Monday, January 2, 2017

Liquid Assets: Fine Wine Index Posts Biggest Gains In Six Years

Too much with the "liquid assets" bit?
I think so too,
In 2017, I resolve...ummm...I'm sorry, I can't do this. I know it will happen again.

From The Telegraph:
It has been a vintage year for investors in fine wines as the index price surged by a quarter to five year highs in its strongest rally since 2010 as the slide in sterling tempted US and Asian buyers back to the UK-based market.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/business/2016/12/30/finewine-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqIyylyHPsyHInjulRlAypDRYVYuvyXpD9WJyJCnSYsF0.jpg


Global fine wine marketplace Liv-Ex raised a glass to a 28pc increase in its index of top 50 most heavily traded wines which reached its highest level since 2011. Meanwhile the market’s broadest index, the Liv-Ex 1000, successively breached its all-time record highs in the last four consecutive months after surging 21pc in a year.

Bordeaux continues to hold the lion’s share of the fine wine market at 74.4pc as the Bordeaux 500 index climbed 21.8pc from last year.

Tom Gearing, founder of investment management company Cult Wines, said the market has seen a steady return of US investors due to the strength of the dollar compared to the weaker pound....MORE
...Data compiled by Cult Wines shows that a £5,000 investment in the FTSE 100 in 1984 would now be worth £34,473 whereas the same investment in 18 cases of Lafite Rothschild 1982 would be worth £698,832....
Now kids, that's a mountain chart!
As noted in the introduction to a 2011 post:
After the market puked into the last hour on Friday (although somehow closing higher than the low for the day) I thought of the run up to the crash in 1987.
The market hit its then all-time high on August 25, 1987, memorable, if for nothing else, for the mountain chart that Fidelity ran as a full page ad in that day's Wall Street Journal. That sucker looked like the Eiger, lots of vertical.* Of course they were focusing on the almost-five-years-to-the-day upward climb.

They didn't know that their ad would run on the day the market would turn south

The decline from that point was slow and easy until October. Steady, 2722 to 2600 meandering like a river coming out of the mountains, out of the meadow.

http://www.stockpickssystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/1987-Stock-Market-Crash-Chart.gifNot scary, dropping a little, up a little until...
The DJIA closed at 2640 on both Oct. 2 and Oct. 5. Hmmm...

Then a 10.8% drop in 9 days, Holy crap, these are class V rapids!
On Friday the 16th we hit class VI: "Danger to life and limb".

London trading was closed because of the "Great Storm" so everything pent up and the "portfolio insurance" stuff had to be done in New York. In whitewater terms the water ran into constriction.
That Friday the DJIA was down a then record 108 points.

And then, just like real life, it got worse.

Toward the end of the day, over the roar of the rapids was the sound of.....
...a waterfall.

Black Monday's 508 point, 22.6% collapse was the first and worst waterfall decline I had ever experienced.
I thought about it and the riverine imagery leading up to it after the close this Friday....

*North face of the Eiger:

source http://www.hkvysehrad.cz/obrazky/eiger_nordwand.jpg