It's easy making money online when you find auction lots like this to bid on! There's multiple sets, and a number of varieties on the Trans-Tasman. Beautiful.

Here's a few examples of why my preferred buying method is individual items over collections. It takes time, but the returns are worth the effort. The benefits are that you know exactly what you're getting, you have no remaindered collections to dispose of, and you can easily calculate selling prices and anticipated profit margins 1st image - PNG 1960 6d Postal Charges - bought for $10 from the US - sold for $36 2nd image - Saar 1921 5m - bought for $1.50 from the UK - sold for $10 3rd image - NZ 1893 2d Lighthouse with Z flaw - bought for $15 from Canada - sold for $50 4th image - Netherlands 1951 Seagulls - bought for $62 from Canada - sold for $160 Expenditure $88.50, sales value $256, profit after fees around $150

I prefer buying small lots or single items for resale, which is why I rarely have over 1,000 items for sale. This little "ugly duckling" arrived today. It's Trinidad SG18 (1d) Slate-blue, and it looks the worse for wear. In fact it's VFU with four clear margins, as SG comments "(October 1858). Impression less distinct, and rarely showing more than traces of background lines". This is as good as this issue looks, although I'll give it a bath to clear 168 years of dirt and grime. Catalogue value is £850. I paid £75 including postage from an auction site in Sweden

I was sorting KGV heads yesterday. The shade variations on the 1d Violet intrigue me, and I found a dozen stamps that appear to my eye to be different shades. SG, unhelpfully, states "shades", with red-violet as the only shade mentioned separately. BW lists eight shades. I entered this image into chatgpt with the following prompt: "this image shows 12 copies of the same stamp, all with different shade nuances. Using british philatelic descriptions of colour and shade from resources such as stanley gibbons, identify the shade of each stamp (row 1 is numbers 1 to 6, row 2 is numbers 7 to 12)" This is the reply: Fun problem — but I need to start with an important caveat: exact shade attribution from a photographed image is inherently unreliable. Lighting, white balance, camera sensor, screen calibration, and compression all shift colour. Even professional dealers avoid calling precise Gibbons shades from photos unless the image is colour-controlled and compared against a reference chart. So what I can do is: 👉 describe the closest Stanley Gibbons–style shade terminology based on relative comparison within your image, not absolute catalog certainty. These appear to be 1d violet KGV issues (Australia), where Gibbons uses terms like rosine, mauve, aniline rose, dull purple, reddish purple, bright violet, etc. I’m judging by hue temperature (red vs blue bias), saturation, and ink density. 1 - Dull mauve-purple 2 - Rosine-purple 3 - Bright violet 4 - Violet-purple 5 - Rosine 6 - Deep-violet 7 - Pale Dull mauve 8 - Reddish-purple 9 - Dull purple 10 - Bright violet-purple 11 - Aniline rosine 12 - Deep purple It's going to take a lot more research to clarify if chatgpt's answer reconciles with known shade variations, but I think that it's a positive outcome for a first attempt

I sit here in hot, sunny, Queensland, listing stamps for sale. On the other side of the planet, a collector in Gibraltar sees one of my listings and buys it. Gibraltar has a population under 40,000, at least one of whom is a stamp collector! My first sale to this destination.