Back in the 1990s, a mentor of mine in the antiques and collectibles trade would frequently lament that value is all that anyone cares about. In 2024, truer words have yet to be spoken. I have had more than one dealer tell me that they dont think anyone even cares about the history of the item. Tune into any episode of Pawn Stars, and you can see a lot of would-be sellers eyes glaze over while they have to sit through a monologue about the history of an item they just want to sell for the right amount of cash. Some of these would-be sellers dont even care about what the expert has to say about their item, just as long as it is worth more cash than they originally hoped to get for it. At its core, this is understandable. Value does matter in the antiques and collectibles, and as much as I hate to admit this, in some cases, it matters more than the history of the objects themselves. Case in point, I tend to think that the history of a 1933 $20 Double Eagle gold coin is more important than the history of a copy of Action Comics #1, which featured the first appearance of Superman. The reason for this is simple, the 1933 $20 gold coin was never officially put into circulation by the U.S. Mint, and as a result only 13 known examples exist. This is in sharp contrast to a copy of Action Comics #1, which was readily available at newsstands back when it was first published in 1938, but almost no one thought to save it as a potentially valuable collectible. Today, both the 1933 $20 gold coin and a copy of Action Comics #1 can each be considered rare, and both are in demand. However, the history of the gold coin is much more interesting simply because it was never put into circulation and was never meant to be owned by the general public. The monetary value of each of these items reflects this very point. The 1933 gold coin previously sold for close to $20 million dollars at auction and a high grade copy of Action Comics #1 just recently sold for $6 million dollars. This does add credence that the history of the object does matter when monetary value is being assessed, but this does not answer the basic question as to what actually constitutes value? In 1988, literary critic and author Barbara Hernstein Smith decided to answer this fundamental question in her now classic book titled, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Without getting into a deep analysis of this book, which is well worth reading, in my opinion, Ill use Wikipedias simple summary of the book to get this conversation going: Smith argues that value is an effect of continuously changing and interacting valuables. Smith also argues that value is a product of a system, more specifically, an economic system. With that said and to be fair to the author, this is a simplistic analysis of the book. What makes Contingencies of Value a worthy read isnt this concise conclusion, it is how Smith manages to elegantly portray the definition of value as something both abstract and logical that is ever changing. It is also, these same changing variables that make an investment in the abstract (i.e. any investment in an antique or collectible) not logical over the long term. Sure, today in 2024, we can agree that a 1933 gold coin and a copy of Action Comics #1 are very valuable and have a lot of demand that attributes to this value. But now lets go into the future 100 years. In 2124, are both of these artifacts going to be just as valuable as they are now? How about 500 years from now? In 2524, will people still care about Superman? Unfortunately, my crystal ball is getting extremely cloudy, but if I was a betting man, I would choose the 1933 gold coin over the copy of Action Comics #1. However, both of these artifacts are simply items that we as a society choose to value at present time for what could be considered enormous amounts of money. Neither the coin nor the comic provides any underlying cash flows to the owner of these items. Collectibles, or even antiques for that matter, have no value without cultural relevance or at the very least, demand. This is what makes investing in antiques and collectibles so inherently risky over the long term, and this is something that a lot of collectors and speculators operating in these markets get wrong. It is very easy to predict the desirability of an item over the next six months or even the next six years; however, trying to predict what will be collected and sought after 16 years from now or 60 years from now is no easy task. Even the experts get it wrong. Just because something has a lot of value and is in demand now does not mean this demand will increase over the coming years. The worth of anything is consistently changing and never constant. Unfortunately, some in the trade think that the value of even the most desirable objects only continues to increase year after year, not realizing the abstract variables that define this value. This is why few experts in the antiques and collectibles trade can consistently beat the returns of a basic S & P 500 index fund over the long term by choosing a simple index of fixed antiques and collectibles to compete against it. This is also one reason why collectible indexes like the PCGS 3000 (an index of rare coins) are completely meaningless over the long term. If anyone ever claims they have created the perfect index to track the value of a group of collectibles, please adhere to the advice given in the Tom Hanks movie Forest Gump, and run, Forest, run! Furthermore, valuing an antique and collectible is not the same as valuing a financial asset like a stock or a bond. There are real business and financial metrics we can use to assess the health of a business, like projected sales, inventory turnover, cash flows, and return on investment. At its core, an antique or collectible is abstract and has none of these same properties. As a result, value is much more abstract than logical when it applies to the antiques and collectibles trade, simply because we are dealing with emotional (not logical) assets. And some of these emotional assets, much like Action Comics #1, have a lot of nostalgia contained within them. This reminds me what another mentor of mine in the trade once told me about nostalgia. He said, Nostalgia is the most valuable commodity of all. If that is the case then how can we ever accurately value an item when the people paying for these same items are attempting to apply logic to the abstract (i.e. their emotions)? Without going any further down this proverbial rabbit hole, how about this: lets consider the value of our beloved artifacts to simply be whatever someone is willing to pay for them at a set point in time. And should someone come knocking with an offer that is higher than what we paid for the item in question, we probably should consider taking it. Now hows that for a realistic definition of value? 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.