doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Investment quality doubles....

Gene Hill wrote a good article some time back about investing in double shotguns. He concluded they weren't good investments from a financial perspective. I was skeptical at the time, but have concluded he was probably right. That's not to say you can't make money buying and selling, but it's tough if you consider inflation (and the higher tax rate on the gain on "collectibles").

For about 15 years I was securities licensed, Series 6, 63 & 26. and I encouraged folks along with myself to invest heavily in mutual funds and insurance. I finally figured out that doing so was a lot like going to Las Vegas except you didn't get free drinks, a suite and a floor show.

I have bought and sold land and guns over 50 years and to this day I have never lost one dime in either. No, some property & some guns don't appreciate in value as rapidly as do some investments but then they don't have the downside risk of losing value either. Antique and Exotic Cars, Boats, Airplanes, Race Horses and such are playthings and most of the times should not be looked on as investments but rather large holes into which to throw money.

As was previously stated by Ed, original condition along with rarity is everything be it a Stevens 311 or an A-1 Special or anything in between. Buying with cash and seeking out the bargain will keep you in the game for the long haul. The workmanship and the friends that are made are really the priceless elements to be had.

Just My Humble Opinion......George

GregSY: You are 100% right on the fact that there are no hard and fast rules about collecting. However, I simply distinguish a collection from a large accumulation of inventory.

When I wrote my first book, many of my friends tried to refer me to the storied "collectors" with 300 Parkers, but I didn't have the time or the attention span to sift through that many guns to find the ones my prospective readers wanted to see in pictures and in print. As it was, I did sift through a 60-gun collection and found 10 guns of true merit, which I photographed and featured. The collector had three A-1-Specials, one truly wonderful, one not as good, and an upgrade; I suggested that he sell the two "yes, buts..." The ten guns I zeroed in on would have stood alone as a great collection, but were obscured by too much background noise of common guns. A true collection is somewhat like a museum display...

Bill Furnish donated his collection of seminal doubles (including about 40 Parkers) to the Cody Firearms Museum. They languished in storage for a number of years and some (30) are now on display in the basement, including 7 Parkers, of which only one has any real merit as a collector's item. Thus even the seven Parkers on display are not really a "collection" if they are mostly just common guns that occupy space, but don't grab the interest of other collectors.

Meanwhile, the Coca Cola guy's two guns, long on display at Cody (including the CHE .410), grab the interest (but not because of the Coca Cola connection)...as did the PH .410 I photographed for my first book (one of three made, and the only one in original 60% CC condition). Compare the interest of the CHE and PH to the three same-old same-old Parker VH(E) .410s pictured in the current DGJ: is this a collection or an inventory? And while it's nice to have the ownership provenance of a gun (as opposed to not having it), the fact that the president of a large real estate brokerage firm (or president of Coca Cola) owned a certain shotgun usually has little or no impact on the price (absent a name like Czar Nicholas or Annie Oakley).

Now skip forward to the next article @ p.55 and heed the author's sound advice: (1) Buy what you can afford; (2) High original condition is paramount; (3) "Partial restoration"? Maybe, but only if necessary; otherwise leave well-enough alone; and (4) Re-read #1--When it comes time to sell, high original condition guns are always in great demand. The author features four high condition guns; Trojan, VH, PH, GHE--THIS IMHO is a "collection."! As a counterpoint, buy all 44 Parkers in Jim Julia's October 6th sale and you will have an impressive inventory of Old Reliables, but will you have a "collection"? I don't think so.

Parting shot about the idea that an expert/collector would "...own 100 if he could get his hands on them," ignores the fact that a great many collectors have plenty of $$$ to buy any size of a large inventory, but mega-bucks makes them more selective, and selectivity is the key to any good or great collection.

Gun collectors are nickle-shooters when it comes to applying loose cash to acquire collectibles. The entry level for impressionist art is $10,000,000. I get antiquarian bookseller's catalogs with prices for books by Jane Austen (who?) in excess of the Czar's Parker. What if Larry Silverstein (who?) decided to get into Parkers? He owned the Trade Towers, and his insurance settlement was $13,000,000,000 (that's billion). If he wanted to be real safe with his $$$ and put it into FDIC insured accounts, he would need to find 56,000 banks at $250,000 each. Just think of how many $100,000 Parkers he could buy! People with money are more likely to buy an $800 bottle of Mouton Rothchild '88 than 400 bottles of Rot Gut. A person with $100 burning a hole in his pocket is well advised to partake of good eats at a fine restaurant rather than blowing his wad on "meal deals" at McDonalds. Less is more! EDM

House help and art are the first to go - then its the his and her's Beamers. Times been tough on the well-to-do.
The market is filled with their used toys of olden better days.
Commerical real estate has tanked, and they'd be hungry now for a Big Mac n fries!
Things gotta go.

Btw, the game has changed for those who have saved their nickles 'n dimes.
The newly rich are out-of-work and holed-up in a doublewide(and how they hate their new neighbors), the old money set(checkout the uppity golf courses) are dinning on paper plates. Time for those who have kept their noses to the work-a-day grindstone to score stuff.

This topic is just too interesting not to comment on. I think the idea of firearms as investments is a matter of perspective. My estimate of a return on investment involving guns has never had much to do with intrinsic value, but rather the pleasure of its use or the knowledge of historical value. I also think that the gun business is very difficult to survive in. I don't think there is too much room at the top for giant profits. But, as in any market one needs to operate and trade constantly to know the market and for the effort to be profitable. I don't think a buy and hold strategy, trying to predict a market for just one kind of shotgun, holds much opportunity.

EDM's analysis is correct- but here's the old "leveller of the playing field" whether an accumulation of guns (like my modest group of older all 12 gauge Smiths- all "shooters") or some original High Grade parkers or AH Fox guns, we all meet the "Grimster" sometime and those guns, whether users or safe queens, end up elsewhere- our heirs- first choice, but with proper safeguards so some shyster doesn't pick up your Uncle Ed's AAH 20 with extra barrels (one set for quails, one for doves Suh) from his Thomasville stompin' grounds- for a nickel on the dollar- and the old "Greater Fool" theory can't be denied, a spin on the late Bernie Baruch's "buy low, sell high" advice.

The late Robert Ruark once wrote about hunting quail (buurds) with Mr. Baruch and mentioned his (Baruck's) 16 bore side by bird gun. Anyone know the make, grade and configuration of that "escopeta" and where it might be now, as with the Czar's 12 A1-Special, etc.?? Just curious!!

I hesitate to sum up the present discussion with a short post, but I think I can. A true gun buyer, collector, accumulator, gun huckster, part time dealer, high volume shooter of interesting guns, or however you describe a guy who owns twenty or fifty Parkers, does not feed his collection with money earned solely at his day job. Over a lifetime, the owner of twenty or fifty Parkers has bought and sold many times that many marginal guns on the "buy low, sell high" principle. The nearly immediate profits from these transactions help to finance the twenty or fifty Parkers that are probably still in the gun room at the death of our collector. A five thousand dollar gun today would have to have been bought for a pretty low price to have kept up with forty years of inflation, but only if the gun were bought with money earned on the collector's day job. More often than not, this is not the case. Collectors are hucksters at heart and generally complete their deals with play money.

Very interesting points of view from many people who are more knowledgable and experienced than me, but I can't help but weigh in. I have collected guns since my college days, when you could actually have guns on campus. I even had a gun shop at one time and made fair money by the day's standards trading guns. I aspired to quality guns like Elsies, Foxes, Belgian Brownings, and some nice European stuff. (Couldn't afford a Parker until a few years ago.)

Over the years I've had some nice ones. Piece by piece I sold off most to afford other bad habits such as cars and women, the latter being the most tempting and simultaneously worst investment you can make. I made money on all the guns I sold. But what I found was pretty soon I had no gun and no money.

As I now limp into my sixth decade, I've decided that.. if the air conditioner ain't broke, there's gas in the tank and there's food in the fridge.. money is really pretty worthless. I'm buying guns to keep. At least they're investments I can take out of the safe and admire, occasionally taking one to the field. I hope when I die my boys sell them wisely, but then one likes cars and the other seems to serially attach himself to the above described fiscal fiascos.

By the way, I'm always interested in cheap deals on good guns and good deals on cheap women.

Bill: I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing your "summing up" of your rather narrow view of the manner of collecting fine (and not so fine) guns, which you believe is the mode. I see things through a different lens.

I admired my friend's Parkers in the mid-1970s and bought a Trojan 20-bore for $900 (not chump change then, but 25% of what I had just paid for a new International Scout 4x4). A week later a VH 16-bore came to my attention in a newspaper ad and I paid $650. Both guns were bought in 1974 with proceeds of my day job. And never since in 35 years of Parker collecting and shooting has there ever been any connection between my buying an incremental gun and selling another.

This does not mean that all "true" Parker collectors (other than Eightbore) adhere to my template, however, the greater number of people I know who collect fine shotguns are not self-declared wheeler-dealers who are trying to build an estate with profits from buying low and selling high "marginal" shotguns. When Jim Julia sold 129 of Jim Parker's Parkers in October 2005, I think it's fair to say that those guns had been acquired with funds derived from sources other than wheeling and dealing. Many of the Parkers in Julia's October 6, 2009 sale have named owners who are obviously not dealers or traders. I will have a table in the PGCA tent at the Vintage Cup this weekend and I am hard pressed to think of any others of the "usual suspects" who will share the tent at this remote and expensive venue who buy and sell to feed their Parker appetite. My point being that one size does not fit all.

Over the past 35 years I have owned about 30 Parkers, and have sold most of them for various reasons; for example, I sold all but one of my two-trigger shooters after I lost my right eye and had to learn how to shoot as a lefty (my left trigger finger can't sign checks or pull two triggers effectively). My NIB unfired Trojan 12-bore was strictly a play on perfection and I got tired of storing it, along with a certain 98% VHE 20-bore Skeet and a 95% VH--I wasn't going to shoot them; I could possess them forever because they were pictured in my books and articles, and it was someone else's turn. In other words, not all motivation to buy and sell is of the wheeler-dealer mentality. Circumstances change, interests change, and motivation can change independent of financial considerations and/or the blind pursuit of the next deal.

I will have five guns on my table at Easton MD, not to wheel and deal or feather my nest, but because it's time for others to own and enjoy that which has given me pleasure over the years. All five are seminal examples of American gun making excellence, A Parker lifter s/n 0895 (ca.1870); an Ethan Allen ca.1868; a Remington Whitmore s/n 190 ca.1873; a Philadelphia Fox s/n 262 (which is a dead ringer for a contemporary Parker VH); and "Tuck's" AAH pictured on the cover of my latest book. In fact, all but the Phil. Fox are pictured in my books and articles so I can, thus, "possess" them forever...and if I spot a Parker that interests me at the Vintage Cup...who knows? But whatever the case, there is a total disconnect, for me, between acquiring and dis-acquiring, and I believe that this is true for most of my Parker friends...or at least I hope so. After all, if liquidity in the stock and bond markets depended on everyone wearing their "I Got More Than That In IT!" T-shirts and making their "play money" nut on "buy-low-sell-high profits" then nothing would happen. EDM