By Insider Envy Staff
By Insider Envy Staff
Probably the most popular financial advice given to people both young and old is ‘start investing early,’ and ‘diversify your portfolio.’ But whether you’re a seasoned investor or just beginning to dip your toe, anything more than a regular, incremental deposit into an ETF can feel daunting and risky.
But what causes this anxiety and insecurity around investing? For starters, information on what you’re actually investing in can be hard to find, the market feels increasingly turbulent, and alternative investments, such as commodities or real estate, require too much capital at the outset to make a meaningful investment. It’s almost impossible to find an investment that feels safe, solid, and provides consistent returns.
One of the buzziest alternative investments to diversify your portfolio with is the world of Contemporary fine art. Artprice, the leading source of information on the present day art market, found that blue-chip art prices have outpaced the S&P by 131% over the last 26 years. Plus, there is a low correlation between the success of the Stock Market vs. the appreciation of fine art over time, protecting that portion of your portfolio from turbulence.
But the problem remains that a strong investment in fine art requires not only a massive amount of initial capital to make an investment, but also a remarkable knowledge of trends and value in the world of Contemporary fine art.
One platform that is making alternative investments in fine art more accessible is Masterworks. The concept is simple: you can invest in a smaller share of a physical piece of fine art that is owned by Masterworks itself. The pieces in question, from Banksy, Warhol, Picasso and more, have been selected by experts in the field – they are handling the research and Art History knowledge, and investors can just reap the benefits.
Masterworks is also gaining traction for the transparency and accessibility of their platform. Their website and mobile app are both incredibly user-friendly and easy to navigate, featuring the most comprehensive price database to understand appreciation rate by artist market. Plus, they provide artist information, so users can be familiar and excited about the pieces they have a stake in.
This positive user experience wouldn’t be anything to write home about, though, if it wasn’t for Masterworks’ proven history of positive returns. It’s easy to be pretty floored by their success rates: with 21 successful exits to date, including net annualized returns of +14.6%, +17.8% and +36.2%, they are outperforming the S&P in massive numbers.
If you are looking for both safety and portfolio diversity, a combination that is famously hard to find, fine art is your best option. And if you want to enter that world with a low buy-in, we don’t know a platform better than Masterworks on which to do it. Plus – it’s pretty cool to be able to say you own a Picasso… even if it’s just .05% of one.
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by Insider Envy Staff