Quote Originally Posted by elevatethis View Post
Its very interesting that a couple of years ago, you'd read a lot of forum posts expressing how great of an investment ball morphs were. Suddenly a lot of the same people changed their tun and leaned more towards "its a great hobby that you can break even with."

I believe that there are a few factors for the price drops:

- Increased supply. Obviously.
- Less demand. Not many people are entering the market anymore. Also, not many people are willing to incur large weekly feeder bills or invest a lot of money into caging.
- No market unity. Too many back door deals and price slashing, no one has any confidence in the market anymore and aren't willing to invest large sums of money out of fear of losing their "investment."

Just my .02....
Wasn't a lot of the initial excitement spurred by high price tags of a few morphs in particular? "Oh my gosh, Joe just sold an albino for $20,000!". It sort of reminds me when the real estate boom and flipping houses took off...everybody wanted a piece of the action until they realized it was hard work and not worth as much money as they saw on TV.

I think one thing that helps control supply is that ball's have relatively small clutches compared with some animals (40 bearded dragons at a time, for example), and they can be a little picky when it comes to breeding.

I feel like demand is just going up and up, but maybe I'm missing something here. A breeder from of mine produced about 1000 eggs last year, and says he hopes to get that number to 5000 in the next couple years.

Is there there such a thing as a back door deal? If a market is "free" then producers can sell at whatever price they want.

JonV