Community LEGO Blogs

I just wanted to bring attention to a new sort of Evaluation Corner article / Set Review that was submitted by Donotinsertinmouth(DNIIM)... 75005 RANCOR PIT REVIEW The review is very similar to in depth LEGO set reviews that members do on the Eurobricks forums. I have always admired those sorts of reviews because of the time invested and the visual nature of the reviews. What DNIIM did was to take a Eurobricks set review and add a BrickPicker flair to it, with some investment data and analysis a

The Ninjago theme is one that has proven to be one of the most successful themes in LEGO's recent history, as evidenced by its first place in the Top Themes when considered CAGR. The theme has been a hit ever since it hit the shelves for the first time a couple of years ago, product of a mix of sets and a popular TV show, a combination LEGO hopes brings the same results with the released of the somewhat recent Legends of Chima. Ninjago has been discussed and analyzed several times in this forum

On Ebay, when you are going to sell something, Ebay really pushes the “use free shipping to attract more bidders” motto. I know that I waffle back and forth every single time I go to sell an item in an auction style listing because I can't figure out whether I want to do this or not. There are pros and cons to every part of it and a lot of factors you have no control over. So I decided to do an article for my own benefit, as well as anyone else who decides to draw conclusions from this. This blo

I found myself in an airport in a faraway land. Walking aimlessly from gift shops to gift shops until I saw a sign with 4 familiar letters in white against red rectangular backdrop. To my amazement, the store had a section full of brand new sets, like the Republic Gunship, Jabba's Sail Barge, Friends' Dolphin Cruiser, and Heartlake High. The beats of my heart were slowly calmed with a few glances on the price tags which were about 45% over US RRP. My heart almost stopped when I saw my old friend

We're coming up on the holiday selling season (it's the most wonderful time of the yearrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr) and with a lot of new investors around here who will be going through their first Christmas, I wanted to help out with a little advice on the shipping side of selling. First, a little background on me so you know where I'm coming from. I worked for FedEx Ground/Home Delivery in the terminal unloading trailers and loading delivery trucks for 2 years and was a delivery driver and contracto

One of the reasons I decided to do the first set of planet articles was because I saw the lineup for the planet series 4 and was memorized at how awesome they were. I really felt they had some seriously higher investment value than the first three series, so I wrote down a note to myself to do a blog article about it. While doing some research for the article, I was looking through some data on BrickPicker and figured I could not do an article about the new planet series 4 sets without mentionin

There are a lot of great reasons to get into polybags; sometimes they show up in your Lego orders for free or after buying enough product, sometimes you see a nice box of them in a store with a sale or clearance price tag and wonder if there is any value there.  Sometimes you see them being discussed on Brickpicker or another Lego forum and simply decide you *must* obtain a certain polybag because it is pretty darn cool or fits perfectly into your Lego MOC.  Whatever your reason, I'd like to out

As LEGO investors, I think it would be pretty safe to say that most of the time we are more focused on getting sealed and big sets in order to secure higher profits on each sale, but there are some other aspects to LEGO investing that can also turn out very profitable with a significantly lower amount of capital. Polybags and promotional mini sets on each theme that is released usually perform extremely well, and given their lower or none existing retail price they tend to reach great ROI in a v

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

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

So, it's been a while since my last blog entry, but I finally managed to find some free time to continue with one of my favorite articles to write, the effect of re-makes on LEGO sets. This time, I wanted to analyze the impact the newly released Republic Gunship had on both of its predecessors. For some reason that's beyond me, this particular ship seems to be one of the most popular vehicles of the whole Prequel Trilogy, and LEGO has seen a lot of value in releasing it for the THIRD time this

Most often than not, we see people asking in the forums whether a particular currently available set is a worthwhile investment or not. Usually, that question is either preceded or just after the asking whether the set will be EOL soon or not. That is the strategy most of us follow in this site. Grab currently available sets at good discounts and hold them until retirement to start enjoying some growth in value. However, I think that we are underestimating the power of investing in already reti

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

Return On Investment (ROI) is a common tool used to see how an investment did. Most of the members on Brickpicker know about the Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). There is a formula that goes with CAGR to predict how a set will do for future investments. I always say that the CAGR formula is used before investing. Now here is a formula explaining how your investment did after you made your profit. The formula for ROI is very simple and each part of it will be explained. ROI = (Gain from Inve

Some investors out there have seemingly unlimited capital and look like, at least on this sites forums, that they just throw money around. Most likely that is not the case – everything the successful investors do is still perfectly calculated and planned before hand to make money – and not lose it with wasteful spending. For those of you who are scared to get into the investing part of it because of your limited capital, fear not! Anyone who is interested in Investing can get into it and make su

Hello everybody, Time is money as the old saying goes and that theory applies to Lego investing and reselling. Allow me to introduce myself a little. I'm a critical analyst during work hours, a husband with beautiful kids in the weekend (of course) and ... English is my third language, so apologies for my grammar.  Lego was (and is again) one of my biggest passions as I picked it back up in 2012 after the traditional "Dark Age" which lasted more than a decade I'm not proud to admit. I've been

Semper Paratus - the United States Coast Guard's official motto - should serve as a beacon to Brickpickers. Translated from Latin, it means "Always Ready", and while it's appropriate to the core mission of the US Coast Guard, it's doubly appropriate for savvy investors on the lookout for their next investment purchase. This summer, BP members should recognize a familiar sight: a new wave of Coast Guard sets will be sailing into brick and mortar retailers. Should Brickpickers keep an eye out for

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

As I have been opening sets lately to build them and increase my display, I have come across a problem: What do I do with the boxes to my used sets? It takes up room to keep them, but I am afraid if I ever decide to sell one of my display sets, I will be disappointed with how much money I lose for not having the box. I decided I had to find out because I am quickly running out of room in my downstairs closet for all my open boxes. This was a very difficult venture with a ton of information. Unfo

Like the ever classic tune performed by The Who playing during the intro of that TV show, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, “Who are you?” except in this case, who am I? After a rather ridiculous amount of posts and topics starting with my very first one titled “Stargate in LEGO?”, I realized me of all people has yet to actually introduce himself whatsoever and figured what better way than to blog about it now? Perhaps this will get me better acquainted with everyone here as well as helping you un

More often than not, resellers and investors of LEGO bricks are builders first, collecting second, and investors last. Not that investing is a terrible thing to do, but the love of LEGO usually comes before the love of money. One of the worst things about collecting and building is the mess. A few years back, some relatives came over and saw the LEGO’s piled on the floor, on the former dining room table, and on the chairs. Of course their nieces and nephews loved it, but one of my uncles took m

Look at her, isn’t she a marvel! I stumbled upon this set looking back over a few of the older sets in the City theme.  It caught my eye as something I would have loved to have played with when I was a kid, so much play opportunity for a young lad.  Then after looking at sets info page here on Brickpicker the CAGR and secondary market pricing history captured my attention. The first thing is that the set boasts a very impressive CAGR of 22.6%, that puts it ahead of all but one of the entire

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

Among the most reliable small LEGO sets that you can invest in are the beloved Battle Packs. Though not talked about as much as large sets like the Tower Bridge or even the non-UCS Millennium Falcon, money manages to take form in all shapes and sizes. In this article, we will focus on Star Wars Battle Packs, which first started in 2007, with two Battle Packs: 7655-1: Clone Trooper Battle Pack and 7654-1: Droids Battle Pack. Star Wars Battle Packs had kept up a tradition of having two opposing ba

I brought this up on the forums today and several people agreed and gave opinions about boxes and how they have changed for the newer sets. Lego changes their boxes every couple of years to give things a new look, but honestly this stands out more with Star Wars because they have redone so many sets. As new ones come out, you start comparing the actual sets to each other and you can't do anything but compare the boxes as well. After going through all the Star Wars sets, I was pretty surprised t