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WHEN I WAS NINE years old, I managed a diversified portfolio—and yet I knew nothing of stocks and bonds. My primary asset classes matched those of my peers: coins, baseball cards and stamps.
Rather than a brokerage firm, we had the Koin Korner, a fairly large store in our nearby shopping mall that sold coins, stamps and a few other collectibles. And instead of following the gyrations of the stock market in The Wall Street Journal, I regularly consulted the annual Red Book by R.S. Yeoman to obtain the current prices for collectible coins, which were the mainstay of my portfolio.
Every time my parents took me to the mall, I made a beeline to the Koin Korner to gaze at the treasures on display in the store’s glass cases. When I had a little money, I loved to sort through the Koin Korner’s bins of loose Buffalo nickels, Liberty Head nickels, Mercury dimes and Barber dimes. Occasionally, I’d find an undervalued bargain, like the time I paid 75 cents for a 1913-S Barber-style dime worth $13. That was a major investment win in those days.
Baseball cards were collected primarily for fun and because of interest in the game. Older cards were highly prized. In my era, Willie Mays and especially the elusive Mickey Mantle cards were particularly sought after. Eventually, my friends and I realized that some well-maintained older cards could have significant value. In those days, prices weren’t as accessible for baseball cards as they were for coins. And, to be honest, most of the cards circulating among my friends weren’t exactly in mint condition.
The status associated with a good baseball card collection was much higher than the status for owning a good coin or stamp collection. One friend, Richard, received a treasure trove of baseball cards ranging from the late 1950s to the late 1960s from his grandmother. He became an instant celebrity among the neighborhood kids. His bedroom was a mecca where wide-eyed boys like me would salivate over a collection that, to us, was unattainable.
Around age 11, I started getting a little bored with my baseball card collection. Another friend and I decided to start our own mail-order business. He convinced me to mix my card collection in with his, so our inventory would all be in one place. Of course, a couple of days later the idea of a mail-order business seemed absurd, but now he had all my cards.
He gave me a few silver quarters and half-dollars to compensate me for the loss of my cards. It was a pretty sweet deal for him. Upon reflection, I realized I was the victim of a well-executed swindle. I built up another collection of baseball cards after that catastrophic loss, but it wasn’t the same. Neither was my friendship with my ex-business partner.
Stamps were the most speculative of the asset classes. Interest wasn’t as strong as it was for coins and baseball cards. Postage stamps were, after all, merely pieces of thin paper. Stamps would be worthless when the economy crashed, an eventuality we discussed even as kids, no doubt influenced by growing up in the turbulent 1970s. In a worst-case economic scenario, you could still spend your coins. The ones with silver might even continue to command a premium. But despite the shaky investment prospects for stamps, I enjoyed collecting them and filling the spots in my album.
Even as a youth, I was not very good at timing the market. In summer 1979, I traded a small pile of my best baseball cards to a local collectibles dealer for an equivalent amount of silver coins. Silver was selling for around $10 an ounce. The total value of this high-stakes transaction was about $100.
Although silver briefly hit $50 an ounce several months later, thanks to market manipulation by the Hunt brothers, I didn’t profit as I was in silver for the long haul. Adjusting for inflation, the silver I obtained in 1979, and have held ever since, has lost about half of its value. Meanwhile, the value of the cards I handed over to the store has probably increased by a factor of five or 10.
My stamp collection sits in a box in a closet. It’s probably worthless, with or without the much-ballyhooed economic collapse. I saved my baseball cards to pass on to my son, but he and his friends were far more interested in Pokemon cards. They sit in a shoebox in the same closet as the stamps. A few of my cards may have some value, but not much. My son’s Pokemon card collection is probably worth far more.
The coin collection of my youth is also gathering dust. It’s not a particularly valuable collection and never will be. These relics from investments made in a simpler era may not be worth many dollars. They do, however, pay out periodic dividends in the currency of fond memories.
Ken Cutler lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has worked as an electrical engineer in the nuclear power industry for more than 38 years. There, he has become an informal financial advisor for many of his coworkers. Ken is involved in his church, enjoys traveling and hiking with his wife Lisa, is a shortwave radio hobbyist, and has a soft spot for cats and dogs. Check out Ken’s earlier articles.
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Fond memories but also early lessons learned and interest in making money. I joined a 7th grade coin club at school in 1961 and began sorting through rolls of coins my father would get from our bank. Came across a 1914D Lincoln penny that I sold to the teacher who ran the coin club for $60. That caught my father’s attention and led to a decades long interest for both of us.
Good story. That was quite a find. Adjusted for inflation, that penny was worth over $600. No wonder it caught your dad’s attention.
My first investment was tropical fish. I got the brainstorm at 12 that I would raise guppies and a few other fish and sell them to pet stores. Who knew the parents would eat the profits?
That’s one I never tried. I kept tropical fish in a fish bowl…that didn’t work out too well, except for a blue gourami that must have had extraordinary survival genes.