In late December, I turned 44. I have been active in the antiques and collectibles trade since the age of 12. I still remember my first flea market, my first antique fair, and my first auction. In my teenage years, I was arguing that one day video games would become collectible. In the year 2020, many people in the trade will admit that I was right. When eBay premiered back in late 1995 under the name of Auction Web (the name eBay came a little later), I was an early adopter of the platform. At that time, Beanie Babies and PEZ were king, and collectors were still learning how to navigate this new electronic frontier. It was then that I began hearing about how the internet would fundamentally change the collectibles market forever. Within 10 years after the advent of eBay, most established and successful auction houses would make the transition to online bidding. Today, Heritage Auctions is one of the largest players in the business, with multiple departments and record-breaking sales. Other prominent auction houses are also online. Morphy Auctions, located out of Denver/Adamstown, Pa., has successfully made the leap to online bidding, as have international auction houses like Christies and Sothebys. In my opinion, the internet was the first successful adoption of the antiques and collectibles trade by the casual collector. Before the rise of the internet, and more importantly e-commerce, collectors were dependent upon trade shows, flea markets, and in-person bidding if they wanted to buy and sell. Today, all a collector has to do is log on. Then, in 2005, the next big advancement in the antiques and collectibles trade occurred, and very few people noticed. It was around that time that an interesting concept was born. Anybody with a digital camera and internet access could start to record video and upload that video directly to the internet to be viewed by almost anyone. The company that pioneered this technology was known as YouTube, and while at first glance YouTube is not known as a platform geared toward collectibles, in present day, a lot of collectors have started popular YouTube channels to bring attention to their treasured collectibles. This, in turn, has sparked certain collectible prices to rise and also spawned powerful social media influencers with millions of subscribers to take to the platform and announce their intentions to invest in certain collectibles. Sports cards, Pokemon cards, and even comic books have not been immune to this trend. And whether you consider this a form of market manipulation or just the power of the internet, it occurs on an almost daily basis within the trade. Today, we now have companies that exist solely to facilitate pricing data and asset trading in a lot of these popular collectible markets. Wall Street, who is not immune from cashing in on collectible trends from the past (check out the disastrous effect of the Merrill Lynch Athena Fund in the late 1980s if you dont believe me), has decided to warm up to collectible assets once again. Now nothing is immune. Todays collectors who want to act like investors can even buy fractional shares of ownership in various high-end collectibles like million dollar paintings, rare Pokemon cards, or even key high-grade vintage comic books. Investing in alternate asset classes is the new norm. It is quite possible that some of you reading this already invest in gold bullion. Younger generations are no longer attracted to gold. Now they want crypto-currency and rare graded sports cards instead. Along with these new developments we have new buzzwords in the antiques and collectibles trade. Graded collectibles are all the rage. What started out as a way to preserve coins back in the mid-1980s has now expanded to everything from sports cards to collectible game cards such as Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering, to comic books, to toys and video games. Rest assured, if it can be easily encased in plastic, or even not so easily encased in plastic, third-party grading is coming soon to your favorite new collecting category. Meanwhile, todays buzzwords in the trade combine both collecting and investing. Alternate asset investing is the newest thing, which collectibles happen to be the driving force. Now we have financial advisors doing the unthinkable. Some are advising their high net worth clients that they should not have all their money tied up in financial assets and real estate. Many of these advisors are telling their clients to invest a portion of their assets in collectibles or even crypto-currency. Yet even more and more young people are risking their financial futures on collectibles and Bitcoin, refusing to place any money at all in the financial markets. In my opinion, this is just insane. You cannot put all your money in alternate asset investments, but you can put a portion of your assets in them with varying degrees of success over the short and long term. Now the term cultural assets is the latest buzzword to hit the collecting scene. Social media influencers, certain auction houses, and companies designed to track the markets for todays hottest collectibles are now promoting it. According to one definition in the trade, a cultural asset is something that has value due to its historic and perceived importance in a specific culture. Even financial news media heavyweights like CNBC and Fox Business are not immune from this trend and are actively reporting on it. So, as I had my 44th birthday, the question I find myself asking is where do we go from here? I suppose I should consider myself lucky. Most of the younger generations operating in the antiques and collectibles trade never got to experience the trade before the development of the internet, and I consider that to be sad. Life was truly different back then. People mattered. Relationships mattered. Today it is just numbers on a computer screen and impersonal bidding, and should you win that bid, a package comes in the mail with your item. It truly can be a very impersonal experience, to say the least. Is this really where we want the antiques and collectibles trade to be as we enter the year 2021? Does it even matter? Maybe I am just starting to actually get old and this is what it sounds like when a 40-plus collector laments what the trade was like when we were young and what it has become. But one thing is for sure, there isnt any going back now. So where do we go from here? In a word, forward! Shawn Surmick has been an avid collector since the age of 12. He currently resides in his hometown of Boyertown, Pa., and is a passionate collector of antiques and collectibles. His articles focus on various topics affecting the marketplace.