Investing In Lego Bricks For Fun But Mostly Profit 98
First time accepted submitter theideabulb writes "Just as stock investors have portfolios of all different sorts of stocks, Lego investors hold massive collections of Lego sets and can make annual profits that beat stocks. This article is a looking into the world of the little plastic brick that makes money for LEGO fans and a website that helps track peoples' collections to help them track their profits."
Re:High risk, low return (Score:2, Informative)
So were comic books and trading cards. Both existed a long time before they had their collector bubbles, and now the collector markets for both are almost dead. Even though both comics and cards continue to exist, they are worth almost nothing as short term collectables. As long term (like 50-100 years) they may increase in value.
Re:Um ... excuse me ... (Score:5, Informative)
I think Lego is onto this. After all, if you go to their website and check out the sets they are selling now, they mark certain ones as "Exclusive" or "Hard to find". Also, most sets are sold for 2 to 2.5 years, and if they are made again they are different. It does seem that they are feeding this part of the market purposefully.
I've been collecting Star Wars sets since the big Millennium Falcon came out a few years back. I'm buying mainly OT sets and have them on display, I'm not worried about resale. In the time I've been collection I've seen two different X-Wing sets produced, and I know there was an earlier one, also one of the earlier sets was sold in two kits, one standard, one wrecked on Dagobah. Each of these sets is different, and comes with different mini-figures.
There's also been 3 or more Slave 1 sets, with one of those being Jango's. I believe the main difference between that and the other was just color. Naturally anything involving Boba goes up in value quickly, so I only own the one that was released recently.
Mini-figures is a key marker of value. Some people buy the sets, and then sell the sets and the figures separately on e-bay. It's a good way to pick up extra sets if you aren't worry about collectability and value.
A few years back Lego started producing a line of very nice modular town buildings that snap together to form a long European city style street. These are all about 3 stories, come with lots of little extras and several figures, and retail for around $200 each. One of the early ones, and this is only maybe 6 or 7 years old, now goes for about $1,000 on ebay. I've read a post from someone at Lego that says this very desirable set will never be produced again, and one reason is that the molds for some of the doors/windows doesn't exist anymore. So doing something like that certainly makes it seem like they are helping inflate the value of the sets. They even publish books detailing all the Star Wars mini-figures. Turns out they make minor changes set-to-set for even the major characters. I don't think the books mentions any value, but it's obvious the purpose is to help collectors track which figures they have.