With collectibles having matured into an alternative asset class, some stamps have become worth more than just serious money. The Inverted Jenny stamp is touted as the world’s most famous stamp and it leaves almost all other valuable stamps in its wake.

Collectors Dashboard constantly evaluates the happenings in the world of collectibles. These precious and scarce items now compete head to head with the likes of investing in stocks, bonds and real estate. To prove the point, it is possible to spend millions of dollars at the highest level for just a single stamp.

Unique in the philately community for its extreme documentation of public sales, the Inverted Jenny stamps themselves were numbered while together on the original sheet. The website InvertedJenny.com has tracked the movement of each Inverted Jenny stamp.

The price paid and the change of ownership are not always made public because of privately negotiated transactions. Any sale that happens through an auction house is recorded and the site has effectively created a collectors DNA for each of the stamps.

Initially bought from the U.S. Post Office for $24.00, the first sale was the entire sheet for $15,000. That was a lot of money back then. It’s nothing compared to the dollars spent after the year 2000. Each subsequent sale has been supportive of continually higher values. Some of the stamp positions have not been seen since the 1950s.

Position 11 is the most recent Inverted Jenny to come to auction on January 7, 2020. Siegel Auctions sold Position 11 for $250,000 at that time. This is not cheap by any means, but the projected estimate of $450,000 caused the auction to be less than some had been hoping for. That said, the previous sale of the same individual stamp was back on January 29, 1977 — for a price of just $45,000.

The Stuart Weitzman collection will be sold by Sotheby’s Auction house on June 8, 2021 along with two other treasures. A 1933 $20 dollar gold piece is unique in that it’s the only example that is legal to own. The British Guiana One-Cent Magenta is the most famous and valuable stamp in the world and is estimated to equal the gold coin at $10 million to $15 million apiece.

The Weitzman block of 4 stamps together or in the sheet terminology are counted as positions 87 and 88 and 97 to 98. This current estimate is $5 million to $7 million.

Collectors care about provenance. Block of 4 was once owned by Kerby Confer, a publishing and broadcasting executive who bought the stamps for $989,000 in 1989. Bill Gross, who was known for over 20 years as The Bond King in financial media, was the next owner after buying the stamp for $2,970,000 in 2005. The sale in 2014 to Weitzman was for a private amount. Sotheby’s expects by estimation the price to double Summer 2021.

It is true that 99.99% of stamps in private collections are worth a penance when compared to the Inverted Jenny. That said, it’s still obvious that even the world’s finest stamps can command millions of dollars at auction.