Following the new rainbow chaos sellout saga, I read interesting comments about buying for trading, resentment towards people trying to trade a "recent" release for an "old" release.

The point is how is "old" and "recent" define? How old is considered old? Pre-07? Pre-06? What is recent? 07 and 08 releases? So it is an unfair trade to trade something in 07 for 05 or 06??

Personally, I would not think for one second to trade an "old" OB chaos or pink booska head for the LS Evil which is a new release if i have missed the evil.

My opinion is as long as you are happy with the trade and both are happy, just do it

buying shit with the sole purpose to turn around and try and trade it for something else is one step below flipper status.

Agreed. This is absolutely the right attitude, and if anyone gives you crap about it you can just ignore them.

I would be inclined to agree, as long as both parties are getting what they want and are happy with the deal, there's no harm.

I wasn't really familiar with this whole 'flipping' thing until I came on here. Having said that, many years ago I used to work in a collectibles store. We sold everything from really old Dinky Toys, Star Wars, film TV stuff etc etc. We also had new stuff as well. Now, there would be the serious collectors who would come in and buy their items, but there would always be the people who would come in and buy an armload of a particular thing as it was a rare version (that they read somewhere) or it was new out or whatever. Their purpose for buying them though was to literally turn 'em around and make a quick buck. They would come in on the Friday, buy all this stuff, and then you would see them at the toy market on the Saturday selling it for double or more than he paid for them. We did once think about limiting the amount per customer, but as we were only a little mom and pop store, we had to pay the bills.

We even used to have people come in specifically asking 'what can I buy thats going to become worth a lot of money'. How can you really answer that? We always kinda advised its better to collect for the enjoyment than investment. Its a very fickle market. If your collection that you enjoy appreciates in value, well, thats a bonus, right?

Holy crap, I really rambled then. Sorry about that!

*gets back in his box*

Exactly.

As my grandmother used to say, if someone else gives you shit about it, fuck 'em.

One cool grandma!

I don't mind trades old or new. As long as it works out right? I know for a fact that a lot of us have sought after toys as trades even if the original intention was to keep the figure. With all the hype in this hobby, it's not surprising to constantly buy just for the sake of scoring something rare in a non contemplating manner. Priorities can change, tastes can change. If it's something u purchased fair & square then u're free to do whatever u want with them (except for flipping of course!).

There's never going to be one definition regarding "recent" vs. "old" that everyone agrees with 100%, plus relative to the larger issue, not all releases age and appreciate value (if at all) equally. Neither is the trajectory of an item's market value necessarily linear. (This is the point and which people usually mention Beanie Babies.)

To slightly contradict what I just said, in my mind, things become "older" about 14 months after release. But again there are degrees. When people say "older RxH" they usually mean "pre-2006" in my observation.

Then there's "vintage."

I think the resentment about trade flipping generally exists because those toys held up by trade flippers could have gone to someone who really wanted it without the self-appointed intermediary, who becomes even more annoying when he holds the toy for some specific other toy rather than a more generous approach, and even more annoying when they try to unfairly "up trade," meaning for something of clearly greater value. Sometimes people do this out of mere misunderstanding or error, but they do risk hearing about it from the community if people find out!

To me there's a difference between making a habit of trade-flipping, as some clearly do, and what may appear like occasional trade flipping that may actually be the result of some other circumstance, e.g. "I thought I was going to like it more" or "I overspent."

Having a good sense of ethics and a sincere sense of community never hurt anyone's toy karma or community profile. A little generosity or altruism is likely to come back to you at some point. People become hip to the greed-heads in time.

Nail well and truly smacked on the head, well said!