Lego Sets Are Better Investments Than Stocks, Bonds or Even Gold | Hacker News Reader

Lego Sets Are Better Investments Than Stocks, Bonds or Even Gold

architecturaldigest.com

27 pointsfortran7712 comments

I have no doubt of the data - but even if its gains outpaced the market returns of stocks - they have better liquidity, are lower risk, and can payout dividends.

The thing about lego sets as an investment opportunity is it's beanie-babies all over again. It's easy to end up with cheap junk that nobody wants.

Higher returns does not mean it's a "better investment".

Great, all we need is venture capital buying a billion dollars of lego...

Wait, then the market would tank and they'd dump it on the market in about 5 years, and legos would be dirt cheap for my kiddo in his prime lego years.

YES PLEASE DO THIS.

The LEGO market has extremely low liquidity. I've been trying to get rid of my substantial collection and finding trouble getting offers for even the most desirable sets. There are also lots of scammers and weirdos that make everything more difficult than it should be.

Have you looked if the prices you're asking are in line with what someone could expect to pay on Bricklink?

In fact, if you don't have a Bricklink store, it might be a good idea to make one. You might have more luck finding legitimate buyers there than if you're trying to use something like ebay/craigslist/FB.

This article could have been good if it was serious, but it's presupposing you can figure out which sets will be discontinued and therefore appreciate more than an average lego set. Apply that logic to any other investment.

Anyway I would have liked to see them space and cost for storage of the sets, and time spent to acquire enough for investment purposes, and see what someone could really do if they were going to be an 'investor in legos'

Like everything else in life, it's up to you to do your due diligence.

Besides the common basic sets like the box-of-pieces sets, every Lego set will be discontinued. I would also argue that most AFOLs will be able to reasonably judge which sets will be good investments and which ones will not be. It also used to be reasonably easy to tell if a set was going to be very popular based on how it did in the 'VIP presale' (where you can only buy the set if you're signed up for Lego's loyalty program)

But you're right about the storage. The sets that appreciate well tend to be the larger ones which necessarily means larger boxes and more storage requirements. And we're still only talking at most several hundred USD per box for the majority of sets, so 'density' of investment is pretty low.

Clearly the solution to knowing which LEGO sets to buy is to set up the equivalent of a real estate investment trust but for LEGO.

“Stocks” as in “they stock market, averaged”, sure. But compare your 1995 LEGO investment to Tesla or Amazon, and that headline becomes ridiculous. Classic case of survivorship bias, it seems to me.

(Credentials: Been investing in stocks for 20 years, and just purchased two pre-owned 1990s LEGO sets for my daughter for Christmas.)

As if Lego sets weren't already expensive enough...

I miss my garbage pail kids and my atari 5200.

wonder if lego funded the study

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