[meteorite-list] Comment on M. Blood's Met. Market Trends 05-07

[David Weir]

Hello Michael,

The Meteorite Collectors Price Guide, by David Weir, to which you refer 
in your recent Meteorite Times article (just after Kevin's 
contribution), was compiled by me for about 5 years, up until January 
2001, the beginning of the new millennium, when I quit revising it. At 
that time I allowed Doug (Meteorite Express) to work on it at his 
pleasure and I removed its link from my website. He continued to update 
it (mostly the date) in a very minor way. You're correct, it's quite 
obsolete. At the time I quit revising it, the NWA boom had led to widely 
varying, "abnormal" market conditions, almost impossible to adequately 
monitor, and the price range listed had grown so wide that no meaningful 
information could be derived from it any longer.

My interest in recording prices was for my collection goals just as it 
was for Kevin and probably Thomas and others, but this was at a time 
when the number of dealers could be counted on both hands and ANY 
meteorite offered for sale was a great occasion. A large percentage of 
meteorite types were unavailable or unknown. Conversely, at the present 
time every collector is a dealer (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc.), 
ebay lists dozens of pages of meteorites of every variety for auction, 
Google searches are magical, and lunar and martian stones, along with 
samples from the very rarest of groups, are relatively easy to acquire. 
My "Availability Code" -- 1) Good Luck!, 2) Here, There, 3) Everywhere 
-- would now be all 2's and 3's.

I doubt if any price guide is able to provide a realistic and timely 
picture of the current market price ranges; in fact, I was often told 
this about my own price guide, which was modeled after Philip Bagnall's 
efforts in his informative book, by some dealers (by yourself too as I 
recall, and I even included a median price). I felt my efforts were 
still worthwhile at the time, and it provided me with the information I 
needed to have -- the difference between a good price and a bad price -- 
at my fingertips.

David