General Philately

Auction trends in 2020 and a fabulous collection of Venezuela comes to market

Like so many industries around us, the philatelic auction business has gone into hibernation mode.

The inability for people to gather means the physical perusing of auction lots is not going to happen for a good while yet. Most of the major houses have postponed their spring sales until later in the year. Some of the revised dates look hugely ambitious to me.

I’m not convinced that the pandemic is going to rapidly disappear and things are going to get back to normal all that quickly…

And even when lockdowns are universally lifted, are – let us be honest – predominantly older men going to want to congregate en masse in the close confines of an auction environment?

Possibly not until a freely available vaccine gives one the confidence to mingle with impunity.

Online auctions take centre stage in 2020

Fortunately, we have the benefit of online bidding to fall back on and unless healthy cash balances and patient sellers allow it, I can see many of 2020’s auctions ending up being online only affairs.

Many houses had juicy inventories backed up for the now postponed London 2020 event and sellers will have been waiting patiently, so the pressure will be on from some to either go to market online only or pull their lots for another day, farther into the future.

With good descriptions and clear images, there is no reason why singles and sets shouldn’t do just as well as if the auction were still live.

Collections though, are going to demand more of the auction house.

Buying blind on a collection is always going to be a gamble. This then puts much more emphasis on photographs and spending the time to create many more images for album sales.

More work for the auction house but future sellers are going to be keen to align with auctioneers that can show off their collections in the best light over an internet connection.

High ticket Venezuela at Spink

Interestingly, Spink have bucked the trend by not postponing and have a phenomenal holding of Venezuela coming to market on 29th April (The “Lugano” Collection).

The last meaningful sale of Venezuela we’ve seen was the Brack auction of 2016. However, this ‘behind closed doors’ sale is solely focused on the 1859-62 first issue. It contains many of the key items of early Venezuelan philately and will need very deep pockets for the high ticket rarities.

Aggregated bid estimates come in at $800,000 plus – and that’s the low estimate. Star billing goes to the 1859 Medio Real Red Error of Colour, billed as ‘The Most Important Item of Venezuela Philately’ at a low estimate of €200,000.

An online only sale of early Venezuela that nets over one million dollars? Let’s see!

Byerley and Moorhouse auctions postponed

Two important postponed sales to keep an eye on…

Firstly, Part II of the vast Bill Byerley collection of Nicaragua will be offered by Harmers on June 16th. Only eight weeks away so watch to see whether this doesn’t get another postponement.

Secondly, the third part of the late Brian Moorhouse’s dealer stock is being auctioned by Corinphila; now delayed until early September. No doubt this will contain a smorgasbord of Latin American delights from across the continent.

In the meanwhile, as the world self-isolates and gorges on screen time, perhaps philately may be reinvigorated by a house bound, inquisitive audience with a newly found desire to engage with the world through those little bits of coloured paper.

eBay and Noble Spirit launch online database with over 200 million price transactions

We’re now used to most facets of our lives being ‘disrupted’ by the advent of the internet. There are few business sectors that have not had to adjust or reinvent their business models to stay ahead of the game in today’s online world.

The niche world of stamp catalogue publishing has remained relatively untouched.

Until now.

eBay has licenced its entire archived database of stamp transactions: over 200 million sales dating back to 2004. This is then supplemented with new sales figures, as they occur, building a vast repository of transactional stamp data across both auction and ‘Buy It Now’ categories.

This huge dataset has had a simple, searchable front-end wrapped around it to enable you to identify the selling price of any stamp sold on the website over the past fifteen years. Noble Spirit, an eBay collectibles dealer, has negotiated the deal and set up a subsidiary company to manage the initiative.

Collectors and dealers now have the ability to search for any stamp and identify every example ever sold on the site, enabling a quick understanding of what any given stamp is likely to be worth if sold online.

And (for now) its free to use.

It’s a huge leap forward in the transparency of stamp values and is going to force catalogue publishers to take a long, hard look at how they reach their valuations (are you listening Stanley Gibbons?).

A superb resource but not perfect

That said, the data is not infallible and you are going to have to come to your own conclusions around the worth of any given stamp. Let’s say I’m looking for Brazil Scott 78. A search for Brazil 78 gives me 698 records to choose from at the time of writing. There are plenty of entries showing the stamp I’m after but quite a few are irrelevant. If I’m wanting an unmounted mint example, I must then qualify further using the search term unmounted. Or should that be MNH? Or UMM?

And if I want the full story, I need to know that a Scott 78 = Michel 37  = Yvert 47 = SG67, and so on.

You get the picture. You’re going to need to be inventive.

Naysayers will also counter that eBay listings will show examples of everything from the perfectly centred, post office fresh candidate through to dog-eared, thinned, mint-no-gum examples and all points in between. And that’s before you start considering the the reperfs, the regums, the forgeries etc.

But this database has one huge advantage: critical mass. Taking my Brazil Scott 78 example above, even if I discount 50% of the entries with having insufficient detail, that still leaves me with 350 records to choose from. And if I just search for ‘used’ and end up with 100 examples that have sold between $20-$30…well, that’s probably the market price for that stamp.

Valuable search capabilities for online sellers

Dealers and online sellers will find numerous ways to interrogate the data to their benefit. For example:

Items without catalogue prices. Say you want to sell a plate proof and have no idea how to price it. Trawl the database and find out what previous examples have sold for in the past.

Stamps with very few transactions listed. If you find that the stamp you wish to sell has only appeared once or twice on eBay over the past fifteen years, you might assume that asking full catalogue (or more) would be a wise strategy.

Stamps considered undervalued. Over valuations in stamp catalogues are commonplace but the opposite is also true in numerous cases. Why sell a stamp catalogued at $5 for a similar price when the data tells you that collectors have happily bid up to $25 in the past?

Useful for ‘investors’?

Noble Spirit are promoting Stamp Market Index as a tool for investors, with an ability to “reference index projections to shape investment decisions” (huh?).

I’m not so sure.

Yes, there are numerous examples of high value items having been sold on eBay. But it’s a very small percentage of the overall volume of transactions. eBay excels in the low to mid-range stuff. But high ticket items and material that one might call ‘investment grade’ are still very much dominated by the traditional auction houses.

And I don’t see that situation changing anytime soon.

Now if Stamp Market Index were to blend eBay’s data with the collective historical realisations from the Stamp Auction Network…well, I’d probably be more convinced of its suitability as a tool for aspiring investors (whoever they might be).

Where does this leave Scott, Michel, Gibbons and Yvert?

So will you continue to use the prices in your catalogue as a guide or will you use this new source of actual sales data? It’s inevitably going to ask collectors to question whether they need to update their catalogues once again or whether they choose to rely on this new online tool instead.

Ironically, for the catalogue publishers, they’ve just been presented with more pricing data than their editorial teams will ever be able to handle. But given the resource, catalogue publishers can now (theoretically) get closer to accurate pricing than ever before.

And here lies a somewhat ethical quandary.

How will we all use this new resource? By searching using the proprietary numbering systems of the catalogue publishers. And what do they get out of this? Nada, zilch, nothing…as far as I can tell.

Is that fair? Is this a philatelic leap forward or will lost revenue to catalogue publishers put their businesses at risk?

And will we now start to treat eBay sales data as the true worth of a stamp, rather than simply the price a collector selling his duplicates happened to get at 3.00am on a Tuesday morning?

As to the future, I’d bet on seeing more development of the data. A little AI (artificial intelligence) interrogation, cleaning up the outliers and creating structured search fields for often used terms would create a dynamic pricing tool that the incumbent publishers would find hard to follow.

As they say, watch this space…

What do you think…?

Try Stamp Market Index out for yourself at www.stampmarketindex.com