Pay peanut and get monkey

This is a 1980 stamp issued by China, the first one in China Zodiac series.

I bought 2 pieces at about $10 each in 1986. Three years ago, I sold one of them at around $500. That's a return of 50 times or 5000% in 20 year, equivalent to 21.6% compounded annual return. I think not many investments could beat this. I check eBay that current bidding goes as high as US600. A little regret to have sold one. But then again, I still have one more :)

On hind sight, this is obviously a very good investment. Had I threw in $10,000 to buy 1,000 pieces at that time, I would have US600,000 now! But then, actually it is very difficult to identify winners in stamp collection. More so nowadays, as the quantity issue is so large now. I was told that this particular monkey can fetch such a high price because a lot of them were scrapped due poor printing technology at that time. And I think it certainly benefits from the growing purchase power of Chinese stamp collectors.