Many may have seen this already, but Shaun started a channel a couple months ago detailing a wide range topics involving video game, toy and card collecting and the risks associated with them. I cannot recommend it enough as many of us fall into these traps of what is "rare" and what isn't and I think the general cautions and advice he lays down should definitely be considered.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/U...

 

I learned about this when they rereleased Dragon Ball GT Final Bout. I payed top dollar for the original print used on eBay because I liked the show. I just bought another copy CIB of the original print for 1/3 of the price I paid just for the disc 15 years ago.

Interesting, I'll give it a watch when I get home. Graded Lego sets, jeez, there's a whole crazy world I don't know about. Also a graded bootleg Sweet Home, wow. I hope that's on the table to demonstrate how you can take a real $100 bill and turn it into something entirely worthless.

Is Shaun a member on here? I'm halfway through a video and loving it so far. He mimics many of the ideologies I tell my younger brothers who are just starting to collect modern video game related items. Exercise extreme caution about paying retail unless you're buying it for YOURSELF only.

I'm not sure, perhaps. he does reference NA at least once. The channel isn't fluff, it can come off as a harsh economics college class and that's what I like about it. 

If you can love something like toys, games, comics, cards etc and let that passion drive your interest, but that doesn’t mean you should be going into debt over it, or being smart about where you put your dollars. His video on VGA VS Wata is also mandatory for any thinking of collecting graded anything and understanding what the scales actually mean.

All in all, one of the best recent channels on YouTube.
 

I have to thank you for bringing this channel to my attention.  I have since consumed almost all of his content (1.75x haha) and genuinely look forward to him releasing more.

Cliffs for those of us interested but not willing to invest hours of time into watching?

TLDR: Investing in current games is a bad idea, you might get lucky on a few things but the majority will flub vs investment in other things.
 

TLDR: Guy's entire career is in antiques and collectables, and gives good distinctions between speculating and investing.  Having bought coins, currency, comics, cards, toys, games and legos since the mid 90's, gives advice on the few things actuallly worth investing in, as most everything else is generational and will inevitably be a loss. 

 

The actual list of "the few things actually worth investing in" strikes me as what Jonebone was looking for with the request for "Cliff's Notes"...

 

From my understanding of what I have watched he basically says your better off investing in things like coins / currency

 

You cant just rattle off a list of what without understanding the why. That's exactly the sort of speculation he warns against. 
 

I feel like you guys misunderstand what "Cliff's Notes" would actually cover...    

I wouldn't consider "Cliff's Notes" to be equivalent to the zero-information "TLDR" one-liners that have become popular over the last few years.
 

I hear ya, but some topics cant be boiled down alas, like investing, esp when the topics range over 40 years of collectables with their own markets and trends. The TLDR version is, this channel covers that, haha.

I have a hard time believing that a video channel couldn't be readily distilled into a synopsis that takes a fraction of the time to read as it would to watch.

Any topic can be summarized more effectively than a TLDR one-liner, no matter how complex or nuanced.



I'm also in the camp where a peeve of mine is people making videos to disseminate information that could MUCH more quickly be read than watched, and much more quickly be written than produced in video format.

I understand why they do it for video ad revenue.  But it doesn't make the inefficiency of it any less annoying.


 

Wait who buys arcade machines at today's prices to flip??? I love arcades with a passion but does any really think they are getting an investment when they buy? And electricity costs are a negative on it really lol.


Saying this I still wanna dive back in to see what he has to say on other videos

Depends on the machine and the price...

While not quite the same thing, pinball machines of the right era tend to appreciate (or at the very least have a very stable value) so at worst you are generally just tying up capital and won't see a loss beyond the opportunity cost.

 

An MTG channel Alpha Investments basically repeats the same few points over and over with different examples, he makes like two videos a day just talking to the camera. Some people just wanna put on some background noise about entertainment speculation!

People still watch Rudy? 

 

I watched the one video that was the shortest and most relevant to my interests, VGA vs Wata scale.  He did okay but I certainly wasn't impressed enough to think that he's some miraculous gifted collecting expert.  Pros and Cons:

Pros - He knows a lot about a lot.  Well rounded.  He was able to break down the scales pretty well.

Cons - He's clearly not an expert in games.  He says he graded DWIV and Snow Brothers because they were both "uncommon".  A DWIV cart worthy of grading?  Eh.  Then he says he can't tell why one is a 8.0 and one is a 9.0.  Granted, Wata does grade carts brutally and he's not saying he's a grader, but he's basing his expert Wata assessment off having touched 2 graded items.  He also cites the Heritage auction sale of a "$26k complete DK Jr" which is wrong on all 3 fronts, $28.8k, sealed, and DK3.  Sure he's shooting from the hip but if you're citing stuff where you don't even know the details then clearly it wasn't that important to you and you don't have much of an expert opinion on it.

End of day, investing in video games has paid off extremely well for many of us if you know what you're doing.  He strikes me as the guy who has a set amount every month, say $1,000 and he just grabs a bunch of collectibles off eBay with it.  That's not how you do it.  You do it by hunting down deals and buying things below their market rate.  You put in time and effort that pays you handsomely when you flip finds at a profit and you continually reinvest those profits all along the way.  You treat it as a hobby that you enjoy, not some savings account where you set it and forget it.  

Neat video but I don't think I'd watch anymore.  

I respect your opinion Jone, but as someone who has watched all his videos, he is not the person you are describing. He ironically displays a lot of items on his desk in his videos as examples of things you should not be investing in, and again, goes to great lengths to dissuade people from rampant speculation. He doesn’t invest in games or comics and the like anymore, but has a love for the medium and tries to coral people into considering the opportunity costs associated with everything you buy.

I fully respect your decision not to watch, but everything you levied has been addressed in other topics. 

It's why I don't like to break things into mere sentence summaries like Arch advocates, because a lot of the details and nuance are lost and assumptions fil the void. 

 

Nowhere did I advocate for "mere sencence summaries".  

 

Yeah I mean I don't know the guy personally, but I can tell that he isn't a video game "expert" from the fallacies in his VGA vs. Wata video. Knowledgeable sure, but not an "expert" in the sense of someone I would look to as a soothsayer.

Personally, for me, "investing" in video games has been the best financial decision of my entire life, bar none. You could argue that investing in your eduction via college gets you the paper to get into a career field perhaps, but in terms of pure financial return, it's outpaced my IRA / 401k / anything else. Though it's not an investment in the traditional sense of "set it and forget it", it's an investment of my time and passion that allows me to finds deals or become savvy in collecting undervalued items.

Also, it's very hard to collect a ton of different things effectively, especially if you have the whole work / life balance thing with a family or other hobbies. Only so much time in the day. I've chosen to primarily focus on games , but understanding that is an all encompassing broad topic across mediums. You can collect CIB games, Sealed games, loose games, Sega games, Nintendo games, PS1 games, gaming signs and memorabilia, etc. "Games" is very open-ended.

I will also say that investing in anything you don't understand or have a passion for is a poor thought process in general. I don't care if he says coins are better than games, if you don't know or care about coins then you wouldn't find it fun. You need to collect what your heart tells you to collect, and then profits will come if you do it intelligently and have the grind / bandwidth to seek out deals. Anything can be collected with a profit if you do it right. Looking at it as a pure investment is a fallacy.

Are you accusing me of TLDRing your opinion? ;p

 

This is the key to everything. One can argue every penny we're not spending on stocks or bonds etc is money we're loosing, but as you say, if you don't have a passion for something, so much is going to fall through the cracks and you won't sustain. Interest and passion are the lubricant to push you towards the engine of your interests, and if you're savvy enough to make money off those interests, even to sustain your own hobby, all the better.

I like his channel a lot because:

1. There aren't many like it when it comes to game collecting
2. It doesnt focus on what you should buy as much as it's a lot of cautionary tales of what not to do.

A lot of us have also been collecting for years, we have an idea of what comes up and what doesnt. But we're now in the age where news sites talks of 100k Marios, 8k Kid Icarus. Between that and Wata pulling in old money, there is this fueled bubble of amateurs looking to strike it rich in this "untapped" game market. His warnings are for those who would put themselves in debt to try and be a part of the action when 95 percent of the time, it will not work out without research. I feel these warnings are valid and should be heeded by any entering the market. 

Like I said, it's a channel about investing in games and toys. That just ticks off so many checkboxes of interest from a conversational standpoint.