Quote Originally Posted by tenOC View Post
Can those bids be real?
Obviously they're real. Are they from legitimate competitive bidders, unknown to the seller? I doubt it. Currently everything real on ebay appears to be on the upswing price-wise. Maybe the professional sellers have decided to join forces and drive the market unnaturally. I'm no expert, but I believe it costs very, very little (relatively) in auction fees to shill a item price to 3 or 4 times it's fair market value, and you only need a few neophyte, deep pocket suckers to make it pay back bigtime. There are a lot of CMPicon mixmaster carbines out there. Sooner or later the inflated prices may become legitimate market prices to a portion of the newby collectors and then it's game-on. Who knows, maybe the market can be cornered and the inflated prices become legitimate. This seems like a real good topic for some interesting in-depth discussion. As for me, I look at the "bidding/selling" price relative to the past few years and mostly just pass with no regrets when I sense the apparent inflation rate has just been too high to be real. As for the stock in question, it appears to be a real Rock-Ola stock and at least the cartouche humper used the right CC ordinance stamp. JMHO