Do you love roller coasters? Many people take pleasure in the buzz involved and never quite manage to “grow up” as we continue to relish that summertime visit to a theme park, simply for kicks. Doing an inverted loop and screaming together with your buddies is one thing, but it’s not the kind of adventure that you want to indulge in every day while you view your retirement nest egg become susceptible to the intense vagaries of the current trading markets.
We have rarely seen such lack of stability as we have been noting in recent times. We’re well aware that it has much to do with the exploding housing bubble and what we now realise to be an unsustainable growth in equity during that time. Whether an investment in the stock trading game is a good idea now or not is open to significant discussion, in particular since the political parties whose job it really is to try to stabilise a tough economy seem to be somewhat inefficient.
If you are not really confident whether you should be putting quite as much of your hard-earned money and resources into stocks and shares, how many other options are there? A lot of the best financial advisers propose that you should diversify even during the healthiest of times. Property is customarily a wise idea, but other positions could possibly be regarded too. How about art for instance? Have you ever considered whether fine art investment could be a considerable and potentially rewarding portion of your plan for the longer term?
On the surface looking in, if you’re not really experienced here, the first perception would be that fine art can indeed return some considerable profits, particularly as we hear from time to time about those incredible prices at Sotheby’s. Are those particular speculators just fortunate, being at the absolute right place at the correct time or is there something to be said for thinking about fine art as a genuine investment decision?
We might try taking some encouragement from the work of two professors at the Stern School of business at New York University. Jiangping Mei and Michael Moses put a great deal of time and effort into creating what they later considered to be the Mei Moses Finite Index. They used certain formulae and a dedicated method to compile and discover exactly how fine art had done over time, to find out what type of investment was likely.
They focused on the effort of experienced artists and fundamentally computed the real difference between the original sales price and the most recent sales price at important auction halls in London or NYC. Some of their effort is indeed eye-opening and in one particular case these folks were able to assess that a Turner original painting of the city of Venice yielded a solid 6% annual return over a period of more than a century (from the date of its initial sale to its most recent auction release in NY) for about $35 million. Hardly to be sniffed at and in the long run almost certainly a much better return than a few of the even more recognised stocks on the traditional stock market. Maybe you should have one more look into those signed limited edition prints you had been taking into consideration?