What items did you collect as an investment, only to find they didn't increase in value?

TripleH

MiL buys expensive pottery as an investment and ornamental plates.

It's like banging your head against the wall sometimes...

Its fine if she like them to look at / use but as an investment, the target market is shrinking each year but supply is not.

She gave me a 'valuable' plate to sell on ebay which I had to show her was selling for a lot less than she thought if at all.

We ended up with my wife's nans Ercol furniture, which was very nice and I know expensive when new but definitely worth a lot less second hand. Sadly it wouldn't have fitted in the place we were buying so we sold it. That purchase fell through, so I could kick myself...

vacheron

I've never bought anything as an investment, but I have aquired a collection of swiss watches over the last couple of decades which I wore, scratched and enjoyed daily. However even these have gone through the roof over the last few years thanks to "investors" looking for the next opportunity and numerous new YouTube channels which have sprang up and are relentlessly hyping up the market and encouraging people to buy certain watches because "you can't lose money"!

Thankfully the inevitable cracks are now appearing in this bubble and hopefully things will start coming down as the speculators panic sell and start flooding the market which will hopefully bring things back to reality so that the actual "collectors" can afford to buy again. 

Hype, "fear of missing out", and marketing are very dangerous things to wield at the general public, and as soon as I hear the word "investment" in relation to any mass produced product I head the other way!

soolin

I'm just unpacking some recent auction purchases that I never got round to dealing with. It is fairly usual for the auctions I attend to add random boxes of house clearance items (ornaments usually) to lots so I end up buying a lot I want and ending up with a 'free' box of items I don't want. Amongst the stuff I have here today is an enormous collection of 'Piggin' pigs and 'Me to you' bears . These were all probably someones pride and joy of a collection.

The charity shops locally will love me when I go out next time, they actually still sell these things , I don't know how they do it !