John Apfelbaum

There are both advantages and disadvantages to stamp investing. Many of the disadvantages are not readily apparent, so they will be discussed first.   Stamps are perishable: After all, they are made of paper. And unlike stock certificates, which are also engravings on paper, stamps do not represent or give title to an item of value. […]

Stamps could be a disorderly market: Because stamps have no intrinsic value other than their face value, which is usually quite negligible, there is a risk in an economic downturn of having a commodity for which there is no buyer. This is mentioned as it is a fear of investors, although it has never actually happened.

All the desire in the world will not get you very far in stamp investing without the knowledge to go with it. And unfortunately, as with every field, there is no easy way to obtain knowledge. But there a few shortcuts.   Beware of price shopping. Price shopping is an excellent way of saving money

Frederick Small was, like many others, a stamp collector during his childhood in Australia. But when he went off to fight in World War I, his parents gave his collection away during some general house cleaning. To Small, it was no matter; the collection was virtually worthless. As an adult, Small had no interest in

Rare stamps are truly rare: On an average day, 250,000 shares of Boeing are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, which represents about $10 million changing hands on a single day’s trade of a single stock. Ten million dollars placed in the stock or bond markets means very little, but in the rare stamp market,

Financial theory, much like political or military theory, evolves over time. The past is usually quite clear, but the future is exceedingly difficult to hypothesize about, let alone predict. All of us are so involved in the current investment strategies that few are able to step away for long enough to see how the economy

Christian missionaries probably had more success in Hawaii than anywhere else in the world. The first missionaries came to the islands in 1820, and by 1825, the Hawaiian king recognized the ten commandments as the basis of his legal system. Soon the Hawaiian language was formulated as a written discipline by the missionaries, and as

In 1847, Mauritius was the fifth country in the world to issue stamps. The British had taken over the island only thirty-seven years before, in 1810, largely as a result of the fact that the French had used the island as a base to interrupt British shipments to and from India during wartime. The population

In April of 1980 the unique One Cent Magenta sold at auction for $935,000 ($850,000 plus 10 percent buyer’s commission). The first price that it traded for between philatelists was 6 shillings or about 50 cents. And the man who bought the stamp for that price only did so because the seller was a young