Community LEGO Blogs

Thought you'd never use math once you got out of school? Think again. Today, as my first personal blog article, I am going to briefly describe a method to predict a set's worth using its CAGR. A while ago, Ed showed us what CAGR is, and how to calculate it in this blog article (http://www.brickpicker.com/forum/index.php/blog/4/entry-15-cagr-compound-annual-growth-rate-and-lego/), but for all of you who don't want to open a five hundredth tab, CAGR, or Compounded Annual Growth Rate, is basically

Awhile ago I placed a very large order on Bricklink to the Czech Republic for a fair quantity of white LEGO bricks/plates, etc. Some of these I ordered in USED condition to save a good deal of money. However, everyone who has an old collection knows, that among their whites (and sometimes blues and greys), lie the dreaded yellowed/discolored pieces. The plight is certainly common to any longtime LEGO owner, and until relatively recently was a problem unsolved. Enter Retr0bright (follow the link

Whether it is an exaggeration or not, in popular culture there has always been the perception of some sort of a friendly rivalry between the two main public service branches, the police and fire departments. I really have no idea about how big this rivalry, or if it even exists, in the real world, but I thought it would be fun to play with the idea in the context one the LEGO CITY theme, so later we will be examining which of the two has been the better performer over the years. Before we do th

I just pulled this off the brickultra.com website. Apparently, TLG is finally getting around to releasing a TMNT polybag. Here's what it looks like, and the link to brickultra's story: http://brickultra.com/new-lego-tmnt-polybag-30270/ My take: I think this is another in a long line of questionable decisions made by TLG regarding the TMNT theme. The first polybag should be an enticement to buy more of the theme, and I really question whether the best approach was to include a "Krang in the R

In this 3rd Edition of the Re-Make Impact Evaluation section I will be focusing my analysis on a set that may not be one of the most noticed or liked by investors and collectors: the Gungan Sub from The Phantom Menace. If you are even remotely aware of the Star Wars franchise, then you more than likely know The Phantom Menace is considered by a large majority of the fans as the worst movie produced under the whole series. What makes it even... better? is the fact that the ship itself is related

Source: Protect your instructions – an instruction to destroy their value?

In the world of finance, investors are usually interesting in measuring the performance of their portfolios against a benchmark or to at least compare them to some of the other investments they had available at some point. Doing this analysis is extremely important, as it is the only way to determine how your personal investments have done relative to some others in the market. For example, say your portfolio produced a return of 20%, I am sure most of you would be happy with that number and wou

"Marty, we need to go back! Back to the Future!" - Doc Brown In 1985, the first movie of the blockbuster trilogy Back to the Future was released to accolades. It quickly became an 80's classic movie with kids and adults alike routinely quoting famous lines from the movie. From Bif bellowing "McFly!" to Doc stammering about flux capacitors, this movie quickly worked its way into pop culture, and today it stands as an all-time great. Imagine for a moment that we were actually able to time travel.

When LEGO investors evaluate a given set, they ask themselves, is this investment viable? Is it worth putting my hard earned money into? But, what does viable mean exactly? Is it anything that nets more than the inflation rate or the supposed risk free investment rate of US treasuries (let's not debate if treasuries are truly risk free)? Probably not. We all know there is a certain element of risk involved in LEGO investing that should command some risk premium, but what should that risk premium

Welcome to my Top Ten Best Selling Sets section for the month of May. This will be the first of a series of articles dedicated to examine some of the purchasing trends as shown by eBay data collected by Brickpicker every month. My aim is to publish one of these as soon as each month's update is completed by Ed/Jeff and show the users of the site some of the most popular sets so that they can use it as a guide about what is hot at any particular month. Hope you find it useful. May 2013 Top Ten

Cars, trains, planes and ships, what do all these transportation methods have in common? They usually start depreciating the very moment you use them for the first time, especially so with cars but also true of all the others. In the LEGO world, however, the opposite is most often the case. There is usually a lot of talk in LEGO forums about the great appreciation usually shown by train sets, and that is something that can’t be ignored, but it sometimes makes me think that we are overlooking or

It is still very early to perform a proper and more accurate re-make impact evaluation about the UCS X-Wing, but now that we have our first month of actual eBay data I wanted to make a couple points and observations that I found interesting about both sets. Later this year, once we have several more months of data, I will be able to write a more in depth analysis. For now, let's just take a look at the numbers presented by the "old" UCS 7191 X-Wing so far this year: There are a couple of s

The purpose of this blog entry is to shed some light on the possibility of using the standard deviation as a measure of risk on different themes, types of sets and so on when investing in LEGO. This article will assume that LEGO returns follow a normal distribution. I am sure several of you already know about standard deviation, since it is often used as a measure of risk in more traditional investments like stocks, mutual funds, etc. For those of you that don't know much about it, we use stand

Is the Friends theme worth investing in? If one were to search the forums for an answer to this question, you would find rather fervent opinions on both sides. Currently the Friends theme sports a CAGR of over 35%, making it one of the highest in the LEGO universe. So is that it, end of story, numbers don’t lie – ‘Friends’ is an investment winner? It is hard to say with such a short history to go on, but I’m skeptical. There is no question that the Friends theme has been exceptionally popular

Investor: Veegs Investments (LEGO) to date: About $8000 Sales to date: About $600 Wife (One day overdue now...and still very pregnant) anger level: 9.5/10 Most Recent Acquisition(s): Captain America at TRU.ca (only to get 30116 polybag) I was just perusing the other community blogs and really enjoyed reading articles that are a mix of personal as well as Lego. I also have the ability to type, so I figured I could emulate my fellow Legoists and provide a little (more) content to a site that I us

Let me start out by saying that the title is definitely stereotypical gender bias, but don't let that exclude anyone. If you've got a man/parent/other supporting you, by all means change the title in your head to whatever is applicable. This is a topic I don't think gets covered enough. The people in the background. The behind the scenes workers who don't get the spotlight, or even the credit sometimes, but are nonetheless pillars of all the business we do here. My woman is amazing. She is the r

As many of you can relate, my five year old son is crazy about Lego. He likes building sets, making his own little creations, and adding new sets to his collection. He loves minifigs. He loves Lego Star Wars, Legends of Chima, Ninjago, and now Castle Lego. He also likes to talk "investment sets" with me, and one day as I was perusing Amazon, he asked me why my Wish List was full of Lego sets. When I explained to him how the Wish List worked and what "priority" meant, he said, "Dad, I want to ran

Before I was an investor, or even a collector, I was... A TRADER. I think that I started out back in 2006 with a friend who was years older than me and a large collection of Lego. I got a few figs off of him for some pieces (he was being generous) and was hooked from there. Through the years, I have expanded my minfigure collection through trading and buying, and now about 2/3 of my minifigures are pure profits from trading. (I don't want to argue out this whole profit thing now, so you can find

LEGO CUUSOO has announced the results for the Fall 2012 LEGO Review. The sets up for selection included the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover by Perijove, the UCS Sandcrawler by mb_bricks, and the Thinking with Portals! by Brickthing and Team Jigsaw. Here is the official video. As many of you already know the process for production is a long one taking several months to a few years depending on how fast you gain supporters. First you post an idea on the LEGO CUUSOO website. Once you get

This section of my personal blog will be dedicated to small posts about those sets that have performed the best over the past six months, namely those that are included in Brickpicker's own BrickIndex. As the Re-Make Impact Evaluation section, I hope to publish this one on a somewhat regular basis. I am not sure about how many of you out there make use of this interesting feature, but the way it works is using eBay's sold listings data in order to see which sets have been selling the most and f

One of the biggest "home-grown" LEGO themes around today is called the Collectable Minifigure Series. In each series are 16 minifigures that can be found in plastic bags at LEGO distributers. Each bag is non-see through, so it is by chance that you get the minifigure that you want... Or is it? Just because you can't see what's inside, doesn't mean you can't feel for it. There are often distinct features of a minifigure that make them easy to feel for. The second method is by bump codes. These co

Hello, and welcome to my blog. My username here on BrickPicker and on many other sites is Comicblast. I've been a member here on BrickPicker ever since around late December of 2012. You can read more about how I discovered BrickPicker and about me in one of my other articles by clicking at the following link: http://www.brickpicker.com/forum/index.php/blog/4/entry-30-brick-brats-the-teenage-lego-investors-blog/?st=20#commentsStart. My article is the last on the page thus far, and is titled "Out

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of spending Saturday with my two kids and two of their friends at Brickworld Chicago 2013. Here are some of my observations from the weekend: 1. I was very impressed by how well organized the show was. The check-in line took less than five minutes, and we arrived at a peak time of the day, roughly 11 AM. There were hundreds of people (dare I say thousands?) all trying to get into the show, but because of the organization and troops of volunteers, everyone was ca

As you know, there are now two X-Wing Fighters in the UCS(Ultimate Collector's Series) line. One was released in 2000, has 1,300 pieces, and has a retail price of $149.99 USD. The other one was released in 2013, has 1,558 pieces, and retails for $199.99. There are various affects of having another X-Wing fighter out in the market. There could be less interest in the older X-Wing because of its avalability and its current price. The newer one is more available and it has a cheaper cost. This may

When it comes to LEGO investing, the investor usually has to deal with several different questions that make things more complicated; box condition, shipping and taxes are just some of those factors. However, the most important choice they usually have to make is about what specific sets are going to be better performers than the rest in either the short or long run, depending on their objectives. Even more, most investors are not really satisfied by following the herd and investing in only thos