FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[Tracy]

I am enjoying the discussion too, and I applaud absolutely everybody in this Forum for their interest and enjoyment in collecting minerals. In my own defense I never thought of my postings as heated, was simply trying to tone down some of the negativity and judgmentalism that was starting to pop up in the conversation. Having tried to make my points with at least partial success, I will go back to reading and learning now.

[Farlang]

Les,

I like your last posting, as opposed to previous ones. About the top 100: couldn't agree more, besides, aside from satisfying someone's ego, and entering "politics" it really doesn't make much sense to decide which piece is the best. But then again.. I have never liked the Mona Lisa, even after attending hour-long lectures on the painting.

I agree with you about Tucson, noone is perfect and I shot myself several times afterwards when I had bought too much in an impulse. Then again sometimes you have to if you want the piece. So what do you do. I guess it boils down to discretionary income: if I can "play" I care a lot less than if I put my savings into it. And I also agree that it's not of this time alone.. things were the same back then, it's just that the dynamics have changed so trends become more obvious or more "amplified", which makes it look like a "new" trend but really isn't.

Finally about the guide: all valid points and a good argumentation on the topic. There is something in the gemworld though called "the Guide". And it lists prices of all types of cut stones, in all types qualities.. using a bandwidth. Funny you should mention "locality" because it is exactly such a hot topic in the gemworld. Does a Burma Ruby really command a premium, even if it is not from the classic mine in Burma ? (Absurd ofcourse). Let me absorb the criteria for a moment and post a comment later... and I understand the complexity and the size of the market (collectors) to not make this a very profitable undertaking. The fact that dealers may or may not use it, may have to do with how prices are determined: cost-driven instead of demand driven. (not including the exlusive segment once again, but let's leave that out for a moment).

An alternative would be.. to let the brain do the thinking. What I mean is this: if you create a image catalogue of in general similarly priced minerals (within a price range, normally speaking etc etc.. but those are criteria guides like "the guide" apply which has pretty much become an industry standard for gemstones).. then perhaps instead of trying to quantify a number of parameters, you'd let the brain do the pattern recognition. I have not seen any catalogue doing this but for very complex qualifications the brain is exceptionally skilled at that. You could then add percentage adders for things like locality and perhaps things that are difficult to see on images (absolutely no damage, or a slight nick/scratch).

By the way: the price should not be influenced by the type of buyer. If specialists determine market dynamics and the price is high because of it.. then world-wide collectors will have to deal with it, like or not. And vice versa. (I know that pretending to be the "ideal collector" for the dealer sometimes DOES help in pricing though :-) )

Patrick

[Les Presmyk]

THanks for your comments. I am shocked that people are trying to impart "locality premium" status on gemstones. Another way to attempt to get extra money out of something, I guess. You are right that if the market perceives that a locality collector will pay more for a Bisbee azurite than a more general collector, it is the general collector who has to deal with the premium.

I look forward to your additional thoughts.

[Farlang]

How about doubling the price for top pieces ? It has to do with the fact that THOSE pieces ARE the best. However the original locality (mine) is sometimes expanded to the country in general.. and a premium of say 10 % or so is often paid just because it's from that country but where other mines are not producing better quality material than other mines in other countries.

A nice recent example is Paraiba Tourmaline.. where the trade really made an effort to call everything Paraiba.. up to the point that it was discussed whether the name referred to the mineral/gem or to the locality. The premium being that the same quality cuprian tourmaline from Mozambique wouldn't sell as well as from paraiba.

More thoughts later.. I have to travel.. but I actually the thought of having images, instead of a long checklist sounds quite appealing..

[lluis]

Good evening, Les/Patrick/List

Well, I suppose that I am one of those ill-ones that pay more for some locality.
A blue wulfenite from Tsumeb for me is a rarity and I will pay more (of course, if I could afford).
Pieces from Spanish classical localities, like Hiendelaencina, could be asked for more money, to me. And some places that I like specially (Morenci)
In gems, locality pays an extra price for the hue/colour of the piece. A pigeon-blood Burmese ruby would be top…..At least in Spain. And price would be accordingly.
But I have seen and had in hands a very decent sapphire that cost less than 30 Euros. And was not a micro. Place and opportunities.
And a maw sit sit in Spain would bear a fair price, not as high as in Asia. And nephrites that would cost a leg and an arm in other countries could be had. But ask for an Alma den decent cinnabar!

For Paribas: I (absurdidly) will pay more for a Paraiba locality elbaite than for a Madagascar colour like one…Absurdities of mankind……

Prices are what a collector wills to pay for ….
No more, no less.

On the other side, I agree with Gail. We are all in same hobby (just that I am too afraid to crawl in a mine…Well, chemist, you know, are odd…. 

By the way, Patrick, if anytime you come near Barcelona, drop me a line. You are invited (also Les, but Patrick is in Spain and Les in USA; Patrick has easier to reach me than Les  )

With best wishes

Lluís

[GneissWare]

Having been a dealer in Tucson in the 1980s and into the mid 2000s, I have seen a huge change in the market, particularly amongst a small subset of dealers. But, there are plenty of great buying opportunities even in Tucson. What is unfortunate, and why I largely stopped selling at Tucson, is the Tucson mentality -- that is, it can only be good if it is expensive. I would offer minerals at what I believed to be reasonable prices, but the collectors would not buy from me. However, other dealers would buy from me, raise the prices tenfold and would sell out, and come back to me for more stock.

I found that to sell in Tucson, I had to raise the prices, otherwise the minerals didn't sell. And, I had significant moral issues with charging people more than I believed the mineral was worth. Of course, informed and astute collectors would sometimes find me and get a good deal.

I now make a point of courting certain dealers who fairly price their specimens when buying for my own collection. But, even with many years of mineral dealing experience, I still find myself looking at two specimens, both of equal quality, and wondering "what's wrong with the less expensive one."

[Farlang]

And that's where I think a photodatabase with price-bandwidths could come in handy.. since you're not the only one who thinks that.

At the same time, why not join John Veevaert;s auctions or some of the other platforms that are out there.. and reach collectors online ?

Lluis: I would love to and I will. We're just working our a**** off at the moment and had a lot of bad luck last year, but things are going better so it's a bit easier to "go out and mingle" !

(I'll be travelling for a week).

Patrick

[parfaitelumiere]

really interesting gneissware!
I share your opinion about prices and quality.
I have seen it whith custom knives,or antiques.
It seems that an expensive price gives impression of a quality.
I told to a friend"if they don't buy,raise your price!"
What a shame!

[alfredo]

And which prices will we record for this database? The ones asked at the Westward Look and TGMS? Or the (on average) lower prices asked at the Inn Suites or other hotels? And will we use the label price asked, or the price the mineral actually sold for? (which can be significantly different for some dealers) And how will we know what price a specimen actually sold for? This all sounds like an impossible task to me. Any resulting price catalogue would be so vague and have so many variables as to be unusable in practice.

[Gail]

I agree with Alfredo.

There is no certification, no board of peers, no governing body as they have in various other industries. So the best way to stay sane and enjoy our hobby is to learn, visit others, build friendships and get on the computer to do research!

And do NOT spend your childrens education money on minerals that you CAN live without.

Also, patience....it is amazing what comes before you in good time. I am in no great hurry to buy up everything, as I was in the first couple of years of my collecting.

Okay, off to have breakfast. and then on to the Smithsonian museum of Natural History.
I will be like a kid in the candy store!
All the best,

[Farlang]

Alfredo, Les and others:

While I appreciate your lifelong experience in the mineral world, far more and deeper than my experience and knowledge is -- or ever will be-- and while I greatly respect you for that, I respectfully.... disagree.. so bear with me.. and this long posting and let me try to address some of the issues many of you have posted.

Just because a topic is complex, doesn't mean it can't be standardized and visualized in a simple way. Is the market too small to warrant such a large undertaking at present ? Probably. Will it have a slow adaption rate ? Absolutely. Will it encounter a huge resistance ? Absolutely. Will you have to push and pull to create an industry standard ? Absolutely. Everyone can understand that !

Still the arguments that have been given so far, in this thread are no different than arguments against any type of innovation that has been done, in a highly competitive, closed, saturated etc etc market. I don't buy those arguments for a minute. Do I have all the answers to all potential objections ? No. Of Course not. I barely started thinking about it when Jordi brought it up.. I liked the idea when he mentioned it, and I like it even more now.

The more resistance it creates, the more it tells me there can be power in the concept. When outsiders look at market opportunity these are typically one of the dynamics they look at: the more entrenched a certain industry is in its own thoughts, the weaker it is and the more opportunities it offers. you mention "people" would never use it.. but who are these "people" ? The dealers ? The present-day collectors ? Who knows it would create a whole new group of collectors, or collectors start to change their behavior if it serves their interests .. or.. maybe collectors from emerging markets could drive innovation and sales shift their way.. or..

it's not always the "old" that will be rejuvenated, it's also possible a complete "new" can be created !

Will it be financially possible to do this, at this moment, with the technologies we have ? Probably not. However do not be mistaken, it's not very cost prohibitive to obtain a lot of intelligence. It's being done already. I knew one company that 6 years or so ago, scraped all "sold" prices and products from Ebay and stored it and graphed it. They connected sales cycles to "reasonable prices" etc etc.
Until they got the CIO of Ebay on the phone who had noticed the spike in bandwidth and ofcourse claimed that THAT information was theirs to use. It wasn't.... it's public but do you really want a dozen high powered lawyers litigate you into bankruptcy ? So.. they chose to quit doing that. Yet their products were sold afterwards to new internet up-starts which obtained detailed market intelligence from their competition and then adjusted their value proposition accordingly. Online. Live. 24 hours per day. Who would have thought only 5 years ago.... ?

Ohh and the cool part for the webmasters among you: you can block those crawlers, but these guys pretended to be from Google, Yahoo, MSN search. They measured the time the average visitor was on your website, the average amount of page views, and that is how long they stayed on it. Then they would disconnect, and reconnect again now pretending to be another search engine. Until they were completely done with your site. Pretty nifty eh ??? Do you know how to counter such an attack on your website ? That was 6 years ago.

Who would have thought 5 years ago that diamonds were a commodity. No.. not just Blue Nile, so a database with diamonds.. but a *real commodity*. Blue Nile changed things already. While jewelers were saying "It's a symbol of love", "A wonderful rare object" (in fact play into emotions) the consumer brings a print out of Blue Nile's prices and that's the end of the story... jeweler resistance or not.
Now let's bring this to a new level. Diamonds as a commodity. Literally. Like potatoes. Or Corn. THAT type of commodity. Proof ? I talked to the consulting firm who does multivariant analysis on price fluctuations on commodities. Multi-variant analysis is the type of statistics you use when dealing with many, complex, interconnected parameters.
Food product companies that needed to get a better grip on when to buy their raw materials use them.

For the fun of it this consulting firm applied their knowledge to diamonds, feeling that, in fact, diamonds were a true commodity. You can now compare diamond A with totally different properties than diamond B and judge which is a better buy, based on a commodity market model. (You can fill in about 10 parameters or so). They discussed their results with scientists at MIT and other Ivy Leagues and with diamond experts. In fact they obtained very credible results.

So to answer everybody's question about the possibility of doing something like this in view of the complexity and the amount of parameters and data: my first "back of the enveloppe scrible" approach would be to combine powerful crawlers, add collaborative data entry (such as show info), apply algorithms to trends such as sales cycles (how long is something for sale online etc) and use multi-variant analysis. I bet you you can get pretty far with all that combined. And I am now probably ignoring 99.99 % of all existing and potential useful technologies and models out there.

You have all seen what Internet has done to the mineral business. So far this was limited to transparency in the sense of e-commerce versus shows, shops. Information accessible for the miner in China, versus a supply chain of 3-4 middle men. That was only the beginning ! Are you really so sure about your challenges being so unique, that no new methodology or technology can efficiently deal with it ? That would be a very risky bet indeed if it were my business.

Perhaps the mineral world has come under a magnifying glass because of all the hype and elite-collectors and shocking prices. That type of dynamics usually draws attention of outsiders. Outsiders usually "go for the kill" because they want to be disruptive. And they're not emotionally involved. (point in case: Blue Nile: legend has it that the founder was pissed off at the treatment he got in jewelry stores, Tiffany included. Now these same stores get 15 % margin on their diamonds where 5 years ago it was keystone.) The mineral world is small-scale. Cosy. But that also involves a risk if it gets more exposure. Alfredo. We met. You deal in rare minerals. Les: I did not meet, but you deal with high end minerals. Both difficult sections to commoditize. But what about the 1000th dealer selling the 1000th piece of OK quality Azurite from Morocco ? What about *that* market ?

I can continue with more examples, but I think my point is clear: Oftentimes when people say "it's impossible to do it" they discover it's already being done.

Patrick

[alfredo]

Patrick, I'm truly impressed by your analysis of these possibilities! Now I'm aware just how much of a primitive luddite I really am, and I'll stop using the word "impossible". But I still think it will be quite a lot more difficult than pricing cut diamonds, where almost all characteristics can be quantified. Minerals are more like art - too many unquantifiable subjective criteria. But I won't be too surprised or shocked if you prove me wrong....
Alfredo

[Farlang]

Alfredo,

We met a few times (with Gary Moss) and I have always been impressed by these COOOOL stories about Bolivia, and about your knowledge of rare minerals I had never even heard of or knew how to even spell ! So.. we have many years to go (hopefully) to exchange interesting information and.... minerals ! I love them.. I actually bought shiploads of BULGARIAN minerals.. I don't know why.. I got them from a Bulgarian dealer and he's such a cool guy and some are worth a lot now (I had like these hoppered galena's 3 years ago) and most are not.. and most are black, or any other ugly color.. but they're not extremely expensive, and you get these plates of etched galena's.. or a pyrite crystal in a cavity of chalcopyrite, or galena pressured by tectonic forces and it looks like silver, or Veracruz-like amethyst (everyone thought it was Veracruz).. from Bulgaria or...
anyway it just reminds me of the old days of Agricola and mining and mines.

So now let's try for an algorithm to standardize that ! :-)

Patrick

[str4hler]

Dear Patrick, or Hoi Patrick (we're both dutch),

if ( I'm not ) I would be at the top of the pyramid, Alfredo wrote about earlier in this topic,
then I really would not care about a system of quality/pricing.
I would just buy something that I wanted desperately, at that moment, instantly, without thinking... If I love something, I will just buy it. I fall in love with people and minerals usually without being rational :-) usually I'm very irrational when I'm in love...

But, if I would later find out that the seller really "overpriced" the specimen with an extra zero, and lied to me, etc, that seller would have a nice time with me again when I came back... Then we would have a nice talk not about buying, but about reputation... In Holland we say (translated): trust walks slowly towards me, but runs away like a horse...

Doing fair business (fair trade) is not about pricing only, or about the quality of specimens.
It's mostly about trust first, being an open and honest and straightforward uncomplex person, then about reputation, then about having fun together and exchanging stories, and only then about pricing... fair pricing. What's fair? Fair is what we both decide on what fair is... we make the price together. Kill the pricetags on specimens, delete the system, I decide what I want to pay :-)

Well, at least that's my point of view...

Cheers! Frank

[keldjarn]

I think it is fully possible to make more freely availble information about the real price range for most common mineral specimens sold to collectors. All activities supporting this should be encouraged. That includes having dealers retain pictures and prices also of sold minerals on the internet, even as stated by Alfredo, in many cases the selling price may have been lower than the listed asking price. But I have problems to see how the real selling price of minerals at shows, in shops, by private showings etc. could be entered into a database with the structure of the current mineral market. The problem is not how to process mineral price information and make them available to the public, but how to get hold of the information covering a significant part of the market. I think each collector have to seek this information actively from as many sources as possible and ultimately make his or hers own decision on what is a fair price. Personally I have a system of reviewing purchases made after 1-2 years and have a rating system for the dealers based on my previous experiences of the fairness of their prices.
Unlike Farlang I never think we can approcah an "industry standard" for most of the display specimen mineral market. What should the basis of such a standard be ? The size or weight of the specimen/mineral and the colour will have far less impact on prices than for diamonds and other gemstones. Too much of the price differences between two specimens of the same mineral will be a result of differences in aesthetic appeal, which is very hard to define and measure. But it may be possible for whole-sale type material of vanadinites, azurites, pyrites etc. Also for micromounts, massive samples or polished sections for systematic collections it could be possible. It will have the least impact on the focus of this discussion: high-end specimens that clearly are being offered at prices that many collectors view as questionable. And so they are, until somebody is willing to pay that price.....

Knut