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:This is basically a pump and dump scheme now... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure that it will work incredibly well for Lego for quite a while yet. They've found a way to increase sales.
The only question is as to whether Lego will go the way of the Beanie Babies.
Thankfully, for the rest of us, all we have to sit back and laugh until the bubble bursts, and we're able to buy mint sets cheaply in a few years time.
Re:Um ... excuse me ... (Score:5, Interesting)
they're selling the idea that legos are something you can put your money into and get profit a year later from, further "And that's not an anomaly. Lego bricks, have become lucrative investments due to a confluence of bullish factors. Driving the market is the strong underlying demand for Lego bricks and sets. The toys are craved by older consumers, who now have their own money to spent on the sets rather than waiting for a birthday gift. "
I hope Lego hasn't caught onto this yet. This attitude is one of the things that ruined comic books in the 90s. Publishers actually started creating comics as investment vehicles. Instead of putting an interesting story into a character's regular book, they would come up with a gimmick storyline and concoct some way to make it a #1 issue. Then they would print six different versions of #1 with a different cover on each. Some of the covers would be rarer than others. The main difference would be that they were stamped with holographic foil or some other printing gimmick -- or even more often, the variant covers were drawn by artists who were way more popular than the one who actually drew the story.
The problem with all of this, naturally, is that it meant these #1 issues were printed in massive supply. In many cases, owing to all the variant versions, there were far more of them printed than there was actual demand. Because, after all, there was a relatively small window to convince collectors to buy any particular #1 issue, given that there would be five more coming out the following month. Not surprisingly, before the end of the 90s the market had pretty much collapsed.
I remember standing in a comic book store around 1998 and a guy called up wanting to sell his comic book collection. He began rattling off all of the "interesting" and "collectible" comics in his set. The store owner cut him off. "Yeah ... yeah," he said, "Tell me this: What do they weigh? I'll give you a buck a pound for them."