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1.  Market-Movements.com - A New Approach

 As a child, I took great delight in believing that my rather poor quality, heavily postmarked and often damaged collection of stamps was worth a given sum of money, simply because the catalogue said so.  My then pride-and-joy was a 5/- red from the first series of Seahorses and was “worth”, in those days, the princely sum of £4 – equivalent to several months’ pocket money!  The fact that my stamp was a poorly centred perfin on which the obliterator had been particularly successful, and had a corner missing, and numerous dodgy perfs, did not diminish in the least my faith in the value of my £4 stamp!  

Most collectors are not that naive, and, of course, catalogue values are for stamps in good condition.  Even so, how many times have we heard collectors who have sold their stamps saying that they have not realised their true value, or that they were worth much more?  And in how many of these cases is this simply because they greatly overestimated their true worth in the first place?

 The old adage that anything is only worth as much as the next person is prepared to pay for it is as true today as it ever was, and especially so for stamps.  What today’s buyer is prepared to pay on the open market provides the best guide to what the item is actually worth!  So why does our hobby so often quote ‘catalogue values’ when our products are traded in such large numbers on a daily basis giving us the opportunity to calculate genuine market values?  If someone had, say, shares in British Gas, how would they value them?  Ask an expert?  Look them up in a catalogue?  No, they would take the current unit trading price and multiply it by the number of shares.  And allowing for commission, they have a real market value.  So why should a traded commodity like stamps be any different? 

Stamps, of course, differ from shares in that there is a considerable variation in demand (and hence price) attributable to small variations in condition.  For example, when ordering modern unmounted mint, the product received is likely to be fairly consistent in quality.  For Victorian stamps, however, considerable premium may be attributed to such aspects as good centring, freshness of colour, size of margins (for imperforate issues), clarity of strike, condition of the gum etc, with a high quality example sometimes commanding a price several times that of a perfectly good average one.  These same aspects will affect used stamps, with the added factor of the postmark where a neat circular date stamp will command a significant premium over a smudged parcel cancellation.  With nineteenth and even early twentieth century stamps there can be a wide variation between an average condition stamp and what is often termed ‘superb used’. 

 Market-Movements is an attempt to address some of these issues by estimating the true values for stamps using dealers’ actual selling prices, and providing values for a range of conditions.  These cover unmounted mint, mounted mint, very fine used, fine used, and average used, and each term has been defined.  As stated in the Guidance Notes, defining each condition is difficult as dealers descriptions will vary, but by averaging prices across a number of dealers, the impact of such variations can be minimised. 

Even the values in Market-Movements may overestimate true value, because these are dealers selling prices, not buying prices.  Just as some shares will have a different price for buying than for selling, a dealer will not buy stamps for anything like as much as he will sell them for, else he would have no margin and no margin would soon mean no viable business! 

Arguably, the issue of value doesn’t really matter to most collectors because the joy of stamp collecting lies in far more than monetary worth.  It’s the excitement of owning pieces of history, miniature works of art.  It’s the thrill of that elusive find, and seeing the collection grow.  But at least with this new approach based on actual prices it is possible to get a realistic idea of a collection’s worth, and to be well informed about the appropriate price to pay for new purchases.  In the electronics age, calculating stamp values by this method is relatively straightforward and is, in my opinion, the most sensible method to understand the true value of stamps. 

Editor, February 2010.