Brickfolio Question

[legogreg22]

I just joined Brick Picker and I am really glad I found this site. I have been collecting Lego for a really long time. When I get a new lego set I open it up build and put it on my shelf. I don't really play with lego. I really like lego but I mostly display, not play with it. As I was adding sets to my brickfolio I noticed that if I say that they are used the value on my sets go down. All my Lego sets are in right out of the box condition. Would my sets be considered New or Used?

[dmoser22]

I joined BP a couple of months ago, and I like the Brickfolio concept for storing my set data, but I noticed that it shows a full year of values, even though I've only had my sets entered since Dec '12. This made me realize that what it's really showing me is the value, in each of the last 12 months, of the collection that I have right now, not what I had during each of those months. In fact, as far as I can tell, BP does not maintain any history of acquisitions and divestitures in my Brickfolio. (There is space for me to enter buy and sell dates for each entry, but I don't believe that data is used to actually anywhere to reconstruct historical Brickfolio contents.) That's very misleading, if someone is looking at the graph of his Brickfolio and thinking that it has some relation to the value of his investment over time. I saw another thread on this topic where it was mentioned that, if you assume that proceeds from a sold set would be reinvested, they would then be reflected in the Brickfolio, so that would mitigate distortion of the graph, but that doesn't really address the issue. For example, say I bought two Maersk trains a year ago, for $110 each. My Brickfolio graph would show a pretty flat line at around 220, right up until two months ago, and then a nice spike up. Now I sell them both for $185 each, and buy a new Death Star. Suddenly my Brickfolio shows a value of roughly $380-400 for the whole year - no indication that I had a pretty good return for the year. I know that keeping Brickfolio history and generating graphs that reflect the value of sets actually owned in each month would be a huge and difficult change, but if you're presenting this as an "investment" oriented site, I really think the Brickfolio graph as it currently works is inadequate, and as I said, potentially very misleading. Having said that - still a great site, and I love the value tracking done for individual sets, as well as the wealth of reviews, articles, sale announcements, and other info! Thanks, -djm

[Ed Mack]

This is version 2.0 of the Brickfolio and it's a work in progress. Many upgrades were made with this version, yet many more need to be made with the next version. Jeff and I are currently working on a major site addition, so a lot of small stuff has been ignored as of late. There are some changes to the forums we want to make and some key additions to the Brickfolio, like taking into account what people paid for their sets in relation to current values. It will all come in time. We have some cool sh*t planned....in plain English. ;-)

[redeemed763]

I like the improvements in version 2.0, as a matter of fact, this very feature is one of them, I didn't use to be able to track the sets in my portfolio's history and now it shows this. I am sure there are many very important improvements to be made before this feature becomes all that we want it to be, it definitely seems to be getting there.