Armand Rousso in the Phoenix Gazette

Rousso learned early that some stamps were worth more than their postage.

The ones he took to a Chinese restaurant owner he befriended bought him and his cronies countless meals.
Rousso, who now lives in Palm Beach, is hoping to get even more people interested in the $470 million-a-year business, but not through trades in small shops, auction houses or other traditional means. He wants to bring the art of stamp collecting into the computer age with his fledging International Stamp Exchange Corp.
Rousso’s concept is to provide through the Stamp Exchange an elaborate data base that stamp aficionados can tap into-a computerized ticker tape of minute-by-minute prices for thousands of stamps.

“I thought there was a need for a …dealer to be able to follow the market day by day and not just year by year as in the catalogs,” said Rousso, who started his first stamp collecting business in Paris at age 18.
“We’re still entering the stamps in the computer,” he said. “We have complete sets of stamps from Europe, South America, English colonies, Canada, the United States…”

Rousso said he will charge a commission of 3 percent to buyers and 6 percent to sellers for each stamp sold. For the most part, say dealers, both rates are cheaper that standard commissions at auction houses.

Rousso said he also has several dozen brokers worldwide who will make deals through the exchange and 14 independent floor brokers with offices in the Stamp Exchange, who represent big-time stamp dealers.
So far, hundreds of thousands of stamps, worth more than $75 million in Scott’s Catalog value, have been sent to the Stamp Exchange for inclusion in the computer network, he said.