Buy What You Love, Pay What You Should
Shifting Gears
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Cobras, Cobras Everywhere
“My brother and I just wanted to have a car that would always be the fastest at a stoplight drag race, and it has been” Driving a 427 Cobra with sidepipes and an open exhaust is a ticket to be the badboy you always dreamed of being in high school. Within seconds of turning the…
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The Shadow of the Internet
It’s a miserable, wet, 45-degree day in Portland as I compose this. And for the first time in a decade, I have missed the 44th annual Always-in-April Portland Swap Meet. Billed as the largest event of its kind west of the Mississippi River, it claims to have over 4,200 vendor stalls and 50,000 shoppers. An…
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The Future as History
{vsig}2008-5_2178{/vsig} As I look at these pictures of my children, Alexandra and Bradley, taken 16 years apart, I wonder what kind of automotive world they will inherit. We Baby Boomers are the last generation to experience raw, unregulated cars as daily drivers; those built from 1955 through 1974 represent a golden age of motoring. Engineers…
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The End of No Reserve
At times, being at the epicenter of a collector car weekend is like sitting in a command bunker. In Scottsdale, SCM’s boots-on-the-ground team included nearly 20 market analysts, staff, and support crew. During the weekend, they fanned out to all the events, notebooks and cameras in hand, and began submitting their reports back to HQ.…
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The Swede Meets the Italian
If I worked in a regular job, I would surely be fired for sendingand receiving so many links about collectible cars for sale First, I’d like to thank SCMers Craig Wood, of Brighton, Michigan, and Donald Sanders, of Durham, North Carolina, for being so quick to respond. When I wrote in the January issue that…
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Leaving 1990 in the Dust
In my 20 years of writing about the market, I have never seen high-end cars accelerate in value like this For the first time in two decades, we’re considering pulling a tattered banner out of storage and hoisting it above SCM world headquarters. It bears the fabled words of Monterey Sports Car Auction founder Rick…
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Mucking out the SCM Stable
We began to wonder if the BMW had had some conjugal visits with our failure-prone Fiat 2100 and been the recipient of its DNA You might think that with all the transactions we track, and all the conversations we have, the principals at SCM world headquarters would make nothing but brilliant deals. We’d buy perfect…
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On the Road Again
If you’re reading SCM, chances are you’re an enthusiast. Your friends may uncork a vintage Barolo and marvel over the bouquet; you’d just as soon go out to the garage and inhale the gasoline and oil vapors that constantly seep out of a vintage car. This has been an exceptionally busy year for me and…
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Why Market-Driven Beauty is Only Skin Deep
Buckle your seatbelts and tighten your shoulder harnesses. Based on the results from Monterey, the collector car market is in the midst of a wild and woolly ride, with little way of predicting the crests and valleys in the year ahead. There are a few things we can all agree on as we plow through…
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Factory Fake or Certified Authentic?
The market continues to surge toward all-time highs and surpass the prices made 18 years ago as more and more people look to buy used cars at all levels. For those looking to buy, questions about authenticity and provenance continue to be one of their keys to valuation. As we noted in our review of…