toys based on some assumptions I made with my Magic the Gathering collection about a decade ago. I figured everyone that was playing back in what I thought was the hayday of the game had finally grown up and I saw tournament participation start to dwindle so I sold my collection for about $6k. Turns out I was way off and there has been a ton of new life and if I had just held on to it to today it would have been close to $40k. I made a poor assumption that just because the people I knew were growing up there would be no new influx of life into the scene and I paid for it. Look at the collectors on this board today, half of them have only been here a few years and a lot of the old timers don't come around any more. The scene has changed and adapted and still seems to be thriving
-Barry
