Armand Rousso in the Herald Telephone

A 35-year-old French0born millionaire wants to rejuvenate the hobby of stamp collecting and make money in the process.

Rousso, the owner and chairman of the International Stamp Exchange Corp. of Miami Beach, believes he can revive interest in philately with a combination of publicity and the lure of profit.

In the exchange, which opened in October and which Rousso expects to be fully operational later this month, descriptions of each stamp, including the owners’ asking price, are fed into a computer. Potential buyers, dealers, or individuals who have computers can see the exchange’s listings of stamps and enter bids on them. If the bid equals the price asked, the sale is automatically completed by the exchange. If the bid is lower, the seller can choose to accept it.

There are stamp publications and associations in practically every country. Individual stamps or collections are ordinarily sold at auctions. Worldwide, the stamp market is estimated at $450 million a year.
A generation ago, a typical stamp collector would try to complete a particular collection he was interest in. Today, Rousso believes, many younger collectors are adding $200 to $500 in stamps to their collections annually, partly for pleasure but also in the hope of eventual profit.

According to Rousso and other experts, about 95 percent of the children who star collecting stamps when they are 10 years old abandon the hobby by the time they reach 15.

“Today young people have many distractions and this is why all of us who are in this sector must do something to create a new generation of stamp collectors,” he said in an interview. “After all it is one of the least expensive hobbies. You can start it with $25, and some of the stamps obtained for next to nothing can appreciate a hundred times in 20 or 30 years.”

Rousso says his approach to stamp trading has some detractors. Among them are experts who, he says, do not like the publicity about selling prices, older dealers who cannot adjust to the modern technology he uses and auctioneers who believe-erroneously, he says-that he will take business away from them.
For his part, Rousso contends that is his computerized exchange increases the number of people who buy and sell stamps by 10 percent, everybody in the sector will benefit.