When you buy a box of baseball cards, you pay $XXX. Then, you review the cards you purchased in that box and allocate the $XXX you spent to the cards in that box. So if you have one Mickey Mantle and one Roger Maris in the box and the rest are players who played 5 games in the Majors and never got a hit, you allocate YY% of $XXX to Mickey and ZZ% of $XXX to Roger. You are using the relative fair market value of the asset to allocate your cost (which we hope is a bargain purchase) to the assets you purchased. My friend had a wonderful tee shirt: I was a Millionaire until my Mother threw out my Baseball Cards!
