LEGO might just be one of the few truly beloved brands left on the planet. Kids love it, adults love it, fans obsess over it, and it’s all clean, innocent fun. It also happens to be an excellent investment, if you want to go all Lord Business.
The Telegraph ran the numbers on LEGO versus a wide range of financial products such as gold futures and the stock market, and found that LEGO beats them all. Your average Lego set rises 12 percent in value, year over year, so if you’d, say, put $100 in LEGO and $100 in the FTSE 100 Index, the former would give you a profit and the latter… well, at least you kept pace with inflation!
Why? LEGO is constantly retiring sets. Even relatively generic sets like houses and hospitals get taken off the market and redesigned frequently. And if a movie license LEGO has expired, every set from that movie goes off the market at once. The result is that what’s a cheap LEGO set on the shelves now becomes a collectible when it’s retired.
The caveat here, of course, is that you can’t play with them. For maximum value, they’ll have to be kept pristine, bricks in bags, box sealed, tucked away in a closet. Even Lord Business would find that a little sad. Similarly, this is a market phenomenon nerds will be all too familiar with. Collectibles keep rising in value until suddenly the market collapses, and LEGO is in the business of making toys, not investments.
Still, if you’d like to become a toy speculator, at least you know that, for now, there’s a market for LEGO. Just don’t be surprised if there’s a Brick Crash of 2020 waiting in the wings.
(Via The Telegraph)