Back from Vacation

Total Trade Count: 207,243
Total Foil Count: 3,750

Big news!  
The wife is going to be heading to a city wide garage sale tomorrow and there was one seller that was promoting the Magic the Gathering cards for sale.  She will be give me a call, and we can do a Facetime to see if it is worth it for me to put in an offer on what might be there, but considering that I am trying to get rid of all my bulk I doubt I will put in an offer.  Ok, maybe if they had "the stuff" and were selling cheap I will think about it.

I will not be going because it is her Mother's Day gift.  Every year she goes with her sisters and they drink and shop all day long.  So while she does that I will be hanging out with the kiddo, having our own little party.

Update
So yeah, before I left for vacation I tried to get a Mythic Edition: WAR booster box and failed, and my last post I went on a long rant about chasing the chase cards was really destroying my internal soul, so I was no longer buying new products.  Well now that I am rested and thinking straight, I am going to update my statement to I am no longer going to go after the chase cards.

That means I am only going to get the cards I will play with, and since I am not a foil player I am just going to be skipping out on all that crap.  I don't care about Judge promos, or Masterpieces, or Mythic Edition releases.  I might pick up a Mythic Edition booster box after the release, but it will not be a priority.  The only thing I care about are the Standard Sets and my playsets for the collection.

I will be finishing up the Box Topper set, and be done with it.  Now, I might try and pick up the cards that I enjoy like the Judge Promo of Teferi's Protection, but it is no longer a collection goal just like it was never a collection goal to get foil sets of anything, well except that Urza's Legacy set because I was so close at the time.

Stocks!
I love investing.  I have been investing into Stock, Bonds, ETFs, Index Funds, and many other financial vehicles since I could earn a paycheck.  I think I know how to see value in something, and put a little extra cash into it so that I can try and make a profit.  With most of my investing I usually use those gains to increase my positions into that venue, and that just means that I roll those profits right back into my financial investing.

I very rarely take profits from one investment to put it into something else, and what I mean by that is I will not sell a stock to buy a Magic card and in the like I will never sell a Magic card to buy a stock.  This way I can keep each investment in separate buckets and if there is a down turn, it will not effect the other bucket.  For instance, if we hit a lull in the stock market I will not see a down turn in my ability to purchase Magic cards.

I know that some people take their investing profits and invest them into different asset classes, but I am much more of a buy and hold guy.  What does that mean?  Well I have been investing for a very long time, and in those over years I was able to finally figure out how I want to invest.  I would say that this was the most important decision that I made in my investing career.

I tried to do the buy low and sell high, but I always hated waiting around for a stock price to go up so that I could sell.  It just never made any sense to me.  Like every beginning investor, I dabbled in penny stocks for a very short time with buying a small amount in a single stock, and in that short time I lost it all and moved on, never turning back to that waste of time.  I also did the Mutual Fund thing for a bit, but then moved into the way I invest now.

In the mid 2000's I started to think about how wealthy people actually live.  They sure did not work to make salaries to elevate themselves to the lifestyles they had, and a lot of them did not work at all.  How in the world did they make a living to support their lifestyles?  Enter the passive income strategy.  I picked up some books on dividend investing and started to really dig in to how I can make the money I already made, make me more money by doing nothing.

In the simplest terms, I buy shares of stock that pay out a dividend and then I take that dividend to buy more of the stock that just paid that dividend, so my position grows exponentially.  So hopefully by the time I want to retire I have a large amount of stocks that will pay me a dividend for free every year, and instead of buying more stock with those dividends, I will just cash them out and live off that money.

It is a buy and hold strategy, and I really do not need to pay too much attention to the market as long as I get that dividend payment.  I just find a company I really like that pays a dividend, buy some shares and put it into DRIP mode (Dividend ReInvestment Plan).

That is also how I deal with Magic the Gathering cards.  I might do some speculation on cards that I think will go up later on, but that is only so that I can make a profit to buy more cards.  99% of my collecting is to buy and hold, and then watch as my entire collection goes up in price.  I do not worry about the spikes in card value because I already have my playset and I can build my decks out of those cards.  Honestly, I never have to go out and try and pick up cards for a deck while worrying about a price spike.

In most cases, when there is a price spike I will go out and pick up some more of that card because I follow my logic that I use with stocks, "Keep buying your winners".  If you own a stock and it is doing really well then I try and pick up more.  In most cases, a company that is doing really well will do well in the future, so why would I not want to own more.

But really, if I own everything then I get to sit in the back ground and know that I own everything that will be going up or down.

Honestly, the only thing that I keep away from are the newest cards.  Unless I have a Standard deck that I want to play, I will no longer pick up Standard cards while they are in Standard.  There is always an inflated price to those cards while they are Standard legal, and once they rotate out you will see that price drop.  Through the years, I have found that trying to predict what is going to do well in Standard is never a winning battle.  I would really just wait until the card prices drop after rotation and then pick everything up at a much cheaper price.

Just an example, Kaladesh on release was close to $425 per set, that is close to $1300 for a playset.  And right now it is over 6 months since they rotated out and I can pick up a playset of Kaladesh for a little less than $600.  That is a $700 swing that can be avoided if you are just patient.  To me, that means I can get everything I wanted at a hugely discounted rate if I just stay away from Standard, and since I am an EDH player it makes that really easy.

This way I can keep collecting my playsets at a cheaper price to own cost, and I can be involved in the price spikes that usually occur 3 years after the set has rotated out.  There are some sets that keep going down after rotation, but that is only another reason to wait for rotation to occur before you pick up those sets.

It was a bit of a stretch to get there talking about stocks and how I buy Magic cards, but I think I got there.  I hope I can keep merging my investing life with my MTG blog, and explain my experiences with both, and it is worth something to someone.  Maybe my son will be reading this later on in life, and get some value out of it.

This CardSphere trade finally came in.  Not sure why this trader sent me a $0.50 card while paying $0.52 for postage, but I am thankful!

Here is another Guild Kit land and a Player Promo!

I ended up stopping up at my FLGS and picked up my Bundles I pre-ordered.  I am not sure when I am going to open this up, or if I will open it up at all, but we will see.

Ok so I grabbed these because I feel like this will be a good card to pick up.  I think I will be getting some more of these to get 2 playsets, and I might spec on these a bit.

Being an EDH player, I just had to snag these.  I think this will go a lot higher than $4, which is the price I paid for these.  Just being able to Proliferate for 4 and a tap, I just see value on this one.

And I just said fuck it and picked up these lands before rotation occurs.  I know that the price of these lands do go down after rotation, but I just wanted to pick these up now.  The price on these lands always rebounds after rotation, so it is not a loss for me.  It is just not making much of a gain, but since I am just going to be holding these, and I am a land whore, I am good with paying the prices I am paying for them.