I am by no means an expert on ball python morphs, and constantly find myself having to look up current market prices whenever needed, and I am also not a regular on the ball python forums by any means. But, I do just want to add another point that I haven't seen posted on the "market crashing/not crashing" posts.
In the size of the total US and/or EU economies, ball pythons play such a small role that anyone studying the economies as a whole would laugh before studying the BP market. And for good reason. There aren't that many people involved, and there isn't that much money in the market. Yes, many people dump huge amounts into it, and there are more people jumping on the BP bandwagon, then, say, the cave dwelling rat snake bandwagon. But, as mentioned for other reasons, these snakes only produce 3-12 babies at a time. There is not much product, and therefore very little impact on the economy. Being such a small pocket of the economy also works to it's advantage. The only way the ball python market can collapse is if those inside cause it. If around 10% of the big breeders were to quit the game at the same time, and no one wanted to replace them, there may possibly be a major market fall out. The market isn't related to the real world outside of the obvious part that the member have to have money. New people don't need to join the craze to keep fueling it, there simply need to be casual pet owners to buy some of them. As long as big breeders don't freak out, the good small breeders keep an interest, and naive small breeders continue paying large sums for animals they will never profit from, the market will stand strong.
Part 2, basically, this isn't a business market. Here, people that lose money tend to throw more money in, those that break even put more money in, and those that make money put more money in. As long as it remains the same general pool of people, the prices of old goods will drop, as stated many times, and new goods will still be valuable, as stated many times. But until people simply get sick of paying for a new color (which I doubt any of us will,) the market WILL NOT drop.

[ Show Entire Thread ]