Define strong value -
If you mean a $100 knife becoming a $500 knife outside of a small group of collectors who basically move knives among themselves (meaning the investment washes because you use the profit to buy the other guy's now inflated knives), I doubt you'll see any significant "investment performance" out of any production knives on brand name alone. Maybe you'll get lucky and someone famous will use a particular, relatively limited production knife to kill themselves (or their ex-wife and her boyfriend...), creating a freakish fascination demand, but you can't predict (or desire) such things.
If you mean a $50 knife turning into a $65 knife, which is a better than 25% return - but you'd need to buy by the case to clear money worth accounting for - I'd go with the old favorites, like Case, because the market is so big that the knives will always be liquid. As I state below, you'll need all those buyers to make any substantial profit!
I think that one of the key factors in the "investment quality" of collectibles has to be exclusivity. How can you look for exclusivity when thousands of the same item are cranked out annually, especially when one-of-a-kind knives are readily available?
True, the "price of admission" is lower in collecting production knives, but the penalty for the low cost of entry is going to be low returns. Think about the time, effort, and expense of selling the 1,000 production knives to make a modest $15,000 gross profit. Over a year, that's 20 knives a week - for a private collector, it's just not worth it!
I collect Spydercos because I like them. Even for NIB, low-numbered, hard to get Spyders, I've never been able to make a profit that would buy me lunch.
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AKTI Member #A000832
"Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes, the bear eats you."
[This message has been edited by Brian_Turner (edited 06-27-2000).]
