After watching many, many episodes of antiques roadshow, I’ve come to a conclusion about what kinds of things appreciate and become investments and what things are worthless.

Anything marketed and sold as a “collectible” is worthless after the fad has died down. People will hang on to them despite the bubble popping, in some sort of hope they’ll be valuable again someday. This guarantees they won’t become valuable because so many people have large collections and preserve them well.

The things that are actually valuable after 30+ years all have two things in common.

1. They are things that hold some sort of sentimental, cultural, or historical significance
2. They are rare. Maybe they were mass produced things that were basically commodities but no one valued them enough to preserve any. The few that are preserved (usually by a handful of unrelated individuals that may be compulsive or eccentric) become valuable because of a large group of people nostalgic for those items coinciding with scarcity. Or maybe they’re historical documents or artworks that are truly one-of-a-kind.

The things that become investments are exactly the things no one thought about collecting, but that were ubiquitous and loved enough to engender some kind of nostalgia or significance to a large group of collectors. If the demographics of the bulk of the collectors are in the 1% for some reason, then the values can get truly astronomical. But these also fluctuate in value as these rare items come into fashion to collect (or fall out of fashion). The more ephemeral or fragile in nature an item is, the more rare it is to survive for lengths of time and therefore the more value it could potentially have… things like cardboard toys from the 1920s can be incredibly valuable if they’re in great condition. Those were the cheapest toys and likely considered somewhat disposable back then. No one really valued them at the time, so very few were preserved.

All that said, anything lots of people keep as mint as possible in their boxes will likely never be as valuable as when they were initially sold as new. Especially if “collectible” was a key marketing point for it.