I often find myself coming late to the party. By the time I’ve heard about an interesting collectible, they’re already sold out in stores and climbing on the secondary market.
What resources are available to find out when and where limited editions are being sold?
I wander around stores once in a while, and there’s really no way to tell inside the store that something might only have a run of 10,000.
For the given category of collectible, you’d need to find the website(s) that serve that group of collectors. For books - first/limited editions, collectibles and just plain used - www.bookfinder.com is the meta-engine many folks use…
I did a search on limited edition collectibles and found this site. Don’t know jack about them but I’m interested in coins so I looked to see what they had listed and seems that they had a few recent listings so it might be worth looking at.
Maybe like **wordman **says, if you could narrow it down to some identifiable categories it would be easier.
Are you interested mostly in books? If so, then visit the publishers’ websites and get on their mailing lists.
For example, if you’re collecting fantasy and horror, then Cemetery Dance and Subterranean Press would be good starting points.
Sounds like we’re assuming the OP likes books, which’d make the answers easier. But when I hear “collectibles”, I think more quirky. Anime action figures, hand-painted ceramic unicorns, commemorative Swamps of Peoria County plates…
Hey, Superhal, what kind of “collectibles” are you talking about?
(Free advice from a potential hoarder: if it’s anything that’d clutter up your house and need dusting, I vote against buying more than one)
If there is a list of things to collect, that type of thing is not worth collecting. If you need a list you are a mark, not a player.
Ooh, and the second you collect them, they’re “collectibles”, and not as ‘virgin’ as a category.
So you must find things no one has even thought about collecting…
Hey, everyone likes snot, and everyone just loves Michael J. Fox…
ergo…
Anything. I usually go by average number vs limited runs. For US coins, that generally means a 10k-50k series, maybe 200k if it’s a popular item, as the average coin is made in the billions. For football cards, a run of 32 or less.
But, you get diminishing returns. If something is made in a run of 5, then it’s probably priced out of my budget right off the bat. A run of 200 of something seems about right, but again it really depends on what the average run is.
Have you found that ultra low mintages really turn out to be worth it? I’ve never really looked much beyond what the US Mint offers but I was looking at some of the things at the Royal Canadian Mint that were minted in a few hundred. I may not have done the math correctly after working out karats and converting but it seemed like they were charging at least double the spot price.
The US mint charges a pretty steep premium - right now it looks like around 25% over spot. But that’s for proofs although in the 10’s of thousands, not hundreds. One would think that would automatically make them worth it, but then again, if there’s not much of a demand, it doesn’t matter. Plus the CA Mint had page after page after page of coins. Even if it’s a quality product in limited runs, how do they not saturate the market?