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Investing in your passsion
Matt Ober
July 24, 2023
In wealth management “held away assets” are investments that your financial advisor typically doesn't have access to unless you manually update them or give them visibility. Some financial advisors will give advice on held-away assets, but not all.
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Investing in your passion is something I have been involved in and have been watching the markets evolve for the last few years. Investing in collectibles like watches, sneakers, trading cards, whiskey, wine, sports memorabilia, and more.
With The National right around the corner, I have been thinking more about how the collectibles industry has changed in the last couple of years. For a while sneakers were a booming market. Every time a limited shoe dropped on SNKRS or there was a special collaboration, the reseller markets on StockX would go crazy given how lucrative it was to flip sneakers. Now that market is dead and very few shoes are good investments except for the very limited ones. Trading cards had their moment which we all can see from the auction results, Netflix specials about Goldin Auctions, and I even remember Josh Luber the founder of StockX running a trading card hedge fund-like vehicle. The trading card market has also seen its peaks and though it’s still exciting with new players and constant changes in sports, the peak of valuations has come down.
The collectibles industry has seen a lot of innovation, consolidation, & new technology; and I believe has a lot of future opportunities. With investors holding all these collectible investments, advisors need tools to view these held-away assets, value them, potentially hedge them, and track them. This type of tooling, data, and services is also needed by insurance companies, asset managers, vaults, corporations in the collectibles industry, and sophisticated investors. I am waiting to see the large financial information services and technology providers step in and lead this industry. We need investable indices, liquidity providers, transparency, and derivative capabilities. I think the time is coming soon and I imagine the household names in financial services are going to start investing in this space. They always say the best time to invest is when the markets are down.
I have said this in the past, but the collectibles data and technology reminds me a lot of early financial services information and technology- lots of opaqueness, lots of trading venues, a need for transparency, a need for a market data leader, a need for consolidation and lots of opportunities!
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