+ a few billion. Most of my patients think I am madder than they are.
One of the consultant psychiatrists collects toy soldiers! Well, that is mad. :P
Like you say, it could be Japanese koi carp - or Israeli ones if you aren't a millionaire. A really good Japanese one can go for a couple of million.
Or it could be cameras. I used to work for a place (now defunct) that sold more Leicas than anywhere else in the UK. For their 65th/70th/75th anniversary (I can't now remember which, this was 30 years ago) they issued a bunch of gold plated ones. My boss bought several - at around $10,000 each.
And sold them for waaaay more than that.
The SLR variant was the Leica R3. Leitz (The company that made them) were owned by Wild - a Swiss company who made theodolites and were a NATO contractor. There are serious issues with being a NATO contractor - one of them is that you can only buy components from other NATO contractors (Think ISO 9000, years before ISO 9000). The appropriate NATO contractor for electronics was a company (Thankfully now defunct) called Ferranti. While the electronics were designed by Minolta in Japan (Who are not NATO contractors), they were built by Ferranti in Scotland. They were not very good - in fact they were @W$£^%$ junk. The Leica R3 cost 5x as much as the Minolta (something)700, but electronically the Minolta was roughly a million times better. Press a Leica R3 at a certain point on the base plate and it had to go back to the factory for a new set of electronics - this on a $2000 camera body. I did this more than once. The optics were incredible but the rest was a nightmare - and I hated their rep so made life hard for him.
The Leica R3 was a wonderful idea but a bit marred in the execution.
True story.
Anyway - the boss bought about a dozen of the gold-plated R3's for silly money - we got a really good deal on the price as we sold a lot of Leitz/Leica kit. Even if the R3 was a POS and gold plating it just made it a polished turd.
The gold-plated ones sold for around what I got paid in the average decade. They were not very good but were fantastically expensive and not very good. It would have been well worthwhile paying an engineering shop Swiss rates to make it take Leitz optics - you would still have been well ahead of the game. Till you saw the price list for Leica optics.
There is now one of the gold-plated Leica R3s left. And is advertised globally.
This guy (I couldn't pronounce his name in 1982 so have no chance of remembering it in 2011) flew to Edinburgh from Japan. First Class.
To take a look at this wonder camera.
Apparently, breaking the seal on the box would have halved its value. But he wanted to make sure there was actually a camera in the box. So he phoned the local hospital (Edinburgh Royal Infirmary) and arranged to have the box X-Rayed at a cost of around $400. So I went with him to ERI with the boxed camera where it was duly X-Rayed and the films given to him (This guaranteed that the electronics were now completely destroyed - the camera would no longer work). then we went back to the shop and the lunatic paid $17000 for it.
Tell that to anyone who thinks flashlight collecting is crazy.
While i probably own more lights than any six other people around here, there is not one of them that I haven't used. And there is not one of them that I'd be afraid to damage.
I can't understand the fringe collectors. Apart from anything else, I don't have that sort of money and would probably give it away if I did.
But the whisky I drink would be a whole lot nicer. Look up Port Ellen for the finest examples of the art. Unfortunately they demolished the distillery 30 years ago.