For vintage collectors the golden age of the fountain pen was the 1920s and 1930s

For vintage collectors, the golden age of the fountain pen was the 1920s and 1930s, with many people interested in the large or oversized pens by Parker, Sheaffer, Waterman or Montblanc. He explains: “Increasingly, fountain pens are seen as style accessories. Eight or nine years ago we added 300 to 400 people to our database a year; now we are adding 1,500 to 1,600.”Gray says that, while collectors used to be people who had no intention of ever using their pens, the new market is for people who want a practical writing instrument. “The internet – and eBay in particular – has levelled the playing field and opened up the market,” Gray says.”Collectors can now acquire pens from around the world. You can go to eBay and see three or four pens a week that were considered very rare 10 years ago.

That has brought down some prices, but the market has got busier More people are buying and using pens. “There’s also been a renaissance of the luxury writing instrument and so people are choosing both style as well as function.”
Simon Gray at the Battersea Pen Home says the internet has had a major effect on the pen market. “It’s evolved from a pure collectors’ market to more individuality, and a greater breadth of collecting has resulted in a rise in prices in some areas but a drop in others,” he says. They were once old hat, a writing instrument for middle-aged traditionalists. Today, however, fountain pens are trendy accessories for discerning young people and can even be an investment.

The fountain pen market has changed over the past 10 years, says Bloomsbury Auctions’ Alexander Crum Ewing. What matters far more is whether you can buy the shares that produce those earnings cheaply.Most new issues with long-term-earnings potential are rated so highly that even if you buy them, they will only deliver exceptional returns to investors if they do better than the market is already expecting them to do.So, if you do wander into the new-issue arena, remember to do so with your eyes open, and don’t forget that the people making the most money are the ones selling you their shares, not the ones who are buying.jd intelligent-investor.co.uk. Even then, the key point that Professor Siegel makes elsewhere in his book is that earnings growth alone is not enough to produce above-average returns for investors. His comment: “Here again we find an illustration of the paradox of creative destruction. While all the new products and services these IPO firms create are vital for the economy, buying them when they are issued is not a good way to build your wealth.”All this assumes, of course, that you are not smart enough to work out which companies are going to be the long-term winners. And the hotter the market, the worse your chances of future outperformance (a fate that you can be sure will befall all but a minority of the resources companies now coming to market).Overall, Professor Siegel thinks this makes new-issue investing an odds-against proposition. Professor Siegel compares the process to buying a lottery ticket, in the sense that you may win very big, but your chances of winning are quite small.

Any new-issue-only portfolio would, meanwhile, be substantially riskier than the index alternative.So the conclusion is clear: while you can be sure that the new-issue market will produce a small number of tomorrow’s long-term winners, the more reliable prediction is that the majority will actually be underperformers. Ironically, even in the wonder year of 1986, when Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe and Sun Microsystems all came to the market, the margin of outperformance against the small-stock index would still have been minimal (around 1 per cent per annum). More than one third underperformed by more than 20 per cent per annum.By contrast, fewer than 5 per cent of the total new issues have subsequently outperformed the market by more than 10 per cent per annum. Portfolios consisting of every new issue in any given year would have failed to beat the same comparable market index in all but four of the 33 years covered by the study.The four exceptions were 1977, 1984, 1986 and 1988, with the latter year (the year of Dell’s debut) producing the best returns. In fact, 80 per cent of the new issues in his analysis subsequently underperformed the market (note the recurrence of the famous 80-20 rule).