Investing

While I advocate the careful accumulation of high quality antiques for investment purposes, it is important to choose the right antiques. Unfortunately, there are some collectibles that are now, and always have been, bad investments. Welcome to the Antique Sage’s list of the top 7 worst collectibles of all time for investors, presented in no particular order. Please note that I’ve intentionally left Beanie Babies off this list because they are so terrible I don’t even consider them to be collectibles!

1) Thomas Kinkade Paintings and Prints

Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed “Painter of Light”, has been one of the most prolific and financially successful artists of the late 20th century. In fact, he was so successful that his company, Media Arts Group Inc., had franchised 350 Thomas Kinkade Signature Gallery stores across the U.S. at its peak. But in order to keep that many shops filled with merchandise, Kinkade had to break one of the ironclad rules of fine art: you can’t mass produce it.

As a result, Kinkade’s company estimated that his works hung in an astonishing 1 out of every 20 American homes. Of course, once online marketplaces took off on the internet in the late 1990s, everyone realized just how many of Kinkade’s works were floating around out there. Demand collapsed as everyone who could ever possibly want a Thomas Kinkade work already owned two!

It also didn’t help that Kinkade’s cloyingly saccharin, neo-Norman Rockwellesque style was completely out of step with the late 20th century’s cultural zeitgeist. This is a major demerit according to the Antique Sage’s 5 rules for investment grade art and antiques, and renders Thomas Kinkade’s art among the worst collectibles you can buy.

2) Hummel Figurines

These delightfully cute porcelain miniatures were inspired by the bucolic drawings of Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel – a German Catholic nun. Beginning in 1935, her sketches were reimagined as 3-dimensional porcelain figurines. Hummel figurines were very popular with U.S. military service members in Europe after World War II, who often purchased them for their loved ones back in the States.

Unfortunately, W. Goebel Porzellanfabrik, the corporate manufacturer of this pastoral kitsch, could not resist the urge to ramp up production to pad its profits. Over the course of several decades, Hummel figurines became ubiquitous, showing up for sale in places as varied as airport gift shops and Hallmark stores. Once their obsessive collector base began to age out, demand plummeted while supply remained abundant.

Today, over 90% of Hummel figurines on eBay sell for less than $100. And in all probability, they are still wildly overvalued. Avoid Hummel figurines like the plague if return on your money is important to you. They are one of the worst collectibles out there.

3) Anything from the Franklin Mint

When I say anything from the Franklin mint is a bad collectible, I mean anything! The Franklin Mint has been scamming collectors out of their hard earned money for over 50 years. Since it was first established in the mid 1960s, this fraud factory has cynically and opportunistically striven to create the most banal collectibles known to man. These have ranged from medals and coins to jewelry, dolls and die cast toys.

The Franklin Mint’s only goal is to make money. To this end, it uses its considerable marketing muscle to artificially create demand or interest in a series. It then churns these woefully subpar collectibles out until the market is saturated. Predictably, this is not a winning scenario for producing investment grade collectibles. But it does launch all Franklin Mint products onto my list of the worst collectibles ever.

4) Modern Baseball Cards

The baseball card market experienced a massive bubble from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Sports fans, speculators and pre-pubescent boys across America suddenly became obsessed with the minutiae of price movements – which were usually up – as reported by the Beckett Baseball Card Price Guide. As you can probably guess, it all came crashing down a few short years later.

But the real problem during this period was that the big four baseball card manufacturers – Topps, Upper Deck, Fleer and Donruss – used the bubble as an opportunity to make gargantuan profits. They released an ever increasing number and variety of baseball cards, some of which had special gimmicks like holograms or foil accents.

In conjunction with this huge increase in production, baseball card collectors hoarded the glut of new cards in the (false) hope that they would one day pay for college or a new car. In reality, all they ended up being was one of the worst collectibles of the modern era. Even today, the world is overrun with baseball card sets from the 1980s and later, all in near perfect condition.

Although I don’t generally advocate buying baseball cards for investment purposes, if you must collect them, at least stick to older, pre-1980s cards.

5) Modern Commemorative Stamps

Stamp collecting is a dying hobby. Unfortunately, the U.S. Postal Service, along with many other national post offices, didn’t get the memo, because they just keep churning them out. The USPS prints dozens of different types of stamps in any given year, with a large number of these being “commemorative” issues.

However, they largely commemorate contrived events and irrelevant people. For example, right now you can buy U.S. stamps commemorating the Dominican fashion designer Oscar de la Renta or the Catholic priest/president of Notre Dame University Father Theodore Hesburgh. If that doesn’t appeal to you, there is always the thoroughly corny “Have a Ball!” round baseball stamp.

Good grief! No wonder stamp collecting is dying. The issuing authorities are treating it like a profit center, which it is, at least until the last stamp collector gets snowed under by a pile of meaningless commemorative stamps and finally gives up. If rare vintage stamps are a hard sell in today’s world (and they are), then modern commemorative stamps are simply one of the worst collectibles out there.

6) Modern Commemorative Coins

The U.S. Mint took a page from the U.S. Postal Service and decided that striking millions of poorly designed, uninspiring commemorative coins was the ticket to both quick profits and a disgruntled collector base. Right now you can buy yourself a Lions Club International Centennial silver dollar or a Boys Town Centennial half-dollar for far, far more money than they will ever be worth.

If this does not appeal to you, then there is a high likelihood that you will view most of the U.S. Mint’s current product portfolio as a blatant money grab. Of course, other national mints, like the British Royal Mint or the French Monnaie de Paris, have exactly the same problem. They mint dozens of different coin issues in staggeringly large quantities (for non-circulating coins) and then somehow expect the secondary market price not to collapse. It rarely obliges them, however, making modern commemorative coins pretty terrible investments, with few exceptions.

7) Modern Comic Books

Some old comic books can be profoundly rare and incredibly valuable, like Action Comics #1 from 1938, which features the very first appearance of Superman. And then there are comic books from the modern age, with their massive print runs and tired gimmicks. These modern comics invariably have little monetary value.

For example, in 1992 DC Comics released its much heralded “Death of Superman” story arc. This evocative title was a naked ploy to tug at people emotionally, as well as get them to open up their wallets for what was sure to be a highly desirable collectible.

But DC Comics was busy churning and burning its fan base. They printed dozens of variations of this epic theme, each one intended to boost sales by appealing to legions of comic book collectors and investors. However, in the process, their cynical and aggressive sales methods more or less eviscerated the modern comic collectible scene. Even today it is easy to buy pristine examples of the overhyped “Death of Superman” comic books for just a few dollars or less.

Congratulations DC Comics. You’ve almost single-handedly placed your industry onto the Antique Sage’s top 7 worst collectibles list!

If you detect a trend in my list of the worst collectibles of all time, you are right. Modern collectibles that have been mass-produced by profit driven enterprises are almost always terrible investments. And where the term “mass-produced” used to mean tens or hundreds of thousands of copies 50 years ago, it can easily mean millions or even tens of millions today. With numbers like that, these terrible collectibles will never be worth much.

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I find vintage fountain pens to be one of the most fascinating areas of the antique market. Much like vintage mechanical wristwatches, vintage fountain pens were a relatively obscure collectible niche 25 years ago. There were a few hard-core collectors, but not a whole lot of public interest otherwise.

However, vintage fountain pens have exploded into a very hot market segment today. This shouldn’t be surprising considering the unparalleled beauty and utility of these retro writing instruments. Demand, along with prices, has inevitably skyrocketed.

While it used to be possible to cherry pick marvelous vintage pen specimens for $5, $10, or $15 at garage sales, flea markets and rummage sales, now these venues are largely picked clean of desirable examples. Today, a variety of investment quality, antique fountain pens can be found in good condition for prices ranging from $50 to $500.

However, as desirable as older fountain pens are, there is an often overlooked off-shoot of this venerable collecting category that offers even better value for your money. I’m speaking about vintage fountain pen sets. It was fairly common in the mid to late 20th century for pen manufacturers to package a fountain pen together with another, different type of writing instrument, usually a ballpoint pen or mechanical pencil.

Vintage fountain pen sets were often marketed as upscale gifts. They were promoted as the perfect luxury present for holidays, graduations, birthdays, etc. As a result, these sets were usually populated by more desirable, higher end models – with price tags to match!

Vintage fountain pen sets were also intended to appeal to people who wanted variety in their writing implements. Some customers might prefer the convenience of a ballpoint pen for travel and on-the-go usage, while a fountain pen might make sense for writing longer personal letters or business correspondence. A mechanical pencil might be favored by certain professionals who produced a lot of calculations and scratch work, like engineers, architects, and scientists.

In any case, vintage fountain pen sets are largely neglected in today’s marketplace. Few antique fountain pen collectors understand the charms of old mechanical pencils. And even fewer pen collectors are interested in vintage ballpoint pens. As a result, high quality vintage fountain pen sets can still be purchased for shockingly low prices.

There are a lot of reasons to consider investing in a vintage fountain pen set. But one of the most compelling is that they perfectly capture the zeitgeist of the mid to late 20th century. Stately fountain and ballpoint pens were omnipresent in the most pivotal events of the age, from the signing of the momentous treaty that ended World War II to the endorsement of groundbreaking legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And no successful businessman from the 1960s Mad Men era would have been caught dead without his prized pen at his side, always ready to sign a deal.

As mentioned above, vintage fountain pen sets were generally mid-range or high-end offerings. As a result, they were often constructed using the very finest materials available to manufacturers at the time. This included corrosion-resistant metals, such as stainless steel, gold-filled, sterling silver or even solid karat gold. Hard rubber, resin or dense, high quality plastic were also sometimes employed in pen sets, either in conjunction with metals or by themselves.

A factor that goes hand in hand with high quality materials is high quality construction. And quality was universally high in the mid 20th century. Vintage fountain pen sets, particularly the higher priced models, were produced to very exacting standards in the most technologically-advanced nations on earth at the time – the U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Japan. This is a far cry from the made in China syndrome that we wrestle with today in consumer products.

It is also common to find sets that are for sale with their original cases. An original case is not only a convenient storage container for a vintage pen set, but also adds to the period styling of the set. As a result, an original case significantly boosts a set’s investment desirability.

Another advantage of vintage fountain pen sets is the number of pristine, never-inked or new-old-stock examples available. These are eminently collectible pieces that are often 40, 50 or even 60 years old, and yet can sometimes still be found encased in cellophane with their original price tags attached!

But I think that the ultimate reason to invest in vintage fountain pen sets is price; they are often barely more expensive than a single vintage fountain pen by itself. And there is simply no conventional asset where a couple hundred dollars will get you so much value for your money. I’ve showcased several different vintage fountain pen sets on the Antique Sage website, including a 1960s Parker 75 flat top set, a 1950s Sheaffer Snorkel Statesman set and a mid 1950s Eversharp Ventura set.

None of these vintage fountain pen sets was more than $300. One was less than $100. Where else can you hope to buy a complete set of vintage luxury goods in its original packaging for a couple hundred dollars? It is one of those situations that you simply know cannot persist for very long. And I suspect it will not.

One day soon the supply of Mid-Century, new-old-stock vintage fountain pen sets will run out and their prices will skyrocket. Those who already purchased theirs will be sitting pretty. Everyone else will curse their bad timing. Don’t say you were never warned.

Read more thought-provoking Antique Sage investing articles here.

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Read in-depth Antique Sage investment guides here.