Philatelic investment
Philatelic investment was popular during the 1970s but then fell out of favour following a speculative bubble and prices of rare stamps took many years to recover.
[1] Investing in rare stamps requires a high degree of expertise and can be very risky for the novice.
The increasing age of the population in western countries has also been credited with a resurgence in interest in stamps.
When you buy on a retail basis, you have to overcome the profit margins the dealer has built into his selling price, plus VAT.
Very subtle differences in colour, perforation, overprinting, and the like may be what differentiates a valuable stamp from a common one.
Stamps typically included in an investment portfolio will be rare and priced in the thousands of dollars or pounds but they will probably not be the greatest rarities as those unique items are typically sold at public auctions and may reach prices approaching or exceeding $1 million US.
Some collectors and investors also try to anticipate future trends and buy low now, this however, is difficult to get right and may take a long time to pay off.
No long term indices like the Dow Jones or FTSE Index exist, although some figures have been compiled by Stanley Gibbons and Stamp Magazine in the UK.
In Ireland in the 1950s, Paul Singer, a Bratislavian Doctor of Philosophy, ran a Ponzi scheme under the name Shanahan Stamp Auctions.
The scheme collapsed when a mysterious robbery took place at the company's office on 9 May 1959, the eve of a major auction, when more than £300,000 worth of stamps went missing.
[15][16] In the 1970s, the bursting of a speculative bubble left investors unable to realise their investment at the price they had paid.
[12] In 2006, two Spanish firms Afinsa and Forum Filatelico collapsed and left around 350,000 investors with investments worth as little as 10% of the price they had paid.
[14][17][18] In November 2017 it was announced that Stanley Gibbons' stamp investment subsidiary in Guernsey had been placed in administration.
