Handbags are useful things. Not only can you put your stuff in them, but they can also, to a certain extent, insulate you from the skittishness of investors. Sales of luxury goods maker Hermès' ready-to-wear range were flat in the last quarter, but the French label's leather-goods division, which includes the coveted Birkin and Kelly handbags, actually grew 9.4%. Still, “the halo effect of the Birkin doesn't make Hermès completely immune from a slowdown, it just buys the company more time than its rivals”, says Carol Ryan in The Wall Street Journal. But the premium that Birkins and Kellys command on the secondary market has come under pressure.

That raises questions “as to whether Hermès's allure is waning amid a slew of new products from rivals, most notably Chanel, but also LVMH's Dior”, says Andrea Felsted on Bloomberg. The volume of Birkin and Kelly handbags on the secondary market in the US is three times bigger than in 2020, according to analysts at Swiss bank UBS, which suggests demand has slumped. That said, the bags still command a premium over their store-bought counterparts, even if rival Chanel isn't exactly helping. Chanel has “caused a frenzy with handbags designed by its new creative director, Matthieu Blazy,” says Felsted. “Resale values for Hermès bags have moderated… Notably, the premium at which Hermès Birkin, Kelly, Mini Kelly and Kelly Pochette change hands in the secondary market compared with retail prices has fallen from its peak in 2022”. That doesn't make them a bad investment. A recent study by vintage handbag shop FashioNica found that while the US benchmark S&P 500 stock index returned 43% between 2022 and now (ie, a full market cycle, according to the authors), the Hermès Mini Kelly II bag did even better, gaining 302%. Good things do come in small sizes.

For a long time, the Birkin and Kelly 25s (so called because the base of the bags measures 25cm across) were considered mini bags. Then, in 2019, Hermès released the Birkin 20 – in particular the Birkin 20 Faubourg, modelled on the Hermès' flagship shop front in Paris. In the years since, says Aurelie Vassy for Sotheby's, “the Birkin 20 has evolved from a conceptual design into one of the most sought-after mini handbags in the collector market”. “While Hermès has not officially released a standard leather version [of the Birkin 20], collectors anticipate one based on the success of the Mini Kelly II,” says Vassy. “If introduced, it would probably become one of the most in-demand bags in the Hermès line-up.”

What to look for in a mini bag

Hermès mini bags hold their value particularly well on the secondary market. Several Mini Kellys in exotic skins and rare finishes appeared at Heritage Auctions' spring sale last month, including one Matte Vert D'eau Alligator, which sold for $41,250, including the buyer's premium. The features that determine a bag's value are the material, the colour, vintage, rarity, whether it is a limited edition, which styles are currently in fashion and the overall condition of the bag.

Mini bags made from exotic skins, such as Niloticus Crocodile or Matte Alligator, are sought after by collectors. Sotheby's has a Beton Matte Mississippiensis Alligator Birkin 25 with gold hardware from 2023 to buy now for $98,000. The secondary market also places large premiums on new seasonal colours within the first year after release, says Aurelie Vassy for Sotheby's. If offered the opportunity to buy a new mini bag, it can make sense to sell into the resale market during the period when “demand is high and supply remains limited”. That's doubly true if the style is bold and the bag has attracted the attention of other collectors. Such limited editions can command hefty premiums. In March 2025, a limited edition Day Faubourg Birkin fetched $152,400 with Sotheby's in New York, which was slightly above its high pre-sale estimate.

The mark of a good collection isn't how big it is, but how well curated. So, don't be afraid to sell some of your collection if it means you can acquire bags that are a better fit. “As collectors [also] become more experienced, many begin to focus less on what is newly available and more on what is increasingly difficult to find,” says Vassy. “This is often the point at which a Birkin collection shifts from boutique buying to true collecting.”

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The Pokémon cards phenomenon may have passed you by, but many specialist investors are now paying hundreds of thousands of pounds – or even millions – for the rarest Pokémon assets.

Pokémon is a Japanese media franchise, launched in 1996, featuring more than 1,000 fictional characters with special powers and features. Their human owners can train these creatures and send them into battle against other game players. Pokémon began as a video game series, but has rapidly expanded with the launch of TV shows, films, toys and trading cards.

Today, it's the Pokémon cards that are really attracting attention, partly from Pokémon players who compete in national and international tournaments and want the most powerful characters, but also from collectors and, increasingly, investors.

Take the specialist auction of Pokémon cards held at auction house Stanley Gibbons Baldwin's in London last month. The centrepiece of the sale, a first-edition Base Set Charizard card, raised £442,800, and the total proceeds from the sale reached almost £750,000.

And while those sums are striking, they look small beer compared with a US auction held a few weeks previously. At that sale, AJ Scaramucci, the son of former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci, agreed to pay an astonishing $16.5 million for a Pikachu Illustrator card dating from 1998. He bought the card from social-media influencer Logan Paul, who had paid $5.3 million for it in 2021.

Why are Pokémon cards so appealing?

Roy Raftery, head of trading cards at Stanley Gibbons Baldwin's, says that while this year's 30th anniversary of the launch of Pokémon has buoyed interest in the market, investors' appetite has been growing for some time. “There are collectors and investors in the US, the Middle East and in Asia who will pay almost any price for the cards they really want,” he says. “They work with scouts who go round the world looking to acquire the most highly prized cards on their behalf.” Data from Card Ladder, an analytics firm that tracks trading-card prices and sales, underlines the point. Its “Pokémon index” of card prices on the secondary market is up by 145% over the past 12 months alone.

As in all collectables markets, it's the older, rarer Pokémon cards that attract the highest prices – with good-condition cards selling at a premium. That has piqued the interest of Pokémon fans, both present and past.

Could a long-forgotten collection of Pokémon cards, now languishing in a bedroom cupboard, contain a priceless item? Probably not, but it's worth taking a look and doing a bit of research. Each Pokémon card carries details of its name and set number. You can then search resources, such as eBay's listings of sold items, to see what an individual card might be worth. Services such as Collectr, PriceCharting and Rare Candy can also be useful. Often, you can use your phone to scan a card to identify and price it.

Part of the fun with Pokémon cards is that they are still being printed – and rare Pokémon cards can be resold at decent prices. “Every set has really cool cards, but the occasional one is like the Willy Wonka golden ticket,” says Raftery. “You can go into a corner shop, spend a few pounds on a pack of cards, and end up with one that's worth £200, or even £2,000 if you get lucky.”

At this end of the market, it is fans who will be most active, buying and selling cards as much for the love of the game as in the hope of making money. And in any case, it makes sense to be circumspect about the investment potential of the cards. The price rises of recent times have been eye-catching, but collectables markets can be volatile and unpredictable. Highly fashionable assets can fall from favour quickly if investors lose interest and move on to something else.

Equally, even if you're only spending modest sums, tread carefully. As with any market where money is flowing, Pokémon cards attract their fair share of grifters. Raftery advises collectors to be very careful about buying cards on platforms, such as eBay and TikTop Shop, where it can be difficult to check the seller's credentials and to authenticate genuine cards. “There are definitely growing numbers of fakes out there,” he warns.

Pokémon cards have fans of all ages

If in doubt, steer clear – and if you are thinking about spending more, it's important to investigate provenance. Organisations such as PSA specialise in authenticating trading cards and can often offer assessments remotely. Bona-fide traders will usually be able to provide you with verifiable information from such organisations.

There has also been a spike in thefts, with criminals targeting gaming shops in the hope of finding valuable cards. One retailer in Peterborough lost £100,000 of stock following a break-in earlier this year. Insurers subsequently advised anyone with valuable Pokémon cards to make sure they had itemised these on their home contents policies.

None of which is intended to put you off the Pokémon phenomenon, which continues to have real appeal for fans of all ages. One reason that highly desirable cards are so widely coveted is that multiple generations have now grown up playing the game, including older fans who may today have significant wealth at their disposal.

By all means, have some fun with Pokémon cards – and there's always the chance of making a handsome profit. Pokémon probably won't be your pension fund, but in a world of mythical creatures with special powers, you never quite know when the magic might strike.

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Private equity has always been the VIP room of investing. Big institutions got in. You didn't. Now the velvet rope is coming down. From 6 April, the FCA has given the green light to make long-term asset funds eligible for stocks and shares ISAs. But should you add private equity to your ISA?

Schroders and Hargreaves Lansdown have already partnered to list the first on a major retail platform. The government, keen to channel household savings into the real economy, is backing the push. Ordinary investors, we're told, can finally share in returns once reserved for the wealthy.

It sounds good. But two recent papers – Ludovic Phalippou at Oxford Saïd and Nori Gerardo Lietz at Harvard Business School – take it apart. What's being democratised, they argue, isn't the upside. It's the cost, the complexity and the risk.

So, should you add private equity to your stocks and shares ISA?

Will private equity in my ISA see strong returns?

The case for private equity rests on one claim: superior returns for your ISA. The numbers behind that claim don't hold up.

Take the industry's favourite metric, the internal rate of return (IRR). Phalippou shows it doesn't measure what most people think.

Investment firm KKR reported a gross IRR since inception of roughly 25.5% across 18 consecutive annual filings. Sounds extraordinary. But IRR tracks the timing of cash moving in and out of a fund, not the rate at which your wealth compounds. If you treated that 25.5% as a compound annual return, you'd arrive at what Phalippou calls 'implausibly large' terminal wealth. A number built to impress, not inform.

Compare private equity against public markets on a like-for-like basis and the picture shifts. Lietz matches the actual cash flows of private equity funds against equivalent investments in the S&P 500 using Pitchbook's public market equivalent methodology.

Over the past 15 years, private equity's edge has vanished – for the trailing five years, it's negative at -4.62%. The premium that justified the whole exercise no longer exists.

You can't fix this by picking better managers. Performance persistence among buyout funds has disappeared for vintages after 2000. Sort managers into quartiles at fundraising and there's no significant difference in final outcomes. The idea that a retail platform will consistently spot the winners is a fantasy.

Where does the money really go when you invest in private equity?

Even if private equity delivered the returns its marketing promises, fees would eat most of them before they reached you.

Phalippou calculates that standard institutional private equity fees already consume about 7% of returns annually: management charges, performance fees and the portfolio-company costs that rarely appear in headline figures. Retail wrappers add roughly another three percentage points for distribution, platform and oversight. The Schroders Capital Global Private Equity LTAF, one of the first products heading for ISA shelves, carries wrapper charges exceeding 2% a year. That's before the underlying fund costs.

Lietz's fund-of-funds data is the closest preview of what retail buyers will actually experience, since platforms and target-date managers add a comparable fee layer. The result: consistent underperformance, with a return multiple below 1.0 across nearly every period she examined.

Then there are the valuations. In traditional private equity, a questionable net asset value (NAV) was an accounting curiosity. In open-ended retail funds, investors buy and sell at reported net asset values, so every mark has direct cash consequences.

In 2024, Hamilton Lane's retail fund bought private equity stakes at roughly 80% of stated NAV and marked them to 100% the next day. That's not a rounding error. It's a wealth transfer from incoming investors to existing holders, booked as a gain.

LTAFs work the same way. Valuations are monthly. Redemption notice periods run to at least 90 days. Buy in at an optimistic mark and you can't get out fast; worse, you may be subsidising someone else's exit.

The Woodford echo

We've been here before. The Woodford Equity Income fund didn't collapse because one manager made bad calls. It collapsed because the structure was unsound: illiquid assets inside a vehicle promising daily dealing. Ordinary savers bore the full cost – see our article on how Woodford investors are suing Hargreaves Lansdown.

LTAFs are better designed. The notice period exists to prevent a run. But the deeper tension hasn't gone away. The Financial Conduct Authority classifies these funds as 'restricted mass market investments', yet the new targeted support regime lets platforms actively nudge savers toward them. And from April 2027, under-65s will be capped at £12,000 in a cash ISA, pushing anyone who wants to use their full £20,000 allowance toward investment products. The alternatives are being narrowed at the same time as the risks are being widened. Phalippou's verdict: litigation is 'not merely possible but predictable'.

A simpler route to private equity exposure

If you want exposure to private equity's economics, there's a cheaper and more liquid option.

Lietz found that a basket of publicly listed private equity firms comfortably outperformed their own flagship private funds.

In the trailing five years to December 2024, US-listed private equity stocks beat their firms' private vehicles by an average of 23%. You get transparent pricing, daily liquidity and full exposure to the management fees, carried interest and asset growth that drive private equity profits.

Put simply, the best way to profit from private equity is to skip the expensive products and buy the companies selling them.

If a platform does offer you an LTAF in your ISA this spring, ask three questions before committing. What is the total annual cost across all layers? What are the redemption terms in a stress scenario? And who values the fund? If you can't get straight answers, that tells you everything you need to know.

The VIP room is opening its doors. Check what the drinks cost before you walk in.

The Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2026, written by Dr Clare McAndrew, the founder of Arts Economics, a research firm, has added some detail to what we largely knew already – that the global art market returned to growth in 2025 following two years of falling sales values.

Global sales last year rose 4% year-on-year to an estimated $59.6 billion. However, that was still below the peak in 2022 when the art market rebounded after the pandemic and the number of transactions rose by just 2%.

The gains, which finally came in the second half of 2025, “were driven by renewed confidence… and strength at the high end [of the art market] in particular”, says Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, which organises art fairs around the world.

Sales at public auctions rose 9% from a year earlier, but much of the activity was confined to works priced above $10 million. Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-1916), for instance, sold for an astonishing $236 million last November with Sotheby's in New York. That's the second-highest-ever price paid for an artwork at auction.

In the dealer sector, sales rose 2% to an estimated $34.8bn, reversing two years of declines. Private sales at auction houses, however, dipped 5%. So, the art market recovery wasn't felt across the board.

Britain is a major art market

The UK has hung on to its position as the second-largest art market in the world, accounting for 18% of global sales by value ($10.5 billion), the same as in 2024. China, in third place, saw its share decline by one percentage point to 14% – a symptom, perhaps, of its struggling economy and property sector. Activity in other Asian and emerging markets also increased.

The US remains the titan of the art world. Its $26 billion in sales in 2025, up 5% year-on-year, translated into a 44% share of the art market – a one percentage-point uptick from 2024. Together, the US, Britain and China accounted for 76% of global sales by value.

“Policy unpredictability”, as the report puts it, from the White House kept the market guessing in 2025. Imports of art and antiques to the US, which fuels some major sales, rose 13% in value to $9.9 billion (and exports fell 1%) as buyers and sellers tried to negotiate their way around US tariffs.

This year has brought yet more uncertainty due to the conflict in the Middle East. “Markets do not move in isolation,” says Horowitz. “They reflect the ambitions, perspectives, pressures and uncertainties of the world around them.” Will the war be enough to reverse last year's uneven recovery? We don't yet know. The art market, McAndrew tells the Financial Times, operates in a “volatile geopolitical environment, particularly regarding cross-border trade, the full implications of which are still unfolding in 2026”.

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Collectors of rare books, and of those written by the Brontë sisters in particular, won’t mind that Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights takes considerable liberties with Emily Brontë’s Gothic novel, published in 1847 under her nom de plume, Ellis Bell.

Or that, in the words of The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, it has turned it into “a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness”.

“Major screen adaptations have a long history of reigniting interest in literary originals, and this latest Wuthering Heights is no exception,” says Charles Ashton, a director at Cambridge-based auction house Cheffins.

“With an A-list cast and media frenzy, the film is introducing a younger, Gen-Z audience to the wonder of the Brontës,” he says.

That can only be a good thing for prices of related first editions and rare-book collecting more generally – even if there might not be quite so many “bodices ripped to shreds”, as Bradshaw puts it, in the original text.

Establishing provenance is important when it comes to starting a collection of rare first editions, as is the condition of the books and the printing editions.

“First editions remain the pinnacle, but early later editions, original cloth bindings and works published under the Bell pseudonyms are all highly desirable,” says Ashton.

“Other things to look out for are any author-inscribed title pages (which would be a great rarity), ownership signatures of famous people of the day or associates of the Brontës – or, indeed, any early edition in the original binding in really good condition,” he says.

A couple of years ago, Cheffins sold a first edition of Wuthering Heights for £46,000, along with a copy of Anne Brontë’s 1848 novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for £13,000 and an early edition of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë for £2,800.

Beware of unscrupulous dealers in rare books

Collectors also need to be wary of rare books that have been “overly restored or interfered with”, says Ashton.

The book’s authenticity can be called into question if it has been “repaired many times” and any inscriptions contained therein should also be verified as being real.

“There have been scenarios in the past where unscrupulous dealers may have added inscriptions, bringing up the values of the books, and these are not always genuine,” he says. “It’s really important… for people to do their homework before they buy.”

First editions do pop up for sale at the larger auction houses from time to time.

Sotheby’s has a “first American edition” of Wuthering Heights from 1848 for sale at £10,000. But a “young or new collector” might be better off keeping an eye on the more regional auctioneers, where prices can sometimes be “more affordable”, says Ashton.

“The books which we sell at Cheffins tend to come from large country houses where families are downsizing, or house clearance scenarios, which can often bring about some really exciting finds.”

Other highly collectable rare books

Other genres of books are also highly collectable. Science fiction and fantasy novels, for example, were some of the most sought-after at US-based Heritage Auctions’ rare book sale in December.

A three-volume first edition set of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien from the mid-1950s (pictured) sold for $250,000, including the buyer’s premium – more than double the previous auction record for an unsigned set of the works.

The three books in their original dust jackets – The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King – were listed by Heritage as being in “very fine, unrestored condition”.

“Long recognised as the defining achievement of 20th-century fantasy literature, the record-setting result underscores the growing recognition of science fiction and fantasy as foundational pillars of serious rare book collecting,” the auction house said.

Elsewhere in the same sale, a rare autograph manuscript note written by Tolkien in the author’s distinctive hand in the form of a late-stage revision to The Return of the King, fetched $87,500, including fees.

In addition, a first edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes from 1914, sold for $37,500; an inscribed initial copy of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot (1950) made $20,000; and a first edition copy of Dune (1965), Frank Herbert’s seminal novel that “reshaped modern science fiction”, sold for $13,125. The 610 lots in the sale made $2.1 million.

A more recent classic is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from 1997. Auction house Sotheby’s has a “first paperback edition” to “buy now” on its website, priced at £15,000.

“Combining cultural significance, scarcity, and strong... demand, this first paperback edition stands as an essential acquisition for collectors of modern literature and landmark first editions,” says the auction house.

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Of the major art fairs to visit London every year, Frieze London (14-18 October 2026) is the elite event – serious, monied and glamorous. The London Art Fair, held last week, is a little more relaxed. And welcoming the neophytes to the world of art collecting is the Affordable Art Fair – smiling, approachable and fun.

The first edition of the Affordable Art Fair was held in Battersea Park in October 1999 and it has since spread to 16 cities worldwide, with Houston, Texas, added to the list this year. But there are, in fact, three Affordable Art Fairs held in London – two in Battersea (spring and autumn) down by the River Thames and one in Hampstead in north London. The next Fair is in Battersea from 4-8 March 2026. Last week, I met up with Hugo Barclay, the Affordable Art Fair’s UK fair director, to find out more.

“We’re predominantly gallery-led, which means galleries take a space at the fair to promote their artists,” says Barclay. Artworks from 900-1,000 artists are typically on show across the galleries, so there is “a huge amount of stuff to see”. The Affordable Art Fair also goes out of its way not to make art “intimidating”. First-time buyers can buy a print for as little as £100, while the top end of the price range for artworks is £10,000. “So, the idea is you can afford at least something. However deep your pockets are, there’s going to be something for everybody,” he says.

Galleries have to “rotate 90% of their roster of artists” between the Spring and Autumn editions to keep the offering “fresh”. And galleries must also put prices on artworks, because negotiating a sale with a gallery can be “daunting” for the uninitiated. Can you still haggle, I ask.

That’s a “conversation you have with the galleries”, says Barclay. It “depends on the gallery and their relationship with the artist”, as well as demand for similar pieces.

The Affordable Art Fair is a grand day out in London

However, the Fair isn’t all about art. “It’s a day out,” he says. Visitors can buy “nice food and we do some talks, we do tours and workshops, as well as in the evenings to bring in the late crowd”. Weekends, in particular, are family-orientated. The Fair has activity packs for children, who can follow an “art trail” to learn about art.

Learning about art as a child wasn’t a problem for Barclay. Both of his parents were artists, who moved from Britain to southwest France. “One of my first purchases was a Sayed Raza,” an Indian artist who spent six decades working in France from the 1950s. “It’s such a beautiful, abstract work and I guess it just resonated with me,” he says. But buying art doesn’t have to be “love at first sight”. Sometimes, you see a work and it connects with you and sometimes, it doesn’t.

There has to be a “level of pragmatism” involved when “unpacking stories”, he says. Put another way, sometimes an artwork grows on you. Barclay now lives in Edinburgh with his collection of 60-odd pieces.

The appetite for art is growing

Can the lower end of the art market in London support three Affordable Art Fairs, I ask. “It’s worked so far,” he says. “We had our best-ever Fair in terms of art sales in October [at the autumn edition in Battersea]. We generated £5.5 million-worth of art sales. The media on the whole tends to focus on the top end, but actually, that isn’t a reflection of the whole market.” The Affordable Art Fair has commissioned market researchers ArtTactic to produce a report. “Everything that is going on in the world, it can create anxiety.” Barclay feels the therapeutic nature of buying art is also helping to drive sales at the Fairs. “There’s definitely an appetite,” he says.

And do the Battersea and Hampstead Fairs draw different crowds? “From what I hear from galleries,” the Hampstead crowd is “a little more discerning for whatever reasons,” while Battersea attracts people from the local area as well as Surrey – often “slightly younger families” who may be looking to add a splash of colour to a blank canvas they have bought in the form of a new home. The Fair also runs shuttle buses from Sloane Square, “so we get the Chelsea locals who come over as well”.

The dos and don’ts of collecting art

So, what are the “dos and don’ts” for anyone visiting the Affordable Art Fair for the first time? “Don’t come in a rush” is the first thing. “Come with an open-minded friend. I don’t think art is necessarily about you and the art in isolation,” says Barclay. “It’s about the dialogue with other people [about the art].” And the third thing is “probably about honing your taste”, he says. “Naturally, when you have 900 to 1,000 artists under one roof, there’s going to be a decent portion, possibly 80%, that maybe don’t resonate with you. And that’s okay.” But by filtering out those works, you can discover what you do like.

Can buying a work of art be viewed as an investment? “I’d probably steer away from investment when it comes to starting,” says Barclay. But do go out and explore. One of the pitfalls is assuming you can start collecting “from your sofa” via online auctions. “There’s nothing better than seeing work in person and talking to the gallery. At an art fair, you can do that at scale.” There may also be a visiting gallery from South Korea, for instance. You wouldn’t usually have that kind of opportunity on your doorstep. A quarter of exhibiting galleries “come from abroad”.

Another benefit of the Affordable Art Fair is being able to view works from recent graduates, particularly at the Autumn edition at Battersea in October. “We work with an external curator, who’ll go to lots of art schools and select some artists who she wants to showcase and then we give them their first platform,” he says. That’s a “really great opportunity” for the graduates to establish a name for themselves, because 20,000 people are going to see their work first-hand.

“You’re not going to get that on most high streets.” But “do start local,” says Barclay. “Most people don’t realise how much is available on their doorstep from a cultural perspective.”

Collectors can visit “open studios” to see and chat with the artists as they work and join mailing lists for galleries to find out when their shows are opening. Barclay is a trustee at Edinburgh Printmakers, a 60-year-old organisation.

“This is a good place to see exhibitions, see the artists, maybe do a printmaking course,” he says. “That’s a great way to hone your taste.” But otherwise, the Affordable Art Fair is “a really convenient place to see a lot” at once. If you are “curious and open-minded, definitely come along”.

The Battersea Spring edition of the Affordable Art Fair runs 4-8 March 2026, when artists Christine Relton and Tom Marine – who go by a joint artist name of Relton Marine – will be creating a bespoke installation. The Affordable Art Fair, Hampstead, runs 6-10 May 2026. Adult general admission is £14, visit affordableartfair.com for details.

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The winter of 2024/2025 ran on for an unusually long time in the fine-art market, which really only woke from its hibernation as summer got going. In May, as the flowers were blooming, Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture Grande tête mince (1955), which had been valued at $70million, sent chills through the auction market when Sotheby’s found wealthy buyers were still sleeping. Then, the fine-art market woke up.

In July, Canaletto’s Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day (1730s) sold for £31.9million with Christie’s in London to set a new high-price record for the artist. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the summer was also when the stock market took off and as the year progressed, wealthy collectors didn’t look back. Nine of the top ten most expensive artworks sold at auction in 2025 were sold last autumn.

In November, Mark Rothko’s No. 31 (Yellow Stripe) (1958) sold for $62.2million with Christie’s, which helped the auction house to its most profitable sales series in New York in three years, with a total of $964.5million. November was also the month rival Sotheby’s brought the hammer down on the most expensive artwork of the year – Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1916 – pictured) by Gustav Klimt, which sold for an eye-watering $236.4 million to set a new high-price auction record for a work of modern art and the second-highest price fetched for any artwork sold at auction ever. It was a standout year for works by the Austrian painter. Paintings by Klimt also fetched the second- and third-highest prices for artworks sold at auction in 2025. It was the perfect way to toast what was the opening night of Sotheby’s new headquarters in New York.

Fine-art market bidders get younger

In the end, what had looked to be another humdrum year at the start turned out to be anything but. Projected global fine art sales at Sotheby’s rose 15% from a year earlier to $4.3billion and across all departments auction sales rose 26% year-on-year to $5.7billion. The corresponding projected figure for Christie’s is $4.7billion, an 8% rise on 2024. And Phillips, the third of the “big three” auction houses, reported $725million in auction sales and global sales (with private sales added in) rose by a tenth from the previous year to $927million.

All three also reported rising demand from younger buyers. A third of buyers at Phillips last year were making their first purchases, while “Millennials and Gen Z” (aged 45 and younger) accounted for 40% of purchases at the auction house’s Dropshop online marketplace. Similarly, at Christie’s 46% of new bidders were “Millennials or younger”, a 5% year-on-year increase, while the auction house’s female client base grew by 10%. New buyers were mainly drawn to the luxury goods sales, including jewellery, handbags and wine, accounting for 38% of purchases – a trend confirmed by Sotheby’s, where 29% of bidders were aged under 40, although, perhaps surprisingly given prices, this cohort also accounted for 17% of buyers of fine art. It’s a trend the auction houses will like to see continue in 2026.

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The boom in prediction markets this year has made it, alongside AI, one of the few industries where “young founders can become paper billionaires practically overnight”, says Bloomberg. Leading the pack are the 29-year-old duo behind Kalshi – Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara – who met as undergraduates at MIT. Both have interesting backgrounds. While Mansour grew up in Lebanon and had early dreams of becoming a competitive skier, Lopes Lara trained at the Bolshoi and became a ballerina in her native Brazil before moving to the US. This year, she became one of the youngest female self-made billionaires.

Kalshi has certainly performed un grand jeté. For six years the start-up – which offers wagers on everything from elections to pop-culture happenings – grew slowly, raising about $100 million in small funding rounds. Yet since June, its valuation has exploded by around 450% as outside investors have piled in and now stands at $11 billion.

The attraction isn’t hard to gauge. Once of primary interest to “quantitative political scientists”, prediction markets have evolved rapidly from their “quirky origins” to become “marketplaces for almost anything”, says the Financial Times: helped by some timely approvals from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and close connections with the new administration. In January, Donald Trump Jr joined Kalshi’s board as a strategic adviser. In August, he also joined the board (and invested in) its arch-rival Polymarket. Together, these companies dominate this hottest of sectors.

The event that put Kalshi on the map was the 2024 presidential election race when – having fought a lawsuit to become the first company to offer legal election contracts – it trounced traditional pollsters by correctly giving Donald Trump higher odds of victory.

But what has really greased its wheels this year has been a major move into sports betting: a gigantic, but still evolving US market where Kalshi is proving just as disruptive to established players. Investors are betting it will become “a sports-gambling behemoth”. But almost any event has profit potential, according to Matt Zhang of Hivemind Capital. “What these prediction markets have realised is that the news is a huge, liquid asset class.”

“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina,” Alex Immerman, a partner at VC giant Andreessen Horowitz, told Forbes. Lopes Lara “learned persistence with grace early on… and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi”. After graduating from the Bolshoi, she did a nine-month stint as a professional ballerina in Austria “before hanging up her pointe shoes” and heading for MIT to study computer science.

Lopes Lara spent her summers interning at Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities. But it was a blossoming friendship with classmate Tarek Mansour that launched her entrepreneurial career. The pair became close and one evening “the idea of a prediction market business just clicked”, says Forbes.

The duo spent the pandemic years “building the company, fighting for federal regulation approval and getting early backing from significant players, such as Charles Schwab and Sequoia Capital”, says The New York Post. The gamble has paid off. Having each retained a 12% stake in Kalshi, she and Mansour are now worth $1.3 billion apiece.

Great battles lie ahead for Luana Lopes Lara's Kalshi

The biggest battles may lie ahead. As well as contending with growing competition from Polymarket and other contenders, Kalshi faces a big pushback against its sports-betting ambitions, says the FT. The year ended in a “significant” legal setback. But the battle will go on state by state and could end up in the Supreme Court. Lopes Lara will need every bit of her famous stamina.

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1. Luxury teapot by Mariage Frères

Allow yourself to be transported back in time to one of the great tea salons of Europe with this vintage-style Art Déco 1930 stoneware teapot from luxury Parisian tea company Mariage Frères. The polished steel globe keeps the pot hot for about an hour and it can be removed along with the built-in filter.

Where to buy: £185, mariagefreres.com

2. Loungewear from Skims

The wearer of this Lace-Trim Stretch-Woven Cami Top and Boy Short Set from Kim Kardashian’s Skims label is made from lightweight and stretchy material. Choose from simple red “Brick”, “Periwinkle Foil” and “CB Candy Heart Print”.

Where to buy: £80, selfridges.com

3. Antique rings from Vintage Pink

Vintage Pink is an independent British jewellery brand that was set up from a bedroom in London as a “lockdown project” during the pandemic in 2020. The company has since grown its selection of colourful antique or vintage pieces, many of which are hand-made or hand-finished. Vintage Pink’s rings have been spotted on the fingers of numerous style icons, including model and presenter Vogue Williams, reality TV star Zara McDermott and singer Pixie Lott. Each unique piece of jewellery is an exquisite work of art with a story to tell.

Where to buy: From £295, vintagepink.com

4. Whisky from Cask & Crust

Cask whisky specialist Cask Trade has teamed up with Si King of Sunderland-based Propa pies to offer a trio of very special single malts called Cask & Crust. The drams, all at 46% ABV in 50cl bottles, are Benrinnes 2013, Pulteney 2013 and Ben Nevis 2010. The whiskies have been selected to go with King’s new pie recipes, with the profits funding food banks in Newcastle and Sunderland.

Where to buy: £124.99, casktrade.square.site

5. Tote bag from Louis Vuitton

“If you’re looking to spoil her, few bags come as polished as Louis Vuitton’s iconic Neverfull handbag,” says Marie Claire. The Neverfull Bandoulière Inside Out GM Tote Bag is a reversible tote that showcases Louis Vuitton’s classic Monogram canvas on one side and a stamp pattern on the reverse.

Where to buy: £1,820, uk.louisvuitton.com

7. Portable speaker from Marshall

The Willen II portable speaker from cool British music brand Marshall was built for a life on the road. It is dust- as well as waterproof in up to a metre of water for 30 minutes. Whether at home, in the park or on the beach, your music follows wherever you go.

Where to buy: £99, johnlewis.com

8. Gardening hamper from The Newt

The Gardening Hamper from luxury hotel The Newt in Somerset is the ultimate gift for green-fingered loved ones. Inside, you will find everything to keep tools sharp and in good order, a notebook for seasonal observations, fudge for gardening breaks and the “legendary” Hori Hori Pro tool. Made by Japanese brand Niwaki, the name translates as “dig dig” and it has won a cult following for making a breeze of tough jobs, such as weeding and cutting roots.

Where to buy: £110, shop.thenewtinsomerset.com

9. Casio Unisex Retro Digital Bracelet Strap Watch

You don’t have to have been around in the 1980s to love the style. The Casio Unisex Retro Digital Bracelet Strap Watch is as trendy today as it would have been 40 years ago – and it’s water-resistant too.

Where to buy: £40, johnlewis.com

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What do you buy somebody for Christmas who already has everything? Perhaps that somebody is a collector with a particularly niche interest. In both cases, the high street is effectively ruled out as a place to do your shopping. Even online retailers won’t be much help. But there is another hunting ground that tends to get overlooked in favour of the big shops, and that is auction houses.

Of course, the run-up to the big day is fraught enough without having to worry about waving a bidding paddle around or watching the clock count down on an online auction only to be pipped by a higher bid at the last second. That is why the “buy now” marketplaces offered by a handful of reputable auctioneers can be particularly interesting. Take Sotheby’s for example.

Christmas gifts for collectors at buy now marketplaces

“What sets Sotheby’s Buy Now marketplace apart is our curation,” says Cynthia Houlton, global head of demand generation and marketplace at Sotheby’s. You can find the marketplace on Sotheby’s website. Simply peruse the listings and add items to your basket. Just remember that VAT is not included in the listed pricing and the marketplace is global, so some items may take a little longer to get to you.

“Every piece is sourced to be the best of the best, from rare first editions and exceptional jewellery to objects with remarkable provenance,” says Houlton. “Clients come to us for treasures they simply can’t find anywhere else – whether that’s a coveted vintage Rolex watch, a gemstone-encrusted Van Cleef & Arpels necklace, or a Gibson guitar signed by Paul McCartney. It’s the destination for truly unforgettable holiday gifting.”

That McCartney guitar can be had for £21,368, and the Van Cleef & Arpels necklace is priced at £418,742. If your intended recipient has been particularly nice this year, perhaps they deserve an F.P. Journe Chronomètre à Résonance wristwatch, with an asking price of £447,863. For James Bond fans, Sotheby’s has a collection of first edition 007 novels for £84,281.

CJ Hendry's new juju collectables

In a similar vein, Dropshop allows living artists to sell new, limited-edition creations directly to collectors on a “buy now” basis through auction house Phillips. “What makes Dropshop truly special is its direct connection to living artists – each drop is a unique moment that brings the artist’s vision straight to the collector,” says Christine Miele, retail sales director for e-commerce at Phillips. “In today’s art world, that immediacy and intimacy are more valuable than ever before.”

The artist CJ Hendry is returning to the platform, having helped launch it a couple of years ago, with a collection of “juju” collectable toys that currently make up a “towering” Christmas tree in Hong Kong. In January, collectors will be invited to “adopt” a juju, with the proceeds benefiting a local charity. “It’s a bold, playful series in which fine art meets collectible culture,” says Miele.

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Last week, the fossilised bones of a stegosaurus and an adult and juvenile allosaurus were seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act, alongside nine luxury flats in London and a collection of Chinese artworks. The forfeiture relates to an ongoing investigation into alleged money-laundering by Su Binghai, a Singapore-based businessman. That dinosaur fossils are listed among the seized assets, along with property and art, shouldn’t surprise us, says David Brown in The Times. “Dinosaur skeletons and bones have become the status item of choice for the mega-rich in recent times, with ancient fossilised remains accelerating past the prices of many Old Masters paintings.” The fossils had sold for a combined £12.4 million, including the buyer’s premium, in London last December at auction with Christie’s.

There’s “something powerful about the visual dialogue between an awe-inspiring 66-million-year-old lot and seminal works from the modern and contemporary eras”, says Miety Heiden, head of private sales at Phillips. The auction house is offering a complete skeleton of a juvenile Triceratops as the highlight of its “Out of This World” sale in New York on 19 November. “Cera”, as the triceratops has been named, is expected to fetch between $2.5 /million and $3.5 million. “Today’s collectors want to spice things up,” Christian D. Link, a Swiss expert who has partnered with Phillips, tells The Times. “They’re like the collectors of the Renaissance who liked to surround themselves with amazing things in their ‘chambers of wonders’.” That, says Link, explains the rise in prices. In 2020, a 67-million-year-old T. rex, called “Stan”, sold for $31.8 million, a record-high auction price until July 2024, when billionaire investor Ken Griffin paid $44.6 million for a 150-million-year-old stegosaurus, called “Apex”.

The problem with buying dinosaur fossils

Apex is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History. But loans don’t always solve the problem of scientific access. “Access to dinosaurs on loan… could be taken away at any point, meaning it would be impossible to verify any conclusions made using them,” Professor Richard Butler tells James Ashworth on the Natural History Museum blog. So, some palaeontologists prefer to simply ignore them.

The arguments for and against commercial sales of fossils are many – and not all palaeontologists call for a blanket ban. But private ownership can also make it hard for scientists to know how many of a particular kind of fossil exists – say, that of a specific creature, and that can make tracking “variation” tricky. “Spike”, a 68-million-year-old caenagnathid dinosaur skeleton, for instance, has a mark that suggests it was feathered. It is for sale with Christie’s in London on 11 December, when it is expected to fetch between £3 million and £5 million.

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The upcoming second wave of collectable British coins to wash over Heritage Auctions in Texas shows how important coins from this country are to collectors around the world and not just in Britain.

An Edward VIII bronze proof 1/2 penny from 1937 was the top lot from Part I of The Cara Collection of Highly Provenanced British Rarities sale in May, selling for $180,000, including the buyer’s premium. In Part II on 6-7 November, it will be the turn of Edward VIII’s great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to test the depths of collectors’ pockets. A Victoria gold proof “Una and the Lion” £5 cameo from 1839 features one of engraver William Wyon’s most famous designs. A “proof” is a high-quality sample coin created ahead of a coin issue and one that is often intended for collectors and not for general circulation. A “cameo” is a coin that displays a deep contrast between the relief (the design) and the field (background).) Its “near-Choice” grade designation marks it out as an example that is in particularly good (if not mint) condition and the highest bid for it as of the start of the week was $234,000.

Meanwhile, a gold “Ship” ryal coin, worth 15 shillings in or around 1585, when it was made, is another highlight of the sale. On the obverse (“heads”) side, the coin features a stylistic and rather splendid portrait of Elizabeth I, sporting a large ruff and clutching her orb and sceptre aboard a ship, symbolising England’s rise as a naval power. It was also in 1585, during Elizabeth’s reign, that the first colony was established in America – at Roanoke in the modern US state of North Carolina – and that helps to lend the coin a certain appeal in American eyes. But it is also “one of the most… intensely hunted pieces in British numismatics” (coin-collecting), as Heritage puts it, because it is one of the last coins to be struck in the medieval design style, replete with heraldic flourishes – just as the Tudor era was shortly to come to an end.

The "Ship" ryal is a curious gold coin

The ryal was always a rather curious coin and one of the many gold denominations in circulation in England at the time. It started life during the reign of Edward IV in the 15th century as an attempt to create a half-sovereign, worth 10 shillings. By the time of Elizabeth’s reign decades later, that figure had increased to 15 shillings. But in any case, the competing noble of six shillings and eight pence had become the standard gold coin and the ryal soon made way for the 10-shilling angel. It is for that reason that only a handful of “Ship” ryals, featuring Elizabeth as Britannia, were struck at the Tower of London, and they remain some of the rarest gold coins from her reign. The present example is expected to fetch up to $150,000.

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Albert Einstein is, of course, most famous for formulating his General Theory of Relativity. He also made important contributions towards quantum theory, even if he was at times as puzzled by his findings as the rest of us. That the Nobel Prize in Physics was last week awarded to a trio of scientists for their work, conducted 40 years ago, into quantum mechanics, just goes to show how far we’ve come and how much we have yet to understand in this scientific field. What is less well remembered is that Einstein had other pursuits besides working out how the universe is put together, and one of these was playing the violin.

Einstein is thought to have owned around ten violins during his lifetime. But what is believed to be his first full-size instrument was bought for him by his family in 1894, shortly before the young Einstein left for Switzerland to continue his schooling. Into the wood Einstein etched “Lina”, the name by which he called all of his violins, and it would remain his principal violin during the years he worked on his famous theories until around 1920.

In 1932, he gave the violin to his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue before leaving Germany for the US to escape the Nazis’ rise to power. Two decades later, Laue gifted it to an acquaintance, Margarete Hommrich of Braunschweig, whose great-great-daughter consigned the instrument to Cirencester-based Dominic Winter Auctioneers to be sold last week. They did – for a hammer price of £860,000. With the buyer’s premium of 26.4% taking the total amount paid to over £1 million, Einstein’s violin becomes the most expensive such instrument that wasn’t owned by a concert violinist or made by Stradivarius, says BBC News.

But before selling it, Dominic Winter Auctioneers tapped Paul Wingfield, director of studies in music at Trinity College, Cambridge – who had just so happened to have recently composed a musical drama called Einstein’s Violin – to research and confirm the instrument’s provenance. “I think [Einstein] used [the violin] as a way of mulling things over,” Wingfield tells Rhys Blakely in The Times. “It just really helped him order his thoughts.”

So important were the violins to Einstein that he mentioned them alongside his scientific manuscripts and books in his will of 1927. He updated that will in 1934, shortly after arriving in the US, and that document – torn into pieces, but retrieved from the bin by an employee of the Princeton Bank & Trust Company, which held his assets – was valued at up to $30,000 when it appeared for sale with Christie’s in New York yesterday, alongside personal letters and photographs of Einstein. Other notes and letters of his have fetched upwards of £1 million in recent years.

In 1950, Einstein filed a final will in which he left his violin to his grandson, Bernhard Einstein. Einstein had remarked that if he hadn’t become a scientist, he would have liked to have been a musician. Music’s loss was science’s gain.

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Wealthy older investors are being targeted by scammers pushing fake luxury wine investments, with experts warning of the dangers as one recent operation defrauded pensioners out of a total of £6 million.

Fine wine investment – sometimes referred to as a ‘passion asset’ because enthusiasts enjoy the product as well as hoping for some financial return – is a niche alternative asset market fraught with risk for the novice.

But fine wine’s typical exemption from capital gains tax (CGT) is sparking investor interest amid tightening tax rules. A report from WineCap in April found 96% of UK wealth managers expect demand for fine wine to grow in 2025 – beating out all other luxury assets.

The proportion of fine wine in high-risk investment portfolios has more than doubled – from 12% in 2024 to 26% in 2025, the report found.

However fraud experts have said the wine industry is being infiltrated by investment scammers. They are specifically targeting pensioners, claiming to guarantee a more profitable offer than their standard pension pot delivers.

Paul Hampson, fraud expert and CEO of CEL Solicitors, said: “The luxury wine market is a popular investment opportunity that can pay off, and it’s this that makes it an easier sell for scammers to push.

“Barrels of wine or even some bottles gain value over time. Scammers will create platforms listing the wine for sale, an investor will buy it with the understanding that the seller will keep hold of it and then sell it again one day for an increased value.

“Some scammers actually do have barrels for sale, but will sell to people for an inflated cost, a cost the wine barrel will never reach, no matter how much its value rises.”

Fine wine scam example

In August, three men in Hertfordshire were convicted for stealing more than £6 million from 41 victims in a £37 million wine investment scam.

In the long-running deception, pensioners were coerced into handing over large sums of money to invest in wine, but were often overcharged – sometimes by more than 400%.

The complex wine fraud – run by Imperial Wine & Spirits Merchant Ltd, previously Imperial Wines of London Ltd – was brought down following an investigation by Hertfordshire County Council’s Trading Standards team.

The fraudsters conned hundreds of consumers out of their hard-earned cash and life savings by convincing them to invest in fine Bordeaux wine, on the back of a lie that the company didn’t make any money until they sold the wine at a profit for the customer.

In fact they marked the initial price up so high, sometimes over 400%, that for many investors, it would never increase in value over that price and some customers lost hundreds of thousands of pounds as a result.

While the majority of the wine did exist and was kept in bonded warehouses, a number of victims have no wine at all despite paying thousands of pounds.

Luxury wine scam tactics

The level of deception from those involved in the Imperial Wine scam was significant, Trading Standards said.

The fraudsters claimed to be a legitimate, family-run investment house in fine wine with offices in the City of London, Paris and Hong Kong and personal suppliers in the chateaux and vineyards of Bordeaux.

In reality it was a group in a call centre, working from scripts to cold call, cajole, lie and manipulate largely vulnerable and trusting pensioners.

Tactics such as hiring luxury taxis, wining and dining their victims, who were often recently bereaved or lonely, and sending out glossy brochures purporting to be a well-respected company were also commonplace.

Logos for well-known newspaper brands were used without authorisation. Evidence was also secured showing that the individuals used fake names when talking to their victims, all tricks learned from watching films like ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ as company sales training – a mantra on the wall stated ‘No means Yes’.

In one case a salesperson repeatedly asked a confused lady for her payment card details despite the lady not knowing what a payment card was or who she banked with.

Trish Burls, Chair of the National Trading Standards Tri Regional Investigations team, said: “Victims in this case lost thousands of pounds through a coordinated scam of lies, deceit and manipulation.

“The criminals exploited people’s passion and enthusiasm, preying on them to invest while stripping many of their life savings and causing significant emotional distress.”

Fine wine scam signs to watch for

Scammers prey on pensioners who are sometimes isolated and vulnerable. Some victims of wine investment scams have been recently bereaved.

But others are looking for financial stability and some are simply wine enthusiasts. Anyone can be taken in by increasingly sophisticated fraudsters. Knowing the warning signs can keep your pension pot safe.

Double check the website

In some cases, the wine doesn’t exist anywhere. Scammers create fake websites, stock images and personas to appear as a legitimate wine investment platform. If in doubt, search for the images and identities listed on the website – using a tool like Google Lens or reverse image search – to see if they are repeated elsewhere on the web or stolen from a legitimate site.

Don’t get greedy

Hampson, fraud expert and CEO of CEL Solicitors, advised: “Be incredibly wary of too-good-to-be-true opportunities such as rapid payouts or guaranteed profits.” These can’t be found in other types of investment, and aren’t a feature of fine wine investing either.

Putting you under pressure is a big red flag

Scammers often use pressure tactics, mentioning urgent deadlines and using emotional manipulation. These are huge warning signs to put down the phone.

What to do if you are scammed

“If you are scammed, report it to Action Fraud and your pension provider or bank as soon as possible. You can also seek legal support to recover your funds,” said Hampson.

Summer is over, and the all-important autumn auction sales are upon us. For auction house Sotheby’s, this season is even more important than usual. In July, it reported a pre-tax loss of $248 million for the previous 12 months, double that in 2024. So, every sale counts – or does it?

The trouble that Sotheby’s is facing, like all auction houses, is the triple threat from political uncertainty, relatively high interest rates and shrinking demand from art collectors in Asia. That means consignors have been “loath to part with their most prized artworks – unsure of being able to attract top prices”, says The New York Times.

Fortunately, Sotheby’s has been able to get its hands on the $400 million art collection of Leonard Lauder, the cosmetics tycoon who died in June. It is selling the core of the collection in an evening sale on 18 November in New York and, of the 24 lots, it is the portrait of “a striking young woman with dark hair and pale skin, clad in a flowing, gauzy white dress, and patterned blue robe” that has attracted the most excitement, says Sarah Cascone on Artnet News. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-1916) by Gustav Klimt depicts the daughter of one of the Austrian artist’s most important patrons. If Sotheby’s is able to sell it for more than the $150 million it says the painting is worth, it would “obliterate” the current $108.4 million record price for a painting by Klimt, which was set by the sale of Lady With a Fan in 2023.

A roll of the dice for Sotheby's

The danger for Sotheby’s, as The New York Times notes, is that it has guaranteed the Lauder estate a minimum price for the painting. It is unclear whether Sotheby’s has offset that risk through third-party guarantors, which is standard practice. But still, “the question I would ask is if Sotheby’s is making money from this. Or are they losing money to create an appearance of confidence,” Jacob King, an art adviser, tells the paper. In March, Sotheby’s failed to sell Alberto Giacometti’s 1955 sculpture Grande tête mince, the “$70 million star” of the spring season. Art-market watchers will be watching to see if the confidence Sotheby’s has sought to convey with the guarantee is more than an illusion.

Last week, Christie’s offered a ray of hope that there are still deep-pocketed buyers out there, in Asia. It sold Buste de femme (1944) by Pablo Picasso in Hong Kong for HK$196.75 million (£18.9 million) – well above the HK$106 million (£10.1 million) estimate. Coincidentally, Lucien Paris is selling a second portrait of Picasso’s wartime muse, Dora Maar, on 24 October. It is the first time Buste de femme au chapeau à fleurs (1943), conservatively valued at €8 million, has been seen in public for 80 years.

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The rock now gracing Taylor Swift’s finger, along with US president Donald Trump’s doubling of tariffs on goods from India, has given a welcome boost to the diamond industry. Swift’s engagement lifted the shares in some listed jewellery retailers, while India cuts and polishes most of the world’s diamonds – and Americans are the biggest consumers of diamond jewellery, as Jinjoo Lee notes in The Wall Street Journal. But the lift to diamond prices is unlikely to last much longer than Swift’s wedding cake. That’s because the rise of an almost unlimited supply of synthetic colourless diamonds has tarnished the industry. Colour diamonds, on the other hand, have proved much more resistant.

That’s down to a number of factors, not least of which is the rarity of colour diamonds relative to colourless ones. Only around 0.01% of gem-quality mined diamonds are colour diamonds of the “fancy” type (a measure of the intensity of colour in the Gemological Institute of America [GIA] grading system). They are vanishingly rare. And, naturally, every single one is a little bit different, not only because of the varying sizes, hues, tones and saturations, but also because of the presence of imperfections within the diamonds, known as “inclusions”. So, tracking valuations for colour diamonds is tricky. But with that caveat in mind, prices for fancy colour diamonds have grown at a compound annual rate of 5.7% a year for the past two decades, according to the Fancy Color Research Foundation (FCRF).

How much has the most expensive colour diamond sold for?

This summer, a 10.38-carat pink diamond once owned by Duchess Marie-Thérèse d’Angoulême, the only surviving child of the ill-fated French queen Marie Antoinette, sold for almost $14 million with Christie’s in New York. The record of the most expensive colour diamond ever sold at auction also belongs to a pink gem – the 59.60-carat Pink Star, which fetched $71.2 million with Sotheby’s in Hong Kong in 2017. These prices are not surprising when you consider the lengths to which nature has gone to make them.

Diamonds are created under immense pressure deep underground over millions, if not billions, of years. Yellow diamonds – the most common, although still incredibly rare – contain nitrogen, while blue diamonds contain boron and black diamonds graphite. But pink diamonds get their colour not from impurities, but from the extra stresses they received during their formation that altered their lattice crystal structure. The same goes for red diamonds, which are really just an extension along the colour scale of pink diamonds. They are the rarest of all, and only a handful exist in the world. And since the closure of Rio Tinto’s Argyll mine in Australia in 2020 – which had been responsible for 90% of the world’s supply of newly mined pink diamonds – no more or very few are now coming onto the market. Small wonder, then, that, last month, police in Dubai arrested a gang of thieves who had gone to great lengths to steal a 21.5-carat pink diamond. It had been valued at $25 million.

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Fewer wealthy people than feared are fleeing the chancellor’s scrapping of non-dom status in the Budget last April. That’s according to an assessment of “initial tax data”, the Financial Times said on 13 August. The Office for Budget Responsibility had warned the government at the start of the year that one in ten non-doms without trusts – and a quarter with trusts – would leave Britain in search of a more welcoming tax regime.

Nothing to worry about, then? Not quite. For starters, the available data is a little sketchy – the clue’s in the word “initial” – and estimates tend to get revised anyway. We’ll have a much clearer idea of how many non-doms have left when tax returns are filed for the current tax year, in January 2027. But we don’t have to wait that long, because there is already plenty of anecdotal evidence that wealthy individuals are leaving, or have already left.

“Mayfair is quiet,” Simon Aron, the founder of Cask Trade, tells me at the cask-whisky specialist’s office on Regent Street. “Wealthy whisky enthusiasts are just not here any more.” Aron puts that down to Brexit, Covid and the non-dom status change.

And where have they gone? Well, lots of places, but Cyprus and Italy – where high-net-worth individuals can opt to pay a flat tax of €200,000 a year – are particular favourites, as is Dubai, with its lack of income and inheritance taxes. Dubai also has a “thriving drinks scene”, says Aron. Not among the Emirati population, to be sure, but among the wealthy expatriate community. Dubai is growing, and there is more disposable income to spend on collectable luxuries, such as rare whisky.

Whisky collecting rises in India

Cask Trade has decided to “follow the money” and it has just opened an office in Dubai to cater for this footloose segment of its clientele. To export whisky to the United Arab Emirates, you need to have an import agent, which the company has. The cask whisky also needs to be bottled before it can be shipped, because the casks have to stay in Scotland – Scots rules, not Emirati.

Opening an office in the Middle East has another attraction – “Dubai is the gateway to India”, says Aron. India already has a long tradition of enjoying whisky. Whisky has been made in India since the 19th century, but more recently, Indian whiskies have been picking up awards at international competitions.

Whisky collecting as a hobby has taken off in the country with the expansion of the middle class, as in much of Asia more generally. The Dubai office adds to the office Cask Trade it already has in Hong Kong. While the rare whisky market has struggled to regain its pandemic-era highs, new pockets of whisky enthusiasts are springing up. “Dubai is the springboard to India,” says Aron. “And the world is on the move.”

Starting a whisky collection

Rare whisky prices are still recovering from the decade-long buying binge that accelerated during the lockdown periods of the pandemic. In the decade to this year, rare whisky prices have soared 192%, according to Knight Frank’s “The Wealth Report 2025” – and that’s including the downturn that started in 2022.

At the end of May of that year, prices for the most sought-after bottles reached dizzying heights before embarking on a long, steady decline that still continues, as shown by the Rare Whisky Icon 100 index, which tracks the prices of the most coveted collectable bottles of whisky. Over the past 12 months, the index has fallen 13%. Is any let-up in sight?

No, is the short answer from the latest “Whisky Intelligence Report” from Edinburgh-based investment bank Noble & Co.

Between January and April 2025, whisky volumes transacted at auction fell 37% from a year earlier, and values plunged 52%. Lower-priced bottles are favoured over higher-priced ones, which, as the report notes, could be because sellers are shelving their most treasured bottles for better days. The average price of a bottle sold at auction was £211 last April, down from £493 two years before. Auction activity in the top segment of the market (above £10,000 per bottle) has all but dried up.

While a recovery may still be a way off, the nice thing about collecting whisky is that you can simply wait. As a collector, “you have time to keep whisky”, says Simon Aron of Cask Trade. And if you’re not already a collector, but would like to become one, now is a great time to start. Prices for some casks, especially new-make (spirit that has just gone into the cask), are “unbelievable”, says Aron. He points to Tormore barrels, priced at £1,995, as an example of a good-value cask of new-make whisky, and a three-year-old cask of Glenburgie, costing £2,750, for something a little older.

Visit casktrade.com for the current stock list.

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The intrinsically private nature of cryptocurrency is putting millions of pounds of assets at risk when people die because their loved ones simply lose access to them, lawyers have warned.

Crypto assets, like Bitcoin, is a highly risky, speculative investment where you could lose all of your money – or potentially make millions. Yet despite the volatility, ownership of the alternative currency is on the rise.

According to a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) survey in late 2024, about 12% of UK adults now own cryptocurrency, up from around 4% in 2021. That’s about seven million people. And with new FCA rules allowing investors to buy cryptocurrency exchange-traded notes (crypto ETNs) from October, interest is only set to increase.

But many UK crypto investors are unaware their investments could be lost when they pass away, as crypto assets are not automatically accessible or even traceable through existing methods when someone dies.

Additionally, most crypto exchanges do not allow investors to name direct beneficiaries or solicitors to manage assets after their death. This makes probate very difficult.

Families of those crypto investors could, as a result, lose access to millions of pounds of crypto assets they would otherwise inherit from a loved one, TWM Solicitors, a private wealth and family law firm, has warned.

New rules announced by the government in May mean crypto firms with UK customers will soon have to meet clear standards on transparency, consumer protection and operational resilience – just like firms in traditional finance. But it’s not clear what this means for passing on assets.

Stuart Downey, partner at TWM Solicitors, said: “To look for most normal financial assets you can conduct a ‘financial asset search’, which is relatively inexpensive and contacts hundreds of organisations.

“However, as far as I am aware, there’s no such thing for cryptocurrency. Even if there were, it is unlikely to work for private wallets.”

Can you inherit cryptocurrency?

Cryptocurrency is similar to property in that it can be owned, gifted and inherited. But the often private nature of holding crypto assets means the executor of an estate may not even know they exist.

Typically after death, if there is uncertainty about an individual’s assets, financial asset searches can be used.

These contact institutions including banks, building societies, investment managers, share registrars, pension providers and insurers to look for assets in cases like probate.

But crypto assets are held on crypto exchanges and in escrow wallets, the providers of which don’t facilitate probate like banks or portfolio managers, hindering the transfer of crypto assets after the death of their owner to their dependents, TWM said.

“Families are at risk of losing access to crypto assets after the original investor’s death – even if they are named beneficiaries in a will,” said Downey.

He called for “urgent” reform to ensure crypto exchanges are integrated into the standard probate regime.

“This will ensure estate administration runs smoothly – as it does with pensions, savings and investments – so donors’ wishes can be fulfilled and so their family and other dependents are not deprived of these assets,” he said.

How can I make sure my crypto assets aren’t lost after I die?

Digital assets – like cryptocurrencies or NFTs – are stored in digital wallets accessible only with private keys.

They are usually highly encrypted to protect the investor’s assets, making it extremely difficult for anyone other than the individual investor, or someone in possession of the key, to access these assets.

“If the original investor passes away, their crypto wallets may be effectively locked forever,” Downey said.

Crypto investors should seek professional advice when drafting their wills to ensure their beneficiaries and executors know the value of the digital assets – and, crucially, have instructions on how to access them securely and who they should go to on death.

This could be with an encrypted USB drive with seed phrases, a hardware wallet and Pin, or a “dead man’s switch” service that sends the information to the executors or beneficiary.

Crypto assets held overseas by UK investors may be especially hard to recover, as there simply aren’t good mechanisms in place to access crypto holdings in overseas jurisdictions once the original investor has passed away.

Downey said: “The reality is that crypto exchanges lag behind legacy financial institutions in providing access for personal representatives.

“Assuming digital assets will be automatically inherited after death may result in them being lost forever.”

eToro, a platform that lets investors trade and manage more than 70 cryptocurrencies as well as stocks and ETFs, said it has a duty of confidence to its clients, even after their death.

“This means we cannot disclose information about our investors to anyone other than parties who are legally entitled to it,” eToro’s website stated.

Once it receives confirmation an eToro account holder has died, it closes the investment account, including any open positions and any services connected to it, such as the eToro Money account and eToro Money crypto wallet.

“We then transfer the funds either to an estate bank account in the name of the eToro account holder or to the executor. We do not send funds to the beneficiaries of the estate,” the website said.

Executors of a deceased eToro investor need to open a ticket in its customer service centre with the details of the account to begin the process of transferring funds.

The executor will then need to provide certain documents, including:

• The death certificate of the eToro account holder
• A notarised letter from an attorney confirming who is the executor of the eToro account holder’s estate
• A notarised copy of the eToro account holder’s will confirming who is the executor of the estate
• In cases where the executor is a direct relative: A document proving the relation to the eToro account holder (e.g. marriage certificate, birth certificate)
• Proof of identity of the executor or contacting relation
• Details of an estate bank account (set up once the bank has been notified of the death, in the eToro account holder’s name)

Other crypto platforms will have their own rules about what happens when a customer dies.

A fortnight ago, at Sotheby’s in Paris, the bag Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas made for Jane Birkin – the original Birkin bag – sold for €8.6 million. That is the highest price ever fetched at auction for a handbag. The funny thing is, for such a coveted item, nobody seems to be able to agree on exactly what it is for.

“The original Birkin looks as if it might have been found in a shipwreck, with its fraying handles and mottled leather patina and marks from where she had affixed Doctors Without Borders and Unicef stickers,” says Marisa Meltzer in The New York Times. “The nail clippers she had dangled from the bag were still there.” In a video from 1988, the late actress and singer empties the contents onto a table. Out spills mascara, cigarettes, money, a novel by Dostoyevsky and sticky tape – not surprising, perhaps, when you consider the now-legendary story about the bag’s origins. In 1984, Birkin found herself sitting next to Dumas, the Hermès executive, on a flight to Paris, and the two came up with the idea of creating a holdall to hold all the 38-year-old’s stuff.

But such is the allure of Jane Birkin that the holdall went from being a functional item to the most prized bag on the planet. Even today, two years after Birkin passed away, you cannot simply walk into a Hermès shop and buy a Birkin. You have to be invited. Only then can you expect to pay around £7,500 for the privilege.

Auction winners often like to remain anonymous, but not two weeks ago. Valuence, the Japanese fashion company that won the auction, announced to the world in a press release that it had “successfully acquired the ‘Original Birkin’ bag created by Hermès for actress Jane Birkin, a one-of-a-kind prototype that gave birth to the most coveted handbag design in the world”. When the bag arrives in Japan, Valuence will “host a press unveiling for media and related stakeholders”. The original Birkin has morphed, again, into a ¥1.47 billion piece of publicity for the company.

“With this culture around the bag, it has lost its fashion appeal,” says Lauren Cochrane in The Guardian. Other, younger challenger bags are encroaching on its turf, such as the current “must-have”, the Telfar shopping bag, nicknamed the “Bushwick Birkin”.

Meanwhile, a whole industry of brands selling items linked to celebrities – from footwear to skin care and gin – has arisen since the Birkin bag appeared over 40 years ago. And those nail clippers, they have been credited with starting the trend for adorning one’s bag with baubles, currently in the guise of Labubu dolls.

What would Birkin have made of her €9 million bag? “It’s a good question,” says Meltzer in The New York Times. That the bag’s creation myth is never mentioned in her diary perhaps gives us a clue, she says. But also, just maybe, as with the $75,000 “Birkin Body” cosmetic procedure, she would have found it “darkly funny”.

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There’s nothing like somebody somewhere spending a lot of money on something silly to get a summer-season collecting fad underway. We saw it with the “Bored Apes” non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of a few summers ago. For this year, a Labubu doll the size of a child that sold for ¥1.2 million (£123,000), with fees, at an auction in China last month will do nicely.

For the uninitiated (and frankly too busy), a Labubu is a “cute”, grinning little monster with sharp teeth and furry rabbit-like ears. In its more usual form, it is to be spotted by acolytes dangling from the handbags of pop stars Rihanna and Dua Lipa in the form of a key-ring “plushie” (soft toy). But good luck finding one in a shop. Their retail habitat has shrunk to online marketplaces, with prices well above the £17.50 advertised on the official website of their maker, Pop Mart (where they are sold out).

Hong Kong-based artist Kasing Lung created the Labubu character in 2015. But it is Lisa from Korean girl band Blackpink, who is credited with sparking this summer’s collectable craze with a post on Instagram. Since her post last year, a Chinese bank has been banned by authorities from offering them as bait to attract new customers. And in May, Hong Kong-listed Pop Mart stopped selling Labubus in British shops due to reports of fights breaking out among fans who were desperate to get their hands on the limited stock. And that was without knowing exactly what they would be buying, assuming they made it to the cash till.

The “blind-box” business model – where you only find out what you have bought when you open the box – has been central to the successful sales of Labubu (and Pop Mart’s share price, which has soared 178% this year). Not only does it encourage repeat purchases in the hope of eventually buying the specific one you want, but it also feeds the online marketplaces, where prices rocket, and that in turn drives new demand for Labubus from collectors hoping to flip a few monsters themselves. Meanwhile, that gives Pop Mart every incentive to bring out new editions.

Can the Labubu craze last?

The trouble is, not even a toothy grin can avoid a crackdown from the Chinese authorities. Last month, a report in the state-run People’s Daily newspaper cited legal experts calling for stricter regulation of blind boxes on the basis that they “risked inducing addictive behaviour among minors”, as the Financial Times reports.

For now, at least, amid the ongoing heat and madness of summer, the Labubu invasion continues unabated. It may fizzle out or morph into any number of spin-offs and sidelines. Time will tell. But if you were to offer me a Labubu or shares in Pop Mart, I know which I would rather have. Then, who would be grinning?

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“He who saves his country does not violate any law,” Donald Trump posted on social-media platform X in February. It was an interesting choice of words, not least because those words have been attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the French emperor, who, as The Guardian noted at the time, also “rode roughshod” over his country’s constitution.

But it does perhaps help to explain the US president’s, some would say, unhealthy interest in acquiring Greenland from Denmark for the United States. And as for Canada, it was only on 27 May that Trump was reminding Canadians they would pay “zero dollars” to be covered by his proposed “Golden Dome” missile defence shield if only they would “become our cherished 51st state”. Otherwise, their share of the bill would come to $61 billion, according to the man in the White House.

Napoleon, who was involved in his own real estate deal with the US in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, would probably approve.

Making America great

On 6 June, Trump got an opportunity to inspect an important historical artefact from that transaction up close when Sotheby’s in New York unveiled the green leather portfolio that is believed to have held the paperwork that transferred 800,000 square miles to the fledgling US. The land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains not only comprises the state of Louisiana today, but much of the territory of another 14 states and, as Trump may be interested to note, chunks of modern-day Canada. In return, the US paid France $15 million – a bargain at four cents an acre.

The portfolio displays in gold lettering the name of Francois Barbé-Marbois, the man who led the negotiations on behalf of Napoleon in order to, in the words of his boss, “prevent [the British from] ruling America as they rule Asia”. The papers it contained are today kept in the Washington Archives.

Sotheby’s put the portfolio on display to drum up interest in other Napoleonic relics from the collection of Pierre-Jean Chalençon (a French television personality and collector) that are appearing in its sale on 25 June in Paris. They include Napoleon’s hand-written codicil that distributed his “modest” possessions to his followers, which the deposed emperor wrote “in a moment of illness, paranoia and isolation” while in exile in Saint Helena, says Sotheby’s.

That is expected to fetch up to €500,000. There is also the ceremonial “sword and stick” used in his coronation in 1804, which has been given a pre-sale estimate of up to €400,000, and the grand portrait of the emperor in his robes, from the studio of François-Pascal-Simon Baron Gérard and estimated to sell for up to €300,000. But perhaps Trump, a fan of statement headwear, would be most interested in the headline lot – Napoleon’s bicorne hat, which the emperor wore en bataille, that is with the wings parallel to his shoulders to ensure he stood out in the public eye as well as on the battlefield. It is valued at up to €800,000.

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If you have an attic or loft full of decades’ worth of stuff, it’s worth sifting through it carefully as you could discover valuable items worth thousands of pounds.

From rare coins and stamps to vinyl records and vintage jewellery, our storage spaces can be a treasure trove of things worth serious money.

Vintage engagement rings fetch an average of £7,277 on eBay, according to the insurance provider Homeprotect, with a Platinum Blue Sapphire No Heat Sri Lanka 18K Diamond Ring selling for nearly £18,000 recently.

According to research by EDF Energy, a quarter of us don’t like going up in the loft in our house. However, sorting out your loft – or, with their permission, an elderly relative’s attic – could be a lucrative exercise. You could find collectables like antique furniture and toys such as Barbie dolls and Jellycat soft toys, as well as old VHS tapes.

David Joyson, chief customer officer at Homeprotect, comments: “It’s incredible how much value can be hidden in everyday items that may have been gathering dust in an old cupboard, garage or attic – with some now selling for thousands.”

Homeprotect conducted a study to discover which common household objects found in grandparents’ homes hold the most value when sold on eBay.

The older generation, who may have lived through events such as World War II, may be holding onto items that have sentimental value – and be worth some money.

We take a look at which items are likely to be the most valuable, and how much they could sell for.

Remember that it’s up to the seller as to how much they list an item for, and it’s the buyer’s choice as to how much they spend, so just because something sold for a high price tag doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what it’s worth.

Most valuable items

Coins and stamp collections are the most valuable items you’re likely to find lying around an elderly relative’s attic, particularly rare 50p coins, the research found.

Vintage jewellery is the second most valuable category, followed by antique furniture.

According to Homeprotect, specific designers are particularly well sought-after, with a set of four chairs from Danish designer Borge Mogensen selling for £8,000. Furniture from the 18^th century can also fetch a pretty penny: a mahogany breakfront bookcase went for nearly £5,000 earlier this year.

In fourth place, vinyl records, specifically 1960s vinyl, are selling for nearly £4,000 on average. Recent big-money sales include a promo copy of The Velvet Yellow Underground & Nico featuring iconic art from Andy Warhol, which sold for £6,747.

Old clocks sell for £2,671 on average – it seems the older is often the better when selling clocks on eBay, and hand-carved ones do well, too.

Completing the most valuable items you might find in an attic are porcelain dolls (£2,006 average price), vintage lamps (£1,867), vintage posters (£1,829) and WW1 medals (£1,554).

Source: Homeprotect, April 2025. It analysed 15 categories of household objects often found in grandparents’ homes and took the average price of the five most expensive items in each category, according to recently sold listings on eBay, to calculate the top nine list.

How to protect valuable items in your loft

According to Joyson at Homeprotect, it’s important to ensure any valuable items are covered by insurance.

He notes: “If you, or an elderly relative, have items like these lying around, or if you come across an item you think may have a high value, it’s worth getting them professionally valued, so you can check that you have the right insurance – many insurers will ask you to specify an individual item on your policy, for example, if it’s worth more than £1,500. Not doing this may mean that it wouldn’t be covered if you needed to make a claim.”

He adds: “If you have financial power of attorney for an elderly relative and/or have been named as an executor for their will, in the event of their death it is worth auditing and valuing items, to ensure you have a complete list of their assets and to understand the value, whether you intend to keep any treasured items or if you are considering selling anything in the future once the probate process is complete.”

It might be going too far to say the wheels have come off the market in classic cars. But prices have definitely stalled. Take the Blue Chip index compiled by specialist insurer Hagerty, for example. It tracks the prices of 25 of the most sought-after collectable vehicles of the post-war era. In the decade to January 2025, the index rose 5.5%. But in the six years before 2015 – that is, from the start of the ultra-low interest rate era – the index jumped 118%. So we can take a good guess at what got prices motoring and, by extension, what has put the brakes back on.

Since January 2022, roughly corresponding to when the Bank of England picked interest rates up off the floor (0.1%), the index has only managed a 2.6% rise, lagging the annual rate of consumer-price inflation, which averaged 6.3% in that three-year period. It should come as scant surprise, then, that in the 12 months to the start of 2025, the index contracted 2%. A considerable amount of froth continues to come off the market.

But that is to paint a picture using a very broad brush. Collectables markets are notoriously hard to track because, for starters, no two Ferrari 250 GTOs are exactly the same. There are also so many different makes and models of collectable cars that it would be impossible to follow them all – hence the Blue Chip index limiting itself to 25, for example.

The sample size, the number of sales in a given year, is likely to be small, and within the components that make up the index, you are bound to have a relatively wide range of performances. One model might appreciate greatly, only for that performance to be obscured by the other 24.

The classic car market is for choosy collectors

If we look under the bonnet of Hagerty’s Blue Chip index, we see that the value of a 1958 Bentley S1 Continental DHC in “excellent condition” (all the cars ranked in the indices are rated “excellent”, the second highest of four categories) slipped 19% over the course of 2024. Today, you could expect one to fetch approximately $850,000. Likewise, you could have anticipated paying $2.6 million for a 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda convertible in January, a 15% discount to the price a year earlier.

But for a 1971 Lamborghini Miura SV, you would have had to pay a third more than in January 2024: $4 million. So collectors buying a classic car as an investment need to be particularly picky as to which model they buy – and that is before storage, maintenance and insurance costs are taken into account.

Some car indices have managed to eke out a gain over the year to January. Hagerty’s Supercar index rose 2%, led by the 1994-1998 McLaren F1, whose value rose 5% to $25.4 million. And post-war German collectible cars were worth 1% more than a year earlier, with the price of a 1979 Porsche 911 Turbo Carrera coupe accelerating 19% to $185,000. But of Hagerty’s 11 indices, seven declined and one trod water. American muscle cars depreciated 10% over the year, and the Ferrari index slid 9%.

Nevertheless, a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO Berlinetta (not included in the Ferrari index) became the most expensive car sold at auction in 2024, when one example sold with Bonhams for $38.1 million last August. In fact, seven of the ten most expensive cars ever sold at auction (going back to 2014) are Ferraris. These may be extreme, ultra-rare examples, but clearly Ferraris are still very much in demand. The fact that the prancing horse has its own index rather underscores the point, so a pinch of salt is needed.

The rarest cars continue to fetch stratospheric prices. In February, a 1954 Mercedes-Benz W 196 R Streamliner joined that top-ten list in second position, when it sold for €51.2 million. But this is the rarefied region of the market, which by and large, and in keeping with other collectable assets, such as blue-chip artworks, tends to be oblivious to whatever else is going on in the economy.

As for the “collector car” market overall, it “has been uneven for the past several years, with auctions recording lower average prices and private sales activity slowing”, says Brian Rabold of Hagerty. So choose what you buy carefully, and buy it because, first and foremost, you like it.

Classic cars sold privately in Britain tend to be “sold as seen” and there is “little [legal] protection for any purchaser”, says David Stedman, a lawyer specialising in classic cars at law firm Clarke Willmott LLP. If buying from a dealer, your statutory rights are set out in the Consumer Rights Act. Cars first registered more than 40 years ago are exempt from MOT tests, so if you intend to drive your classic car regularly on public roads, make this clear to the seller.

A classic car could be advertised as a “collector’s piece”, in which case the car cannot be expected to be road-ready. Courts will also consider how much was paid for the car, with the understanding that “a purchaser paying less for a restoration project cannot have expected the vehicle to live up to ‘concours standard’,” says Stedman. So, state your intended use for the classic car to the seller and inspect it before you buy it “with your mechanic present”.

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You don’t have to own a Michelangelo or a centuries-old antique to make a trip to the auction house worth your time.

Even if you don’t own priceless artefacts, you could make a hefty profit by selling some of your belongings at the auction house.

For example, a first edition copy of the first Harry Potter book sold at auction for more than £21,000 in February after it was discovered among the belongings of a deceased man set to be thrown away.

Books are not the only type of item that you could sell at auction.

Auction houses are increasingly selling everyday things that have become collectables, like vinyl records, stamps, and watches. If you have the right items, you could be in for a major cash boost.

Why pick an auction?

Auctions are a great way to sell your rare items because of the expertise that the right auction house can provide for you. As houses earn a commission from every sale, it is in their best interest as well as yours to faithfully value your items.

When it comes to selling your items, an auction also connects you with a base of buyers who will often know enough about the type of item you’re selling and understand its true value.

At the same time, the nature of bidding means that your item is reaching close to its maximum value as buyers compete with one another to buy it. This means that you could possibly get far more than you expected.

These days, many auctions also take place simultaneously online and in-person, meaning that you are able to access a worldwide pool of potential buyers.

What can you sell at an auction?

Broadly speaking, you can sell pretty much anything that is valuable at an auction as they act as marketplaces just like any other.

However, the extra hassle that comes with choosing an auction only tends to be worth it if your chosen item is worth a significant amount of money.

This being said, there is no restriction on the type of item you can sell at an auction. While traditionally the goods sold at them tend to be items like art, sculptures, furniture, and rare jewellery, other items are increasingly being sold.

For example, there has recently been an increase in demand for 1990s records, according to Wessex Auction Rooms.

As vinyl was the most common way to listen to music before CDs and streaming, the chances are that you probably have a pile of them sitting in your attic – some of these records could now be worth far more than you paid for them.

You could also have some rare books sitting on your shelves. While some of the most expensive books sold at auction are hundreds of years old, many relatively modern books are fetching high prices these days.

The Tiger who Came to Tea’ (which was published in 1968) sold for £3,500 at Forum Auctions.

Increasingly, collectable toys have also been gaining popularity and fetching much more than their retail price at auction.

Certain rare Pokemon cards have been sold for over $5 million – a one-of-a-kind card that featured the brand’s mascot ‘Pikachu’ was bought for this much by social media influencer Logan Paul.

How does an auction work?

The purpose of an auction is to sell items in such a way that theoretically maximises their value among the available buyers in the room.

This is done by allowing the buyers to bid increasing amounts of money for the item, and then selling them to the highest bidder. With each bid, the price of your item increases until the point at which nobody wishes to pay more.

Traditionally, auctions involve a person at the front (the auctioneer) calling out prices and acknowledging when buyers accept them. Then, once the bid has been accepted, the auctioneer will raise the price and determine whether there is any interest in selling at that point.

Once the maximum price has been achieved, the auctioneer traditionally bangs a hammer to declare that the auction has finished.

The downside of this approach is that while the auction process will theoretically get the maximum price for your item, it is limited to just the people bidding on it in the room. If the buyers have no interest in the item you’re selling, it could be sold for less than you may like.

However, in the modern age, this problem has been somewhat alleviated as many auctions have moved partially or completely online. This way, people interested in your items can bid from wherever they are in the world.

How do I sell my goods at an auction?

If you have decided that the best way for you to maximise your profit by selling your old items is through an auction house, then you should begin by making sure that they are actually valuable.

Max Hesler, book specialist at Forum Auctions, says: “The two key points that sellers should assess is desirability and condition.”

Hesler uses the example of a book and explains that while it may be rare, “if the author or subject is not of interest to collectors then ultimately the rarity carries little weight.”

This logic follows through for many items that you may want to take to auction.

Validate your items

Though it may be difficult to admit, sometimes old valuables do not appreciate in value and are not worth as much as you think, and items that you may think are rare could be quite common. This is why it is important to validate that what you have is actually worth something.

To validate your item, the first thing you ought to do is some online research to check that what you are selling has the hallmarks of rarity.

If you are selling a book then you should check its edition, the publication date, and potential printing errors that make it more valuable.

For example, lucky owners of first edition Harry Potter books will know theirs is rare because there will be a missing ‘o’ in ‘Philospher’s Stone’ on the back cover.

Similarly, rare editions of The Beatles’ White Album have low serial numbers and the original logo of their record label ‘Apple’ – these can fetch up to £10,000.

Pick the right auction house

Once you have determined that your item is likely to be valuable, the next step is to research different auction houses and find one that caters to your needs.

To maximise your gains, you should pick an auction house that is appropriately specialised in the type of item you’re trying to sell.

For example, you are far more likely to fetch a good price on a rare book from an auction house that specialises in them because they have much better market knowledge, and their customers are likely to know more about the rare book market.

Making sure that the auction house you choose has a good reputation is also vital. Take a look at what the auction house has sold before and examine the quality of their listings.

Get a valuation

The next step after you have picked the auction house is to book in a valuation.

This is where picking the right house becomes apparent, as their experts will have far more experience with the type of item that you’re selling. This expertise will mean they are able to provide you with the best advice and valuation.

During the valuation session, a member of staff at the auction house you choose will inspect your item and look for signs of rarity, as well as determining the condition of the item.

These sessions tend to be done in person, but many auction houses now also allow them to be conducted online and through messaging services like WhatsApp.

Valuations are often free, but it is always best to check this is the case for the auction house that you choose.

Take your item to auction

Once you and the inspector are happy with the valuation of your item, you can proceed with the auction process.

Auction houses typically take percentage fees for the sale of your item in order to make the process profitable for them. Fees tend to be around 15% to 20% of the sale price, and there may be further expenses on top.

Hesler at Forum Auctions says you “should always make sure to check the fees and terms carefully before consigning” so that you aren’t hit with any nasty surprises when your item goes to auction.

You can compare an auction house’s fees with their competitors to make sure you’re getting a good deal and maximising your profit.

You’ll have to agree to the auction house’s terms and conditions and set a reserve price for the minimum you are willing to accept.

Auction vs eBay

Since being founded in 1995, eBay has opened up the auction market to an enormous degree as people from all over the world are able to bid and buy all kinds of items.

While it may be tempting to list your rare item on eBay, there are reasons that you should still consider a traditional auction house.

For one, eBay has no in-house experts that can value and take care of your item. Instead, the ball is entirely in your court so you will have to value and list your item by yourself.

The risk of doing this is that you could be under-valuing your item, and so could potential bidders.

When selling your rare goods through a good, reputable auction house you have the peace of mind that they know what they are doing, and are trying to make the most money possible for you and for them.

This is not to say that you should entirely avoid eBay. If you are confident in your own valuation, and you want a wide audience to see your item then eBay provides a great alternative to traditional auction houses.

Online auction sites allow you to list anything you like and so could be a good alternative for selling your old valuables that aren’t quite rare enough to warrant a full trip to the auction house.

However, if you do go down this route, make sure you do your best to fend off scammers.

Prices for the rarest cognacs still lag those for Scotch whisky. The collectable market for the latter boomed during the era of ultra-low interest rates and, in any case, the whisky market is quite a bit bigger. Scotland exported £5.6 billion worth of whisky in 2023 against almost €3 billion (£2.5 billion) in annual sales for cognac, as of last month’s data. Of that, 97% of cognac is exported – 31% to China. Days earlier, Beijing had retaliated against European Union tariffs of up to 35% on its electric cars by threatening similar taxes on European brandy (of which 99% comes from France – ie, Cognac). Things may yet get worse. “As America and China sharpen the knives over a simmering trade war that threatens to engulf the [EU]... [cognac, that] famed French tipple, faces being caught in the crossfire,” says Henry Samuel in The Telegraph.

But in spite of the gloom (or maybe because of it), prices for rare cognac have been rising in recent years. In 2020, Sotheby’s sold a bottle distilled in 1792 for £118,580 to set the current auction record. And last February, Martell, the oldest of the “big four” auction houses (along with Hennessy, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin) released a dame-jeanne (a large glass flask) of rare cognac, priced at €1 million. It promised to repeat the feat every year. In another sign that the market is maturing nicely, auction house Christie’s recently published a collector’s guide to buying cognac on its website, ahead of the sale of a single bottle of 72-year-old Martell, which fetched £32,500. That’s pretty old as cognacs go.

The grape ugni blanc (called trebbiano in Italy) is used to make 98% of the high-acidity, low-alcohol white wine that goes into making cognac. A handful of other grape types may also be used, according to the rules. The wine undergoes a double-distillation process, called the repasse in French, in which the brouillis (the distillate) is distilled a second time, with each step known as the chauffe (heating) to be completed no later than 31 March after the grapes were harvested. Impurities are removed and the eau de vie, at up to 73.7% in alcoholic strength to account for the evaporation, is put into casks of French Limousin or Tronçais oak for a minimum of two years. During that time, the clear spirit darkens as it ages and takes on the flavours from the wood. After two years, the cognac can be bottled with the label VS (very special), VSOP (very superior old pale) after four years, Napoléon after six years, XO (extra old) after a decade, and XXO (extra, extra old – also sometimes referred to as hors d’âge) after at least 14 years in the cask.

The crus of Cognac

Sometime around 1860, a French geologist named Henri Coquand teamed up with a local wine buff to examine the terroir in the cognac-making region. Coquand identified six distinct areas (crus) and these became officially recognised in 1938. Depending on how the cognac is blended, they may be stated on the bottle label as having come from:

Grande Champagne

Considered the crème de la crème of the crus, the hills and crumbly chalk soil of the Grande Champagne area are excellent for producing the acidic white wine used in making cognac. The eau de vie is said to have a “predominately floral bouquet”, according to the Bureau National Interprofessionnel du Cognac (BNIC), the industry trade body. But it also needs to spend a longer time in the oak casks to mature fully.

Petite Champagne

Petite Champagne is actually a larger area in terms of acreage than its Grande neighbour. But the limestone-chalk soil here is denser and the terrain flatter. Wines from Petite Champagne are also highly regarded, but the eau de vie doesn’t show quite the same level of finesse. “Fine Champagne” comprises a blend of Petite Champagne and at least 50% Grande Champagne.

Borderies

The smallest of the crus by area and the one closest to the town of Cognac, the soil is a mixture of limestone and clay, known as groies. The cognac made from the grapes grown in the Borderies requires less ageing than those grown in the Champagne areas and the wine is “round” and “aromatic” with a “bouquet of violets”, according to the BNIC.

Fins Bois

In the northern part of the Fins Bois, the soil is similar to that of the Borderies and its groies, while in the south, the soil is a bit more chalky. The eau de vie made from the grapes grown here is “round” and “supple” with a “fruity bouquet reminiscent of pressed grapes” and it ages relatively fast.

Bons Bois

The eau de vie produced from the grapes grown in the Bons Bois are quite diverse with the soil being everything from rocky to sandy. The area is also divided between its maritime climate in the west and its continental climate in the east. Bois Ordinaires: Also known as Bois à Terroirs, the grapes grown here are more affected by the winds coming off the Atlantic. The resulting eau de vie has “fruity aromas”.

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Looking to make some extra cash this Christmas? You may not have to go far - if you have vintage toys in your attic, such as a Star Wars Lego set, they could fetch you thousands.

Collectables like game consoles or vintage books are often worth hundreds or thousands. Your vinyl collection could also be worth as much as £10,000.

But did you know that those nostalgic old toys like Barbie, Lego and My Little Pony could also sell for thousands of pounds?

Toys from the 80s, 90s or even 00s are enjoying something of a revival with demand soaring in recent months, according to the insurer Homeprotect.

If you’re hoping to make some quick cash ahead of the festive period, your old toy collection could contain some hidden treasures.

By the time a child reaches the age of 13, they’ve typically owned around 493 toys, according to research by the online retailer Plastic Box Shop.

While some of these toys may have been thrown away, others may still be tucked away in a dusty attic or neatly boxed up in the garage, waiting to be passed down to the next generation or sold for a profit.

We look at which popular 80s, 90s and 00s toys have sold for the most on eBay this year.

Most valuable vintage toys

The most profitable sales this year include Lego Star Wars Cloud City (sold for £2,050), My Little Pony G1 Orange Cotton Candy Flat Foot Unmarked Hoof (£1,022) and Barbie Meadow Mares Horse (£928).

It’s good news for Lego fans, with eight Lego toys appearing in the top 10 most valuable list. This includes five items from the Lego Star Wars collection, each selling for between £660 and £2,050.

My Little Pony and Barbie took the sixth and seventh spots on the list. Whoever sold their G1 My Little Pony Orange Cotton Candy Flat Foot Unmarked Hoof got a great result, as despite not having the box, the rare item had 25 bids before it eventually sold for £1,022.28, according to Homeprotect.

Meanwhile, in seventh place, the “Barbie Meadow mares horse – Rare Original Unopened Box” went for £928. 

Barbie has long been a popular kid’s toy, but last year’s film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling created a Barbie boom, with the Mattel toys surging in popularity.

Other profitable Barbie products worth selling include any limited collector’s edition dolls from the fashion model collection and collaborations with top fashion houses. Three different fashion Barbie recently sold for between £200 and £300, while Christian Dior and Juicy Couture limited edition dolls went for £175. 

Source: Homeprotect

David Joyson, chief customer officer at Homeprotect, comments: “Iconic sets like ‘Lego Star Wars Cloud City’ and others have proven highly sought after by collectors. My Little Pony and Barbie also hold significant worth, with rare items seeing strong demand, particularly following Barbie’s recent resurgence in popularity due to the live-action film.  

“If you’ve got old toys lying around, it might be worth checking their value - you could be sitting on a goldmine!”

Other toy brands worth checking

While Lego, My Little Pony, and Barbie dominated the top spots, there are plenty of other toys from the 80s, 90s, and 00s that could be worth a second look if you happen to have them stashed away. These include:

• Ty Beanie Babies: A ‘Billionaire 14, MWCT’ Beanie Baby sold for £475
• Beyblade: The ‘Original Takara HMS Dranzer DS Purple’ fetched £148
• Bratz: A ‘2005 Bratz Felicia Campfire Collector’s Doll with 2 Outfits and Poster’ sold for £540
• Furby: The ‘Era 1 Jester Special Edition’ Furby went for £200
• Hot Wheels: A ‘Redline Sweet 16 Custom Mustang HK Green’ sold for £220
• Playmobil: A ‘RC Goods Train Set’ was snapped up for £180
• Sylvanian Families: A ‘Very Rare Boxed Flair Sylvanian Families Angelina Ballerina Cheddar Cottage’ fetched £360

“Some people think football is a matter of life and death… it’s much more serious than that.” So quipped legendary football manager Bill Shankly. What he said may be more true now then ever. Sports is now big business – and getting bigger all the time. Whether it is teams being bought for billions, broadcasters spending record sums on securing the broadcasting rights to matches, or the rise of “athleisure” wear, sports is clearly a “potentially attractive growth market globally”, says Sam North, a market analyst with eToro. And although large parts of the industry remain in private hands, there are many ways for investors to grab a slice of the pie. Here’s how.

Why invest in sports?

It’s far from straightforward to work out just how big the sports industry is, says Dan Plumley, a lecturer in sports finance at Sheffield Hallam University – it “can be tricky to pin down” where the boundaries of the sector lie. But using a definition that counts everything from professional sports all the way down to facilities and equipment and individual participation, Plumley has come up with a figure for the size of the global market at just under $485 billion in 2023. This is expected to grow to about $650 billion in 2028 and $862 billion in 2033.

But it’s not just the size of the market or the rate at which it is growing that makes the sports industry unique – sports also “has a reputation for being recession-proof”, says Plumley. This was most clearly demonstrated in 2008, when the industry “quickly emerged from the global financial crisis, powering ahead with significant growth”. Even the more recent cost-of-living issues failed to reduce the amount of money spent on sport and sporting activity – solidifying the reputation of sports as a safe haven at a time of economic volatility.

This makes sense given that many fans have a “love for their team that defies logic”, giving teams and sports a degree of brand loyalty and enthusiasm that other sectors can only dream of, as Theodora Joseph, an analyst at investment information platform Finimize, argues – and as you might have picked up from Shankly’s quip. This gives the teams and companies involved pricing power and means that the shares of companies in the sports industry “tend to have little correlation with other assets”. Joseph suggests that even those for whom sports will forever remain a foreign land should consider investing in companies in the sector to help diversify their portfolio.

Finding new markets

Sports teams and leagues have also become much better at expanding by “trying to find new fans and moving into new markets”, says Joseph. The North American sports leagues, for example, have been making a major push into Europe and emerging Asia. More people watched the US National Basketball Association (NBA) finals in China than in America. Even the traditionally US-centric NFL (National Football League) now plays some games in the UK, Germany – and even Spain.

International expansion may in part just attract fans who might have otherwise gone to see their local teams. But surveys carried out by organisations such as the Women’s Sport Trust suggest that the rise of women’s sports has created “an environment and fan experience that is fundamentally different from the men’s game”, says Anna Reynolds, a consultant at Yonder Consulting. It has attracted into sport a new demographic of younger women and families who previously would never have got involved.

Women’s sports teams and leagues have also been persuading a wider range of companies and brands to consider sports as part of their marketing strategy. The stadium in which Manchester City women play football, for example, has been sponsored by the baby gear company Joie, a relationship that would be hard to imagine for the men’s team. Similarly, while many of the most successful female football teams in the UK are offshoots of established men’s Premiership clubs, this is not the case in the US and already there are several standalone European clubs, says Reynolds.

All this comes at a time when firms in general “are becoming much more open to sports sponsorship”, says Harry Coe, co-founder and CEO of Luscid, a start-up that helps firms find sponsorship and marketing deals with sports leagues and teams. In the past, firms would typically only sponsor a sports team or event if one of their executives had a personal connection with it. Now, however, with a lot more data available, companies can be more scientific, leading them to spend more than they otherwise would have on sports sponsorship and marketing.

The fusion of sports and entertainment has boosted popularity

One of the factors driving the sports boom has been the huge increase in the amount spent on broadcasting rights. Consultancy SportBusiness estimates that the market for sports media rights has now grown to $61 billion, as David Bishop, a partner at LEK Consulting, points out. This is partly due to the fact that sports is “one of the very few things” that continue to pull in large live audiences. Indeed, 93 of the 100 (and all of the top 20) most-watched US television events in 2023 were NFL games, according to data provider Nielsen.

Large live audiences can be “incredibly commercially valuable” because they attract premium advertising and drive TV subscriptions, says Bishop. The opening up of media markets has also “globalised” the audiences of major sports, such as basketball and Formula One, increasing the size of the audience. These facts, together with the arrival of successive generations of new bidders, such as the various streaming services, coming to market with new business models, has led to bidding wars pushing up the price of the rights to broadcast sporting events. The NFL signed media rights agreements with CBS, NBC, Fox, ESPN and Amazon in 2021 – a deal collectively valued at approximately $110 billion over 11 years, says North. This helped raise the NFL’s annual revenue from $12 billion then to $20 billion in 2023.

Having technology companies competing with traditional media companies for the right to broadcast games certainly helps teams maximise their revenues, says Matthew Pryke, managing partner at law firm Hamlins. But the whole thing has been pushed into overdrive by what he calls the “fusion of sport and entertainment”. A classic example is the relationship between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce driving interest in the Super Bowl, or the Welcome to Wrexham documentary series about Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney's investment in Wrexham FC, leading to the Welsh club gaining an international fan base.

Clubs and leagues are taking some lessons from the entertainment industry, says Pryke. Many clubs now offer apps that provide additional content for their fans, such as behind-the-scenes footage, for example. Other clubs are taking advantage by renting out their stadiums for other events. Tottenham Hotspur is one of the pioneers in that regard – they have a stadium that puts on more than 30 music events a year, hosts several NFL games and has a go-karting track under the pitch.

Rising interest in acquisitions

The explosion in the cost of TV rights and sponsorship money has led to a surge in interest in acquisitions, too – and a jump in the amounts buyers are willing to pay. New owners can “bring additional professionalisation” to sports outfits, helping them maximise their commercial potential, but quick profits are not usually the main thing buyers are looking for, says Josh Charalambous, a partner at law firm RPC. They tend to be more interested in the potential for capital gains, either from continued revenue growth or, in the case of sports such as football, from climbing up the league tables, where there is much more money to be made.

There’s a trend of investors buying football clubs and investing in them with a view to getting them promoted and increasing their capital value, says Charalambous. Some owners have bought multiple clubs (as in the case of Red Bull’s portfolio), “though that is a little bit riskier because if one club goes through a bad patch, or is even relegated, that can damage the other clubs in the brand”. There seems to be a trickle-down effect, too: the elite clubs continue to command really big valuations, but the money “is cascading down the pyramid” – even League Two (fourth tier) English football clubs are now able to command “surprisingly high” prices.

Indeed, although the huge sums that have been paid for football teams drive the headlines, there has also been “a major uptick in team values across the board”, says Pryke. Recent deals suggest the value of American football teams, for example, has “more than doubled, if not tripled, over the last four years”. Pryke’s firm has also been involved in transactions for teams in other sports, such as yachting. And with sports leagues loosening their ownership rules to allow for private equity, consortia and (most controversially) sovereign wealth funds, it would seem we are yet “nowhere near the top of the market”.

How technology has impacted sports

With so much money at stake, it’s no surprise that sports team are spending more on technology, which has become a “key growth driver” for the wider sector, says North. Innovations in wearable technology, data analytics and sports apps are “enhancing athlete performance” as well as “creating new monetisation opportunities, as teams experiment with new ways for fans to engage with sports”.

Joni Kettunen, founder and CEO of Firstbeat Technologies, is at the forefront of this trend. His firm’s systems use machine learning to help coaches and managers “select the right players for the team as well as tailoring each team member’s training schedules to help avoid injuries and maximise their performance in upcoming games”.

The most impressive technical advances are taking place in professional sports, where resources are greatest, says Kettunen, but these advances are also starting to trickle down to college teams in the US and player academies. Firstbeat has even developed a scaled-down version of the system aimed at personal trainers. One area already taken up by enthusiastic athletes and members of the public are “wearables” – devices that measure such things as your heart rate, the number of steps you have taken and your glucose levels, says Gillian Diesen, portfolio manager at Pictet Asset Management. There has been a big rise in the number of firms developing products in this area, from tech giants such as Apple to smaller, more focused companies such as Dexcom.

Profits off the pitch

Sporting goods in general are also seeing a surge in demand, including a big rise in “athleisure”, sportswear that has become fashionable to wear off the pitch and outside the gym, such as trainers and joggers. As people around the world, especially in Asia, are getting richer and have more leisure time, they are getting more involved in sport, and spending more on personal trainers and sporting equipment, says Mark Ellis, CEO of Nutshell Asset Management. Innovation is also driving sales, says Diesen, as people go mad for “new running shoes with carbon plates inside and different designs that can help propel you further forward”, for example. Companies are also working on kit that aims to increase comfort or performance with new materials, or just looks more stylish, making products in collaboration with other designers.

Some of the “big names” in athleisure are starting to lose out to upstarts in the battle for consumers’ wallets, says Ben Peters, portfolio manager and director at Evenlode Investment. Nike, for example, despite its experience, expertise and innovation in sports footwear, and its savvy use of athlete sponsorship and marketing, is in danger of being overtaken by challenger brands such as On and Hoka in running shoes, and Crocs and Birkenstocks in leisure. These new brands “have filled the gap with innovative and/or more comfortable alternatives and made material gains in market share, particularly among younger demographics”. We look at some of the ways to invest in all of these trends below.

Best sports stocks to buy now

Most football clubs are privately owned, but there are a few listed on the stockmarket. Celtic (LSE: CCP) is an example. It is currently the dominant team in Scotland, winning 12 of the last 13 Scottish Premiership titles, and is nine points clear at the top of the table at the time of writing. Its storied history, having won no less than 54 top division titles and 42 Scottish cups, gives the club a powerful brand. It has grown revenue by roughly 50% between 2019 and 2024 and is consistently profitable. It trades at 15.7 times 2015 earnings, which looks like good value.

Investing in a single club can be risky, so it might make more sense to invest in a company that owns multiple clubs, such as Madison Square Garden Sports Corp (NYSE: MSGS). It owns two major US professional franchises – the New York Knicks basketball team in the NBA and the New York Rangers ice hockey team in the NHL. Like many sports teams, MSG may make relatively little profit on paper at the moment, but it will benefit from capital gains as a result of a rise in team values thanks to the rapid growth in popularity of American sports across the wider world, says Theodora Joseph of Finimize.

One company at the heart of the sports technology revolution is Garmin (NYSE: GRMN). It has enjoyed success in developing car, ship and plane navigation systems, but gets most of its money from wearable fitness and outdoor-activity products, which account for 58% of its revenue and 68% of operating profits. Sales are strong, with revenue growing by 56% between 2018 and 2023, and earnings per share nearly doubling over the same period. Along with a return on capital employed of 18%, this more than justifies the valuation of 28.6 times 2025 earnings.

Shimano (Tokyo: 7309) gets roughly 80% of its revenue from cycling components, with the rest coming from fishing tackle. Both sports remain popular pastimes globally. Cycling has become incredibly popular at the Olympics, as Ben Peters of Evenlode Global Income points out, with 22 events involving 512 athletes, and has seen an explosion in popularity in China, which should help fuel growth. Shimano has a dominant position in what is essentially a “two-horse race” with rival SRAM, equipping 15 of the 18 World Tour men’s cycling teams and seven of the 15 women’s teams. Shimano trades at 25 times expected 2025 earnings.

Swiss firm On Holding (NYSE: ONON) is a running shoe company currently disrupting the athleisure market. The firm has won plaudits for its shoes, which apparently make running seem easier. As mentioned in the main story above, Peters is a big fan; Pictet’s Gillian Diesen is also impressed by the firm’s product pipeline and strong designs. The shares trade at a pricey 49 times 2025 earnings, but the growth rate has been astounding, with sales growing nearly sevenfold between 2019 and 2023. The firm is expected to keep growing strongly over the next few years.

Another fast-growing company worth looking at is Deckers Outdoor (NYSE: DECK). Deckers makes clothes and shoes that are geared to both the athletic and casual markets. Diesen notes that Deckers’ running shoes (sold under the Hoka brand) are particularly well regarded, especially among younger Asian consumers who “are constantly looking for something new”. Nutshell’s Mark Ellis is impressed by the company’s strong growth rates, with revenues more than doubling between 2020 and this year. This more than justifies the fact that shares are trading at 36 times 2025 earnings.

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These days you can find Ladybird books exploring everything from the mid-life crisis to hangovers – examples from a spoof series released by Penguin, which bought the publisher in 1998, to capitalise on the nostalgia and resurgent interest in the series of children’s books. There doesn’t yet seem to be a Ladybird Book of Investing. It would be fun to follow the adventures of the original child protagonists, Peter and Jane, as they pore over balance sheets and the latest earnings reports.

Ladybird had its origins in Henry Wills’ bookshop in Loughborough, established in 1867, Michael Wood explains in BBC History Magazine. The first books appeared in 1914, but the golden age of Ladybird spans the years 1940-1975, when the series evolved beyond stories to cover science, history and nature (and, more recently, How it Works: The Wife). “These snapshots of ‘Our Island Story’ are nationalist, white, largely male; kings such as Alfred are noble and merciful, and the empire is still a Good Thing,” says Woods. Naturally, they are a product of their time, he notes, but many of the stories have stuck with us “like myths”.

It was in the early years of this golden age that Ladybird books assumed the pocket-sized format we recognise today. Paper was rationed during the war, but it was discovered that a single piece of paper could be folded into a diminutive 56-page book, perfect for children. Over 100 million copies had been sold by 2016, says Marion Willingham in the Financial Times. Naturally, the rarest examples are the most sought-after by collectors today. Often they are the ones that were the least popular at the time of their printing, Helen Day, a collector of 10,000 titles, tells the paper. One, The Impatient Horse, about “an errant milk float”, sells for around £250. Cinderella, the only Ladybird to come in a dust jacket, fetches about £180 for a first edition.

But be careful, warns Day. Ladybird played fast and loose with the rules, so a stated “first edition” may, in fact, be a later version. “First editions” were sometimes completely rewritten and even the illustrations changed, while leaving the original publication date unaltered. “If you’ve picked up an old Peter and Jane book and been bewildered to find Jane in a pair of jeans, this would be why.” Another giveaway is the Ladybird logo – open wings dates the books to the 1940s and 1950s. The “holy grail” of Ladybirds is How it Works: The Computer. Like the Biblical chalice, no one really knows if it ever existed.

Second-hand book shops, car-boot sales and online marketplaces such as eBay are hunting grounds for vintage Ladybirds. Day’s collection has been on tour for the past few years and it is next scheduled to pitch up at Peterborough Museum in the spring if you need inspiration. There is no market for modern Ladybirds. Sadly, that includes the spoof titles. That said, London bookseller Peter Harrington is selling a copy of “the original satirical Ladybird book” We go to the gallery, from 2014, for £1,250. Penguin threatened to sue the publisher, Elia, for infringing on the Ladybird name, so Elia created a new imprint – Dung Beetle Limited.

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Defence is one of the hottest investment themes of 2024. Shares in BAE Systems (LSE: BAE) and its European peers have surged higher as investors have flocked to the European rearmament trade, repricing companies for increased spending on defence. The MSCI World Aerospace and Defence index has jumped 22.7% year-to-date and 45.3% over the past year (to the end of September) compared with a return of 18.9% and 32.4% for the wider MSCI World index. While most of the companies in the defence sector now look fully priced, some opportunities remain. One such opportunity is the defence contractor Babcock International (LSE: BAB).

Babcock profits from nuclear

Around 70% of Babcock’s revenue is tied to the UK defence and civil market; 30% comes from overseas customers. A good percentage of that international base comes from Australia and South Africa, putting the European segment of the firm’s business at less than 10%. As such, the company has missed out on much of the European rearmament trade, but it does have a big exposure to the UK’s nuclear strategic deterrent. Around a third of the firm’s revenue is tied to its nuclear business, with half its bottom line coming from there.

The new Labour government is undertaking a strategic defence review, which has frozen defence spending until its conclusions are published, probably in 2025. But the government has said it’s committed to the nuclear deterrent and that’s where Babcock stands to profit.

Defence is generally a great industry from an investor’s perspective. Defence contractors have one main customer – the government of their respective countries – and such customers are quite reliable. What’s more, spending tends to come in cycles, and long-term cycles at that.

The UK’s nuclear deterrent is at the extreme end of what these long-term cycles look like. The UK maintains a fleet of submarines, which are managed with the US in the Atlantic fleet pool of Trident missiles. The current class of submarine leading the deterrent policy is the Vanguard class, which replaced the Resolution-class subs armed with Polaris missiles between 1993 and 1999. There were plans to replace Vanguard by 2024 (in 2006), but this date has slipped and slipped. The latest date is at some point in the next decade. Delays have, unsurprisingly, pushed up costs. First pegged at £11bn- £14bn in 2007, the cost of the new Dreadnought class now stands at £45bn (including a £10bn contingency fund). As the Vanguard class has been kept in service far beyond its intended lifespan, the costs of maintenance have crept higher.

These multi-decade projects give contractors a high level of visibility over revenue and profit and allow them to plan accordingly. Babcock isn’t building the Dreadnought submarines (that role is allocated to BAE), but it will have a leading role in supporting the submarines when in service. It already supports the Navy’s existing Trident-armed submarine fleet, and analysts believe this support work is already generating £400m to £500m in revenue.

At the company’s 2024 full-year results meeting, management highlighted that the UK will be operating four different types of nuclear power submarines over the next decade. That includes the Vanguard class as it’s replaced and nuclear-powered attack submarines – currently, the Astute class. These will be replaced towards the end of the 2030s with the Aukus class of vessel. The Aukus programme (Australia-UK-US) is a tripartite initiative initially aimed at developing and producing a new nuclear-powered attack submarine. This chain of developments locks in work for Babcock well into the next decade and beyond.

Babcock is cheap at the price

Babcock’s other businesses – in marine, land, and aviation – are just as important to the group, accounting for around two-thirds of revenue. Still, the nuclear side has revenue visibility. It has been doing this for decades and has the facilities in place and the right clearances. The government is unlikely to take the work away and give it to another supplier. And it’s here where the growth is expected to materialise over the next five years. Analysts at Panmure Liberum expect the company’s nuclear revenues to rise by around 5% a year through the end of the decade, based on existing contracts and planned nuclear-deterrent expenditure. Babcock’s marine division (port facilities and infrastructure) is also expected to see revenue grow from £1.4bn to £1.7bn. Overall revenue is expected to hit £4.9bn by 2028, up from the £4.4bn reported for fiscal 2024.

Revenue isn’t the whole story here. Babcock has recently had to spend heavily on major infrastructure projects to prepare for upcoming nuclear contracts. These have eaten into its earnings, but unexpected costs are always a risk and the company now seems to be past the peak. As spending decreases and economies of scale flow through, Panmure’s analysts have the company’s earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) margin rising from 5.4% in fiscal 2024 to around 8%. So, while revenue is only expected to grow 12% between 2024 and 2028, underlying profits could rise as much as 80% from £158m to £283m. Earnings per share are projected to rise to 53p by 2028.

Considering all of the above, Babcock looks cheap compared with its future growth potential and its competitors. On 2025 estimates, at 474p, Babcock is trading at a price/earnings (p/e) ratio of around 10.7, compared with the European sector average in the mid-teens.

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The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index is the benchmark index for assessing the performance of alternative investments. For the past 10 years, bottles of rare whisky have topped the list with a price change of 280%, nearly double the performance of the S&P 500 and fine wine, the closest comparator in the alternatives space.

Meanwhile, according to the Whisky Cask Market Report, whisky casks have generated an average return of 12.4% per annum over the past five years, with popular distilleries delivering even greater advances.

According to The Scotch Whisky Association (SWA), global export figures for 2022, termed a “bumper” year, saw a slight decrease as global markets recovered from the pandemic. However, there remains cause for optimism. Compared to 2019, Scotch Whisky exports experienced a substantial 14% increase in value and a 3% growth in volume.

The whisky market has made a remarkable comeback in recent decades, with distilleries starting up worldwide. Today, the global whisky market is worth close to $70bn and forecast to hit $125bn by 2032, according to KPMG. Countries such as Japan and India are joining traditional products such as Scotch and Irish Whisk(e)y.

The growing global interest in whisky has sparked a gold rush. A KPMG survey of 200 high-net-worth individuals and investment advisors found that whisky was the most desired alternative investment class, with two-thirds of respondents favouring Scotch Whisky.

Tax benefits

Individuals cited tax efficiency for the preference of casks over individual bottles. In the UK, alcohol duty must be paid on alcohol when it is bottled and leaves “bond.” The amount of duty paid varies from product to product, but for the average bottle of Scotch Whisky, a little over £10 is paid in alcohol duty. Storing the whisky in casks in so-called bonded warehouses gets around this issue. What's more, any profits earned from the sale of a cask are generally capital gains exempt because the product is classified as what's known as a “wasting asset.”

There are plenty of benefits to including whisky in your portfolio. However, investing in the market with a trusted partner makes sense. Investing in whisky, particularly whisky casks, takes a lot of work. Unless you've got millions of pounds in assets and your own bonded warehouse, it’s going to be a struggle to acquire a diverse portfolio to achieve the tax and capital growth benefits.

Marketplace like no other

The technology the company have built is made to revolutionise the industry of both wine and whisky collecting and investing, the marketplace offers a comprehensive dashboard for your collection, enabling you to view your entire collection in one place. Regardless of whether you have purchased through their platform, you will be able to store your collection data here. The marketplace provides a secure way to trade wine and spirits securely with authenticity guaranteed and fully insured.

Decant index is available for collectors or investors to purchase one bottle of spirit or wine or multiple casks of Whisky or Rum, their marketplace lists over 1,000 products from more than 100 different producers.

The company are more than just tech business, they have invested heavily in their Mayfair office, creating a contemporary House Lounge Bar and a separate tasting suite designed for client events. Their office is available to all their private clients and is often the meeting place for private client team and their clients.

Decant Index, offers each collector a dedicated private client director to help support their needs.

Decant Index, part of Decant Group, has a number of businesses within the alcohol sector, one of which is a dedicated storage facility in Scotland, this storage facility is a dedicated bonded warehouse where clients are able to store casks.

When the purchase is completed, the casks are stored at their secure HMRC government-bonded warehouse, fully insured (subject to policy exclusions, terms and conditions) and tax-free. All documentation is held within the online portal. Investors can then sit on the investment and wait for it to mature as long as they wish - three years is the minimum requirement for whisky to be called Scotch Whisky.

Decant Index handles the buying and storing process and can help with the selling process. When it is time to sell, investors can choose from one of several options: selling through the platform to other partners and collectors, independent bottlers, or going to auction. If none of those options work out, investors can always sell directly back to Decant Index as a dedicated stockist for a fast turnaround.

To learn more about Decant index, download their free app or create a free account at: https://decantindex.com/.

The autumn season is an important time for auction houses in the sales calendar. But for Sotheby’s, this autumn is more important than for most. “The art market is grinding through a rough patch… driven in part by China’s economic slowdown, wars and volatile US elections,” says The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

To that list can be added the normalisation of interest rates that makes inherently risky assets, such as collectables, less attractive to investors/collectors when you could earn a decent rate of return by simply sticking your money in the bank. As the WSJ points out, the “sales downturn” could not have come at a worse time for “the auction house’s highly leveraged billionaire owner, Patrick Drahi, who is fighting fires amid restructuring in his broader telecom empire, Altice” (Drahi took Sotheby’s private in 2019, delisting it after three decades of being publicly traded).

Executives at Sotheby’s have even had to settle for IOUs instead of their usual incentive-based pay and questioned whether the auction house would be able to continue to pay its staff, a source told the paper. Sotheby’s denies any such discussion took place, but it did lose $115m in the first half of 2024, compared with a $3m gain a year earlier, according to unaudited financial statements, seen by the paper. It marks a swift change in fortunes.

Until recently, the art market had been in full swing, with Sotheby’s raking in at least $7bn in sales annually. Then in May of this year, Sotheby’s couldn’t even sell a portrait by Francis Bacon – an artist who until recently had been very much in demand – for its lower $30m estimate, as David Sanderson notes in The Times. In 2020, the auction house sold a triptych by the artist for $85m, above its upper estimate. The good times look to be over.

It’s just as well, then, that Sotheby’s has been able to land the estate sale of this season – that of the late US beauty tycoon Sydell Miller. Collectively, the 90-odd works are expected to make around $200m. They are on show in London until 8 October, after which they will continue their world tour via Asia before arriving back in New York in time for Sotheby’s marquee sales week next month. Claude Monet’s waterlily painting Nymphéas (c.1914-1917) leads the auction with a pre-sale estimate of about $60m, according to Melanie Gerlis in the Financial Times. Another highlight is La Statuaire (1925), a portrait of a seated female sculptor by Pablo Picasso, bought by Miller in 1999 for $11.8m. This time around, Sotheby’s is hoping to get $30m for it.

Wassily Kandinsky’s “celebration of the relationship between colour and form”, Weisses Oval (1921), is also appearing in the line-up, valued at up to $20m, as is Henry Moore’s sculpture of a reclining mother and child from 1976 (expected to fetch at least $8m) and works by Yves Klein (Relief Éponge bleu sans titre, 1961, for $8m-$12m) and Henri Matisse (Jeune fille en robe rose (1942, $3m-$5m). Sotheby’s will be hoping the sale signals a recovery in the market.

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Given that it’s a hobby rooted in nostalgia, there’s something ironic about the fact that TikTok – a short-video social-media platform better known for airing teenage angst – is driving the current fad for matchbox collecting. A new technology is sparking a craze for an outmoded one. 

It can safely be assumed that the respectable “matchbox-label collectors”, who met at the Boulogne Restaurant on Gerrard Street, London, on 17 September 1937, never imagined that they would one day be sharing their “swapping circle” with the fashionable young things of the 2020s.

But here we are. The young are embracing “phillumeny” – the hobby of collecting matchbooks, matchboxes and other match-related items – and “displaying their collections at home and online”, says Anna Grace Lee in The Wall Street Journal. “It’s a resurgence of an interest that harks back to a time when matches were ubiquitous as smoking and advertising tools.” Related searches on Etsy rose 92% in the three months to the beginning of August from a year earlier, a representative for the online marketplace for homemade and vintage items tells the paper. You can buy posters and prints celebrating the colourful little boxes, a phillumeny-themed “it-girl wallet” from New York fashion house Kate Spade (if it isn’t already sold out) and even order your own matchbooks to give out at parties.

“To some, matches are associated with a certain restaurant-hopping lifestyle that is increasingly harder to achieve,” says Lee. For Britta Lokting in The New York Times Magazine, collecting matchbooks also became “a way to document what may one day disappear”. 

“With their slogans, doodles, aphorisms and inside jokes, matchbooks are objects of beauty that evoke an establishment’s singular character,” she says. “Looking at one can trigger the din of a specific night out or a snippet of conversation, even the hours spent alone.” When favoured watering holes close down, their matchbooks become treasured relics.

It certainly makes a change from the other fad of the last few months, the “brat summer”, characterised by British singer Charli XCX as “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”, says Christopher Howse in The Spectator. But can a passion for matchbooks survive in an era in which smoking in bars is illegal? “To me, there is little point collecting matchbooks… matchboxes belong to the two centuries that required a flame to light tobacco, candles and fires,” says Howse. 

I’m not sure those matchbox-label collectors would agree. In 1945, the organisation today known as the British Matchbox Label and Bookmatch Society was founded. On its website, three letters written in the 1980s and early 1990s reminiscing about the society’s early days can be found. In one, a founding member ends his missive by exhorting the young to pick up the baton and carry the society forward. They must be hoping this craze doesn’t fizzle out.

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Heart disease may not feature as prominently in the press as other medical conditions, but in many respects, it is an even bigger problem, says Dr Ali Khavandi, consultant interventional cardiologist at the Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Foundation Trust. It “kills more than all cancers put together”. 

Heart disease is also a growing problem, imposing the “largest financial burdens on healthcare systems around the world”. Fortunately, mounting demand for better treatments is sparking a revolution in the way we treat the condition, with the biotechnology and medical technology sectors changing everything from the way that we tackle the underlying risk factors to developing better pre-emptive measures.

Heart disease: the causes and some cures

Heart disease has long been a huge problem in richer countries – 40% of the developed world’s population either has a cardiovascular condition or will develop one. However, it is increasingly also a problem for the developing world, says Khavandi. Note that “even in Africa more people now die of heart disease than of HIV, TB and malaria combined”. This is partly because longer life expectancies make an increase “inevitable” owing to the wear and tear on arteries as people age. 

For now, though, the more immediate concern is “metabolic syndrome”. This is the medical term for the health problems caused by bad eating habits, including eating too much ultra-processed food and drinking too much alcohol, and the lack of exercise associated with post-industrial life, which means that “most of us are carrying too much weight, especially around our vital organs”, says Khavandi. 

There has been a “huge amount of interest” in the medical community around the link between poor nutrition and heart disease, with the World Health Organisation estimating that roughly 80% of cardiovascular disease could be prevented by making lifestyle changes. 

Sadly, the message that being overweight can be bad for your heart doesn’t seem to be getting through to the wider population, who tend to view obesity in terms of “how it makes a person look rather than on their health”, says Matthew Renna, portfolio manager for the Harbor Health Care Ucits exchange-traded fund (ETF). Losing weight can also be difficult, while diet pills were traditionally “riddled with safety issues” and “didn’t work all that well”. But this has changed in the past few years with the development of the GLP-1 agonists. Originally developed to treat diabetes, these drugs work by enhancing the secretion of insulin, leading to “pretty significant weight loss” even in people without diabetes. 

Almost as soon as these drugs were developed people began wondering whether the weight loss they promoted would “have a benefit on cardiovascular health”, says Renna. Last year, this was answered conclusively when a large-scale trial by Novo Nordisk involving 18,000 people showed that the weight loss drug Wegovy “reduced adverse cardiovascular events (strokes and heart attacks) by 20%”. This “amazing” result means these treatments are no longer merely weight loss drugs but have become what Renna considers “a major advancement for the treatment of cardiovascular disease”. Overall, he says, this is shaping up to be “the largest pharmaceutical market we’ve ever seen”.

Other promising heart disease treatments

Although important, anti-obesity drugs aren’t the only promising heart disease treatments coming through the pipeline. Until about 15 years ago, statins, a group of medicines that can help lower the level of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (or “bad cholesterol”) in the blood, were a big money-spinner for drug firms, say Ailsa Craig and Marek Poszepczynski of the International Biotechnology Trust. However, as the patents on most of these drugs have now expired, big pharma is seeking “new targets”. PCSK9 inhibitors, which also reduce cholesterol, are one promising category, with Amgen and Sanofi developing some that “work incredibly well in those who can’t tolerate statins or where LDL wasn’t lowered enough”. 

Another group of drugs creating excitement among cardiologists are those targeted at Lp(a), another protein linked to heart disease. Around 20% of the population contains genes that lead to increased levels of Lp(a), even in otherwise healthy individuals. This may be because “in the distant past it actually conferred an advantage by helping the blood clot, useful at a time when there were no accident and emergency departments where you could go to patch up a wound caused by a bite from a sabre-toothed tiger”, says Craig. Unlike statins, which may even increase Lp(a) levels, these new drugs have been shown to inhibit the production of Lp(a). 

Daniel Lyons, portfolio manager on the health care and biotech teams at Janus Henderson Investors, believes that if clinical trials being run by Novartis and Amgen around the link between lower Lp(a) and heart disease work out, it could “open up a new multibillion-dollar market”. Lyons also notes there are some other interesting areas, with biotech companies such as Rocket “working on gene therapies for rare forms of cardiomyopathy [disorders affecting the heart muscle] such as Danon disease”. What’s more, several firms “are working on improvements in cardiac diseases related to ageing, like TTR amyloidosis, with new therapies likely to be approved in the near term”.

The rise of the robot surgeons

Sadly, drugs can’t solve every heart-related condition. Many patients require some form of heart surgery. This can be time-consuming, expensive, come with various risks and even if successful can involve long recovery times. One technology that is starting to transform heart surgery is the use of robotic devices. Paul Modi, consultant cardiac surgeon at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, believes that robot-assisted surgery is particularly useful in “intra-cardiac” procedures (those that take place inside the heart), including the repair of two of the four main valves. It is also increasingly useful in extra-cardiac surgery, such as bypass surgery that involves a single graft.

Modi thinks that using robotic machines in heart surgery has “big advantages for both the patient and the surgeon”. For patients, robot-assisted surgery “reduces the amount of trauma and cuts recovery times”. Indeed, traditional surgery, which involves cutting open the front of the chest and breaking the breastbone, typically requires up to seven days in hospital, followed by a two-or-three-month period recovering at home”. However, robotic heart surgery involves a relatively tiny incision, “allowing the patient to resume normal activities within two to three weeks”. The need for post-operative care, including blood transfusions, is also dramatically reduced, while infections “are almost unheard of”. 

Using a robotic system such as Intuitive Surgical’s Da Vinci also makes the surgeon’s overall job easier. The latest versions include “seven degrees of freedom”, which allows the user to manipulate the robot arm more precisely than ever before. Robotic systems also permit the surgeon to view the area being operated on in much more detail, with both three-dimensional vision and magnification of up to ten times on offer. 

What’s more, robotic surgery isn’t necessarily the final destination. Modi quotes his American mentor, Wiley Nifong, who likens the automation (and miniaturisation) of heart surgery to climbing Mount Everest. So, “if conventional surgery is the base camp, then keyhole surgery (without robots) is a higher camp, and robotic surgery is even higher”, while the summit will be completely endovascular surgery, with procedures carried out by inserting a device into the bloodstream via a single pinprick. 

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that using robotic systems in heart surgery, is delivering benefits for all stakeholders”, with the economic benefits, in particular seemingly “increasingly unassailable”, agrees Andrew Duncan, senior equity analyst at Killik & Co. Duncan accepts that the machines come with a high upfront cost, and the per-procedure expense is higher. However, this is far outweighed by the reduced need for post-operative stays in intensive care and extensive rehabilitation, as well as far fewer cases where the hospital will be required to repeat or redo procedures. 

Killik’s Duncan says the machines are improving all the time. He is particularly impressed by the idea of augmented reality (AR), which projects computer-generated information onto real-world video images. With good visibility vital to successful outcomes, the AR systems starting to appear “will guide surgeons by highlighting areas they need to focus on, as well as the areas which they should avoid”. Force feedback (the simulation of physical touch in the real world) on the controls linking the surgeons and the robotic arms is another technology that could improve precision.

How to improve heart disease diagnosis

Better treatments for heart disease are only part of the solution. Like other conditions, heart disease is much easier to treat if caught at an early stage, but worsens if not identified until later. The problem is that it tends to be difficult to diagnose, especially using traditional methods, such as simple observation. This can lead to seemingly healthy adults, who Dr Khavandi refers to as “middle-aged men in Lycra”, being underdiagnosed. It’s also a particular problem for women, “as their incidence of heart disease is actually equal to that of men, but they tend to present differently in terms of symptoms”, says Adam Fine, co-founder and CEO of Windham Capital Partners. “This leads to delays in treatment as well as heart disease being mistaken for other conditions.”

The good news is that “the same miniaturisation trend that is transforming heart surgery is also taking place in diagnostics”, says Fine. Devices are being developed that monitor the wearer’s vital signs, flagging up potential problems. This reduces the need for more invasive testing such as right-heart catheterisation, where a surgeon measures how well the heart is pumping by inserting a catheter threaded into the pulmonary artery. Such testing requires a local anaesthetic and is uncomfortable for the patient “as well as being expensive and time consuming”. 

Another non-invasive approach is to use an imaging device such as ultrasound, CT or MRI scans, or even simple chest X-rays. Sadly, human error and the limitations of the technology mean “many cases are missed”, says Mark Phillips, chief clinical officer of Annalise.ai. Set up only four years ago, with the aim of applying recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) to medicine, Annalise has developed a system that identifies 124 different radiological findings on a typical chest X-ray. While it doesn’t replace a human radiologist, it reduces the time needed by the specialist by nearly half by flagging up areas of concern as well as prioritising cases in need of urgent attention. 

This is important as some types of heart problems “require immediate intervention, while others can be dealt with by a visit to the doctor and some medication. Indeed, while the device has been clinically verified “to be at least as good as a human radiologist”, Phillips points to analysis suggesting that in a quarter of cases, it can help diagnose cases of heart disease a year earlier than a typical radiologist. Within a few weeks of radiologists being introduced to the system, even those previously sceptical were saying “they needed this to do their jobs properly”.

Integrating data to improve diagnosis

As well as advances in diagnostic methods, there are also moves to break down “informational silos”, says Jason Alan Snyder inventor and founder of SuperTruth. His company aims to integrate the data from various sources such as wearables, scans, cardiograms and even patient histories “to enable medical professionals to diagnose heart disease much more accurately than if they were looking at just one measurement”. He thinks that combining multiple sources can, in some cases, give doctors an “unbelievable” ability to predict heart disease at an early stage. 

Snyder also thinks the increased integration of data and machine learning is improving the accuracy of diagnosing heart disease and making accessing medicine more convenient by encouraging the development of “telemedicine” and home-testing kits. Such kits, which analyse bodily fluids to see if they contain proteins consistent with heart-related inflammation, can prompt patients to come forward who think they might have a problem “but who otherwise wouldn’t want to trouble their doctors”.

How to invest in the battle against heart disease

While there are no exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that deal directly with heart disease, the Harbor Health Care Ucits ETF (LSE: WELL), due to be launched later this month, has several companies tackling it in its portfolio. They include Viking Therapeutics (Nasdaq: VKTX). Viking boasts an anti-obesity drug, VK2735, that showed strong results in a recent phase two trial (the second of three stages of clinical trials). It helped people lose weight, raising the possibility that it could become a major rival to the two main drugs now on the market. While Viking is still in the red, it has more than enough cash to help it get through the final stages of bringing the drug to market. 

Matthew Renna, portfolio manager for the Harbor Health Care Ucits ETF, also likes Rocket Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: RCKT). Rocket specialises in developing gene therapies for various rare and life-threatening conditions, split between blood diseases and heart problems. While it is expected to win approval for its treatment for the blood condition Fanconi Anaemia (FA), Rocket’s most promising (and potentially lucrative) treatment is RP-A501, aimed at the heart problems associated with Danon’s disease, which affects around 45,000 people in the US and Europe alone. RP-A501 is undergoing stage-two trials. Like Viking, Rocket is unprofitable but could reap big rewards once its drugs get approved. 

Amgen (Nasdaq: AMGN) is a more established biotech company. While its therapies are targeted at a wide range of conditions, one of its most lucrative drugs is Repatha, which aims to reduce the risk of heart attacks by lowering the amount of “bad” cholesterol in the blood. It also owns the GLP-1 anti-obesity drug MariTide, which has shown promise – and it only needs to be administered monthly, instead of weekly (as with the existing drugs). Amgen trades at 16.3 times 2025 earnings. 

With a 99% market share, Intuitive Surgical (Nasdaq: ISRG) is the undisputed leader in robotic surgery. With the savings from reduced recovery times making hospitals “extremely happy”, and “tens of thousands of surgeons now trained to use its systems”, Killik’s Andrew Duncan thinks that Intuitive has an “unassailable position” in the field of robotic surgery. While Intuitive trades at a pricey 63 times 2025 earnings, this has to be viewed in the context of sales that are growing at 15% a year, along with strong operating margins and a double-digit return on capital employed. There have also been rave reviews for the Da Vinci 5, the latest version of its robotic operating system. 

One established medical technology company that specialises in heart disease is Edwards Lifesciences (NYSE: EW). As well as making artificial replacement heart valves used in surgery, Edwards also produces monitoring software containing advanced algorithms that can predict the onset of hypotension (low blood pressure) during surgery. While sales have grown by around 60% over the past five years, and it produces a return on capital employed of just under 20%, it still only trades at 25 times 2025 earnings. 

Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) is a medical device maker that derives 66% of its revenue from devices related to heart disease and cardiovascular health – everything from equipment used in heart surgery to wearable monitoring devices which allow doctors to track the health of patients with heart disease. Boston Scientific has a strong record of growing sales, now rising by 8%-10% a year, while offering high returns on capital, which more than justifies a rating of 30 times 2025 profits.

This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.

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Markets dominated by an oligopoly of firms are rare. Those dominated by an oligopoly with over a decade of revenue visibility are even rarer. So when they appear, investors should leap at the chance. Such an opportunity exists in the large ultra-high-voltage cable market. The market for these cables has become dominated by a handful of European firms. 

Over the past decade, these companies have crafted a competitive advantage, flying under the radar of regulators and competitors in a relatively boring and overlooked industry. In fact, the industry barely existed a decade ago. However, it is now growing at such a rate that these firms have accumulated order backlogs into the next decade, and there is no sign of demand slowing down before the late 2030s.

Why undersea cables are in demand

The energy transition is the biggest economic and investment trend in the world today. It is likely to endure for the next two decades as the world rewires itself and builds the infrastructure required to move away from fossil fuels. One of the key challenges of the transition is the process of moving energy from place to place. In the world of fossil fuels, moving energy is relatively easy (or it is now the world has been doing it for so long). Energy stored in oil and gas is transported by moving the commodity via tankers or pipelines. 

Coal is even easier to transport. You dig it out of the ground, put it into a sack and cart it to wherever you need to generate energy, be that a fire for cooking food or a power plant supplying the nearest city. This is the way the energy industry has operated over the past hundred years. Extracting the source of energy from wherever it can be found and then moving it in large quantities, achieving economies of scale, to be burned on the other side of the world. 

But where energy is generated by the wind or sun, storing it and transporting it is a different challenge altogether. Companies can either build giant batteries and move these around the world, which would be prohibitively expensive and incredibly dirty, or they can move the energy to where it needs to be via giant wires. 

The latter option is far easier and an incredibly efficient way of transporting energy. There’s no need for giant supertankers powered by dirty diesel fuel, or any requirement to super-cool gas into a liquid. The wires are laid, infrastructure is switched on and there is very little additional input necessary aside from regular maintenance. Most underwater cables are designed to operate for a maximum of 25 years, although there are examples of cables lasting much longer. 

The problem the world now faces is building the wires required to move the energy from where it is generated, in places such as the North Sea and Norwegian fjords, to where it’s needed; places like London. This is where giant undersea cables come into play. The first international undersea cable was laid in 1850 between England and France by the English Channel Submarine Telegraph Company of Jacob and John Watkins Brett. It was a simple copper wire with insulation, just 11mm thick, designed to carry simple telegraph signals. The cable was wound on a drum mounted on the deck of the paddle steamer Goliath, which set off from Dover on 28 August 1850. There were two problems with the cable set-up. First, it wasn’t heavy enough, so lead weights had to be attached every 100 metres to make it sink. Second, the cable wasn’t armoured and it snapped almost as soon as it was connected on both sides of the channel. By the end of September 1850, sections of the cable were being sold as souvenirs. 

The early pioneers didn’t give up. By 1851, a new cable was in place. By the end of the decade, one had been laid between North America and England and, from there, the business boomed. A comparison of the first cable laid in 1850 and the ones being laid around the world by the middle of the next decade shows just how quickly this vital technology developed. The cables of the late 1860s were nearly 70mm thick, with a 2mm thick copper wire at the centre surrounded by several layers of steel armour bound together with a mix of tar and gutta-percha (a form of rubber). 

The industry continued to grow and develop over the following decades, accelerated by the development of fibre-optic communications. Today, there are around 400 underwater telecommunications cables in operation around the world, spanning a length of over 1.2 million kilometres.

Submarine power-cables: a young market

The submarine power-cable market is younger. In 1954, the world’s first submarine HVDC Cable (High Voltage Direct Current), Gotland 1, was installed. This was 98km long, from Gotland Island to the Swedish mainland, and had a capacity of 20 megawatts (MW). The industry has taken longer to develop as the need didn’t exist until fairly recently: it was always easier to transport energy via ship or pipeline (as coal, oil or gas). 

The biggest hurdle with transporting electricity large distances underwater is converting power from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC). In most countries (including the UK), AC is the dominant power supply. Unlike DC power, AC current frequently changes direction, whereas in DC, electrons flow steadily in a single direction. According to the National Grid, AC offshore cable voltages are limited to 200 kilovolts (kV), whereas HVDC cables can take three times as much power or more. 

A 1,100 kV link in China was completed in 2019 over a distance of 3,300km (2,100 miles). What’s more, there’s no technical limit on the length of cable or overhead line that can be used in HVDC connections. AC cables are far more brittle and require more maintenance, making installation over long periods prohibitively expensive and complex. However, there needs to be a converter station installed at each end of the cable to convert the power back from DC to AC in order to get it on to the grid. These converter stations take up a lot of land and are very technically complex, which is where complications can arise. 

While the cross-section of an HVDC cable looks very similar to a telecommunications cable (the copper conductor runs through the middle, surrounded by layers of insulation and armour), manufacturing the cables themselves isn’t easy. The cables can be thicker, over 110mm in some cases, and they have to be kept as straight as possible during the manufacturing process. The easiest way to do that with cables of this size is to hang them up in skyscraper-high warehouses. Then there’s the technology that actually goes into the cable itself. These cables have to be durable and work day after day, dealing with storms, tides and anchors dragging along the bottom of the sea, as the cost of repairing an underwater cable can be astronomical: it is estimated at around $5 million per mile. 

However, this does not include other factors, such as having to find additional power sources while the cable is out of action. In January 2020, an undersea cable between western Scotland and north Wales named “Western Link” failed. National Grid’s electricity system operator had to pay wind-farm operators £31 million to curtail output as the power being produced had nowhere to go. 

Then, in November 2021, National Grid and its partner on the project, Scottish Power Transmission, agreed with regulator Ofgem to pay a redress package of £158 million for delays to the Western Link Project during its construction phase between 2017 and 2019. The root cause of the delay, according to Ofgem, was “problems with manufacturing processes, installing the cables and commissioning tests”. It also acknowledged that the National Grid and Scottish Power “did not cause or exacerbate the delay”. In other words, they’d chosen the wrong manufacturer to do the work. Compared with the £1.2 billion price tag of the project, these costs were substantial. 

The companies buying and installing the cables, which tend to be the owners and operators of grids, have to be sure they are buying a product that’s reliable and worth the money. That seems to be why the industry has consolidated around a handful of suppliers.

A booming market in the UK

Demand for undersea power cables is set to explode over the next couple of years, led mostly by the wind industry. Data from consultancy 4C Offshore shows that the total length of HVDC cable installed worldwide for wind projects was nil until 2009. That year, the first 660km of cable was installed. There was no more installed until 2017 when the total jumped to 750km. 

But then, in 2019, the total length began to rise exponentially. The figure hit just under 5,000km at the end of 2023 and will rise to 6,000km by 2025. By 2030 it is projected to hit 23,000km. In 2035, the consultancy predicts, 56,000km of underwater HVDC will be in operation around the world. And these numbers only relate to the wind industry. 

The UK, with one of the world’s most developed renewable-energy sectors (thanks to our unique position as an island surrounded by the North Sea), has one of the most mature HVDC cable markets. In December 2023, the world’s longest undersea land and power cable was switched on between the UK and Denmark. 

The £1.7 billion Viking Link interconnector stretches 764km and is just one of six cables connecting the UK grid with its European neighbours. A series of other cables are planned around the UK and between Europe, including NeuConnect, the first direct power link between Germany and Britain, with a cost of £2.1 billion. 

The biggest projects in the UK will be the series of Eastern Green Link (EGL) cables planned to take power from the wind farms in the North Sea to the population centres in the south of England. Four cables are planned between the East Coast of Scotland and the Midlands, with a total cost in the tens of billions. In March, EGL1 received its first provisional funding package from Ofgem, worth a total of £2 billion. The construction of the £4.3 billion 500km EGL2, officially approved recently (with EGL1 likely to be given the nod soon) also began this year. National Grid is planning for EGL3 and EGL4. These cables will be similar in length and will supply enough energy to power two million homes. National Grid plans to spend a total of £21 billion by 2034 on 14,000km of high-voltage cables connecting the wind industry and different parts of the UK transmission system.

Rising global demand

That’s just the UK. The rest of the world is also charging ahead with plans to rewire. Some of the most notable projects include the 400km link between Cubnezais in southwest France and Gatika in northern Spain, and the 1,208km EuroAsia Interconnector from Israel to Cyprus and Greece. Then there is the Xlinks MoroccoUK Power Project. This highly ambitious scheme, still at the inception stage, aims to construct as much as 11.5 gigawatts (GW) in renewable energy capacity in Morocco, where land and solar energy are cheap, as well as 22.5GW of battery storage and connect these assets to the UK via a 4,000km cable. If this project does come to fruition, it could have the capacity to supply as much as 8% of the UK’s electricity consumption. The total project cost has been estimated at £22 billion, with up to half of that earmarked for the undersea cable. 

Xlinks has already started on the work to build the cable. At the end of last year, its affiliate XLCC was awarded a £9 million grant by Scottish Enterprise to continue the development of its £1.4 billion Hunterston cable-manufacturing facility. It isn’t the only group that’s jumped on the opportunity. The UK has a chance to become an HVDC manufacturing hub thanks to its existing expertise and projected demand over the coming years. 

This year alone, several firms have announced plans to construct factories to feed the booming market. Sumitomo Electric UK Power Cables (SEUK), a subsidiary of Japan’s Sumitomo Electric Industries Ltd (SEI), has said it’s working on plans to develop a facility in the Scottish Highlands with a purpose-built factory for high-voltage cables. Britain’s Global InterConnection Group (GIG) and Korean manufacturer LS Group have chosen the 11.7-hectare Tyne Renewable Quay site near South Shields to build a £923 million plant due to open in 2027. 

These additional facilities are going to be needed. Between 2015 and 2020, around $3 billion dollars of new projects were awarded per year to cable manufacturers. In 2022, this figure was $11 billion, and analysts have pencilled in further growth to around $20 billion of orders per annum for the next decade. The major manufacturers have been caught off guard. Order books are full until the end of the decade. In some cases, backlogs stretch out for over 12 years

How to invest 

Over the past few decades, the cable industry has consolidated. Demand was non-existent until the mid-2010s, so manufacturing cable was difficult, low-margin and unpredictable. Firms had to consolidate to achieve economies of scale or exit the sector altogether. As a result, there are only three main players aside from a handful of smaller private companies and divisions of conglomerates such as SEUK. 

All of the key players are based in Europe. Italy’s Prysmian (Milan: PRY) is the largest, with a market capitalisation of €17.3 billion. Nexans (Paris: NEX), based in France, is the second, with a market value of €5.1 billion. NKT A/S (Copenhagen: NKT), based in Denmark, is the third-largest, with a market value of €4 billion. Prysmian is fully booked in its cable business until 2027 and recently hiked its full-year 2024 guidance after it completed the acquisition of Encore Wire, a leading manufacturer of copper and aluminium wire for residential, commercial and industrial locations. 

The company had previously anticipated adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the year of €1.6bn, but has upgraded the projection to €1.9bn with a free cashflow target of €880m (around €725m previously). The additional cash generation is allowing the company to reduce debt rapidly and increase shareholders’ returns. It is buying back shares and hiked its dividend by 16.7% at the end of 2023. 

Nexans reported a record performance in the first half of its 2024 financial year and also hiked its outlook. In the first half, it produced 16.4% growth in Ebitda to a record €412 million. Nexans’s return on capital employed (Roce) gives us some idea as to how profitable these companies are becoming. During the first half of the year, the company reported a Roce (a measure of profit for every €1 invested in the business) of 19.7%. That’s the sort of return you’d expect to see from a high-growth tech company, not an industrial business. The average Roce of UK-listed industrial firms is below 10%. 

NKT’s performance in the first quarter was broadly similar to that of its two larger peers. It achieved double-digit growth in revenue and Ebitda for the sixth consecutive quarter. Its order backlog hit a record €11.5bn, driven by the award of two onshore power cable projects with German transmission system operator Amprion. That backlog locks in just over four years of revenue for the group. Roce reached 22% at the end of the first quarter of 2024. 

Unfortunately, these companies’ success isn’t a secret. Investors have cottoned on to the opportunity and, in the case of Prysmian, have driven the company’s stock up more than 600% since the beginning of 2020 (remember, the industry barely existed five years ago). But the multi-year backlogs are arguably worth a premium multiple, and this isn’t just a story of multiple expansions; earnings have grown substantially as well. 

Analysts’ estimates have Nexans as the cheapest of the three firms, trading at a 2025 price/earnings (p/e) multiple of 14.7 and with a dividend yield of 2.4%. Prysmian is on a 2025 p/e of 15.5 and with a dividend yield of 1.5%. That’s undemanding, considering the company’s backlog, which runs until the end of the decade. NKT is the most expensive of the group, which seems justified considering its Roce and backlog stretching until the end of the decade. The stock is trading at a 2025 p/e of 21.4 and offers no dividend.

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It’s time to raise your glass to the newest whisky nation in town – England. English whisky has come a long way since the turn of the millennium. There are at least 55 distilleries from the northeast to the southwest that have laid down spirit (ie, begun the process of ageing grain spirit in casks), with the first bottlings already picking up awards. English whiskies from The English Distillery and The Lakes Distillery have been named the “World’s Best Single Malt” in two of the past three years, while whiskies from England have also picked up awards in the World Whisky Masters, hosted by The Spirits Business magazine. 

Whisky has been made in England since at least 1636, when the Worshipful Company of Distillers was granted a charter for producing the spirit. By the 1800s, there were distilleries in Liverpool, Bristol, London and elsewhere. But gradually the craft died out. The last English whisky distillery, in the Lea Valley, near Stratford, switched to making gin in 1905. 

In 2003, English whisky was reborn at Hicks & Healey in Cornwall. Dozens of distilleries raced to join the liquid gold rush over the years that followed. One of the things that makes English whisky so interesting is the relative freedom distillers have to innovate. There are, for example, fewer rules than with making Scotch single malt, which is proudly tied to longstanding traditions. English whisky, on the other hand, is just getting started. The English Whisky Guild, which recently published its first annual review, has applied to the government for geographical indication (GI). 

If and when it is granted, each of the four home nations will have GI recognition for its home-grown whisky industry. For English whisky, it will set a bar for quality and standards, with English whisky made from British grain and produced and matured in England. The world has already acquired a taste for it – 40% of English whisky is exported outside Britain. “There’s a lot of excitement around English whisky at the moment,” says Simon Aron, founder and CEO of whisky cask retailer Cask Trade.

“Enthusiasts and collectors worldwide have rapidly established a strong market for it.” With around 50,000 casks produced a year, the market is poised to breach the £1 billion mark. 

Naturally, that is still a drop in the ocean compared with Scotch, but the numbers are rising fast. The English Whisky Guild estimates production will expand by a factor of five in the “medium to long term” from the 2.1 million litres of pure alcohol currently produced in a year. “We think the optimism surrounding English whisky is well-founded,” says Aron. “It’s established a reputation for innovation, with distilleries such as Cotswold and White Peak experimenting with different cask types and maturation techniques, producing some exceptional and award-winning expressions known for their exceptional quality and taste.” Collectors will want to get in before the real party starts.

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In May, the legendary investor known as the “Bond King”, Bill Gross, called time on the “total return” strategy that made his fortune in the 1980s. Interest rates are too low relative to the almost 16% seen in 1981 (despite what anyone coming up to renew their mortgage may say) and that approach is now defunct, he said. But Gross is also gloomy about another of his favourite strategic pastimes – stamp collecting. The hobby has “always been a function of kids and their collecting who later on become wealthy adults”, he told Bloomberg TV in June. “But… I don’t think kids are collecting stamps any more.” So, he decided to sell up.

Gross was introduced to philately when his mother gave him an album of stamps in the hope that he could sell them to pay his way through university. The stamps, however, turned out to be largely worthless. Nevertheless, Gross “wanted to prove his mother right, that stamps could be a good investment”, explains Robert A. Siegel Auction Galleries, the auction house in New York that sold Gross’s stamp collection last month.

The goal to which every serious collector aspires is to build a “complete” collection – that is, to acquire at least one of each item within their chosen field of interest. But within the world of US stamps, there can only ever be one winner at a time. That’s because there is just one privately owned 1868 one-cent “Z” Grill stamp in existence. Another has been held by The New York Public Library for almost a century and, to be sure, if the librarians ever decided to sell it, they could buy a lot of books with the proceeds.

Gross was outbid when he tried to buy it at auction in 1998. It was snapped up by the president of the Mystic Stamp Company, Donald Sundman, for $935,000. So, in 2005, Gross bought the also incredibly rare 24¢ Inverted Jenny plate block of stamps, accidentally depicting an aeroplane flying upside down, for nearly $3 million, and traded it for Sundman’s “Z” Grill in what was described as the “greatest stamp swap of all time”. Finally, Gross had completed his collection of US stamps. On 14 June, he gave someone else the chance to complete theirs and it cost them almost $4.4 million for the privilege.

The auction record for the most expensive stamp overall is still held by the British Guiana one-cent Magenta from 1856, which fetched $9.5 million in 2014. At least there remains, as Robin Wigglesworth notes for FT Alphaville, one “arena where British securities are more highly valued than American ones”.

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A few years ago I wrote a script called Four Murders and Some Funerals, about an old lady who is the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. Seeking revenge, she kills one of the perpetrators by accident, discovers she’s a natural at bumping people off, does away with the other three and becomes a vigilante serial killer – righting wrongs wherever she finds them, usually where the law has failed. 

I still think it was a pretty good script, although it never got made: a bit like Miss Marple, only more savage and retributionist. In any case, in order to write it I had to come up with several original ways in which an old lady might kill people. I had one person pushed down a lift shaft, another electrocuted in the bath, another shot and another poisoned. This all involved quite a bit of research, especially the various poisons. Should our heroine use cyanide, polonium, fentanyl or botulinum, for example? 

For obvious reasons, I wasn’t quite comfortable googling all the questions I had, so I took to Tor and DuckDuckGo for internet anonymity. I’m glad I did because how to murder someone is one heck of an internet rabbit hole to go down. Before long I was reading about hiring Chechen hitmen and Lord knows what else. Clearly, in the grand scheme of things, researching a script about a murderer is a fairly trivial use case for internet anonymity. 

But I don’t think the day is far away when your internet search history (which Google keeps forever, by the way, unless you take steps to delete it) will be taken into account for things such as insurance risk, profiling, or a Chinese-style social credit score by potential employers and so on. I don’t think several days’ research into how to kill someone bodes particularly well. 

Elon Musk, one of my followers on X, says Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, hopes to impose a law whereby police can retroactively search the internet for “hate speech” violations and arrest people even if the offence occurred before the law existed. But you don’t have to be asking questions about how to kill someone to want anonymity. You might be living under some extreme theological regime, asking questions such as, “Is there a god?”; or under a totalitarian regime, asking questions about freedom; or under a corrupt and incompetent regime, asking questions about vaccine safety. You get the point.   

Why you should protect your online anonymity and reputation  

Anonymity protects you. It limits the power that others have over you and the ability they have to control you. It enables you to protect your reputation, and stop things from being used against you, especially out of context. It gives you greater control over your own data and thus your destiny. But let’s say I did actually want to kill someone, and that I even researched how to do it, before deciding not to. The only crime I would be guilty of is thought. 

But if my search history can be used against me, it doesn’t matter if, 10 years later, I have moved on from my inquiry into researching murder. It’s still there, and if the police or some activist decided to uncover it, I would, in the eyes of many, forever be guilty of murder, even if I had committed no such crime beyond thinking about it – which, I bet, most of us have at some point in our darkest hours. 

For me, the most powerful use case is freedom of thought. Being anonymous is liberating. I’m sure that is why masked balls proved so popular. If you know you are being watched, you are less likely to explore new ideas outside the mainstream, ideas that family, friends, colleagues, or even society may dislike. These may be philosophical, scientific or artistic ideas. We might want to express thoughts we otherwise feel unable to express. 

A lot of things, if judged from a different time or place, by people who lack complete knowledge or understanding, may seem odd or intolerable. Anonymity is a protection against having to worry about how actions are perceived and against constantly having to justify them. Anonymity is the nemesis of censorship. The most compelling contemporary real-life example of why we need internet anonymity must be Satoshi Nakamoto, the presumed founder of Bitcoin. We would not have the cryptocurrency without it. 

We are talking here about one of the most revolutionary technologies ever invented, and one that could fix our broken political and economic systems peacefully. How? Because it enables people to opt out. It provides an alternative money system. “Fix the money, fix the world,” runs the mantra. Remove the state’s monopoly on money, and you reduce its ability to create money at no cost to itself and you limit its ability to do all the terrible things it does. So I favour online anonymity, which is harder to achieve now than it used to be. 

But I also see that this is not a black-and-white issue. Many a murderous act has been plotted anonymously. Certain politicians, celebrities and others get an enormous amount of abuse from anonymous accounts. The privilege of anonymity is abused. “With freedom comes great responsibility”; with anonymity, even more so. Many ministers will care more about the terrorist plotting and the online abuse than they will about the freedom to explore new ideas. And the anonymous are harder to control. So we can expect more and more attempts to prevent anonymity – which will mean it has even greater value.

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Hand a whisky-lover a time machine and they might well set the dials for 1993, when Oddbins began selling an Islay single malt matured for 29 years in sherry casks. The price of Black Bowmore – £110 a bottle – was considered pretty steep at the time, but not now. 

No longer is whisky collecting a niche hobby purely pursued by earnest enthusiasts. Buoyed by a series of headline-grabbing sales – culminating in the £2.2m paid at Sotheby’s in November last year for a bottle of The Macallan 1926 Valerio Adami edition – we now live in a world of exclusive whisky auctions, investment funds and new releases with five-figure price tags. 

So is whisky a sure thing, with lucrative returns more or less guaranteed? No. While the long-term price trajectory for rare bottles of alcohol remains highly positive, the market is going through a difficult phase. In its latest March quarterly update on the fine and rare whisky market, Noble & Co notes a “significant slump” in auction volumes, continuing a negative trend that began in the second half of 2022. While pricing has held relatively steady, volumes of bottles sold at auction above £100 fell 16% in the last three months of 2023 versus a year earlier. Volumes last December were down 18% and slumped 35% in January 2024.

Where to invest in whisky

In part, the correction is linked to broader macroeconomic concerns and trends in the primary market. New releases of high-end whiskies are not selling through as quickly as previously, echoing the downturn in fine wine. The other factor at play is that the rare whisky scene is maturing. The remarkable gains of the 2000s and 2010s are unlikely to be repeated, simply because this is no longer such an undervalued commodity. 

So, what should you buy, and where should you buy it? Rare whisky is a relatively illiquid market compared to fine wine, making detailed analysis of pricing trends perilous, so there’s something to be said for buying what you like. At least you can still enjoy your whisky if the market turns south. 

Limited releases from marquee names are the obvious way to go, including whiskies from “ghost” (closed) distilleries. Port Ellen, Brora and Rosebank are famous names here, although all three have recently restarted production. Others include Glenury Royal, Littlemill, Ladyburn and St Magdalene. Outside Scotch, Japan’s Karuizawa and Hanyu are auction room darlings. Other big names in single malt circles include The Macallan – which has spearheaded the rare whisky boom – along with Springbank, Dalmore, Bowmore, Ardbeg and Laphroaig. Beyond Scotch, US whisky names to conjure with include Pappy Van Winkle, George T Stagg and William Larue Weller. In Ireland, niche bottlings from Midleton Very Rare are on the up. 

Distillers have moved fast to cater for the new audience of collectors and investors. Diageo – the biggest name in Scotch – has its Prima & Ultima annual programme of rare aged whiskies. Meanwhile, the Grant family (of Glenfiddich fame) has released several tranches of esoteric, long-aged whiskies from its private stocks under the House of Hazelwood banner.

Invest in whisky: pleasure over profits?

Don’t forget independent bottlers – companies that sell whiskies sourced from third-party distilleries under their own name. Watch out for Gordon & MacPhail’s succession of long-aged releases from its astonishing inventory. Cadenhead’s, Signatory, Adelphi and Italy’s Samaroli are other good indie sources. 

Primary market sources for these whiskies include retailers and online specialists, such as The Whisky Exchange and Master of Malt. On the secondary market, auction houses have an increasingly broad and sophisticated spirits presence, from big hitters Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams to specialists Whisky Auctioneer, Whisky Hammer and Whisky.Auction. As with any collectable commodity, buying from an established business with a proven record is a must, as fakes remain relatively commonplace, and even well-established online auctioneers fall prey to them occasionally. 

And then there are casks. A number of cask investment schemes have sprung up in recent years, some of them promising huge – and usually utterly unrealistic – returns. The lack of regulation in this part of the market – don’t forget that a cask is essentially an open container with an easily removed bung – makes it a minefield for the unwary investor. Sage advice can be found on the website of the industry body the Scotch Whisky Association. 

As with fine wine, storing your collection in the right conditions is vital. In the long term, whisky should be kept vertical (unlike wine), and at a constant ambient temperature away from harsh light. Professional storage (including insurance) is a safe and relatively inexpensive option, which admittedly comes with the obvious drawback that you can’t see your bottles, pick them up or show them off to your friends. 

Does that matter? It all depends on how you view collecting whisky. If you’re doing it purely for investment purposes, then probably not. But whisky is a product designed to be consumed, and to give pleasure. For all the calculations of market trends, auction prices and likely returns, it ought to be about something else too – having fun.

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Anyone old enough to remember using a pencil to wind the magnetic film back into a chewed-up cassette tape may well wonder why anyone would want to dabble with such antiquated technology. You had to fast forward to get to the song you wanted, usually overshooting the start, and the sound quality had nothing on today’s digital offerings. But it’s precisely the sound, often described as “warm”, that appeals to older collectors, as well as a new generation for whom pencils and recorded music hold no connection. “Old guys are buying for their memories. Young people are buying to try. They think it’s trendy,” Stephen Ho, a collector from Hong Kong, tells Larry Ryan in The Guardian. 

East Asia has experienced much of the boom in sales. Record shops in Tokyo have been expanding their cassette sections, “signalling a resurgence of compact analogue recording media”, says Megumi Kito on Nikkei Asia. Last September, Tower Records in the Shibuya district multiplied its stock of old and new tapes by a factor of six as sales have continued to grow in recent years.

“Cassettes seem to come across to the younger generation as ‘new and cute’ things,” Ko Takeda, who heads the cassette section, tells the paper. 

Tapes are also cheaper to manufacture than vinyl LPs which is reflected in retail prices, says Matthew Kronsberg in Bloomberg Businessweek. A new vinyl record can cost $35 in the US, a tape a mere $10, but the latter still provides “a similar analogue experience”. “It may be lower fidelity, but it’s also more playful and more portable,” he says. TV series Stranger Things and the blockbuster superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy, both with their depictions of life in the 1980s, have also helped to make the decade cool. 

Crucially, cassettes are also affordable to the youngest of new collectors. That’s not lost on pop superstar Taylor Swift, who counts many of them among her fans. Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, sold 1.64 million physical units in its first week of release in April, of which 21,500 were cassettes, according to music magazine Billboard. That’s a long way behind the 859,000 LPs that were sold, to be sure, but not bad for a format that until recently had been consigned to the attic of history. 

Selling physical recordings is also a smart business move made by young musicians, who also include Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Dua Lipa. The per-click royalties musicians earn from streaming platforms such as Spotify are “infinitesimal” compared with the “far greater revenues that artists can earn from physical products”, as Ben Sisario points out in The New York Times. 

In fact, such has been the take-up that new iterations of the 1980s Walkman are coming to market so that younger buyers will have something to play them on. Examples include the We Are Rewind WE-001 and the FiiO CP13. Some things really were better in the 1980s.

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We collect art for all sorts of reasons – and seemingly for no reason at all. There was no reasonable justification for me spending my entire first month’s modest teaching salary on a painting by an unknown Serbian artist, but I’m glad I did. Not because it’s gone up in value, but because I love it. 

It reminds me who I am, who I was and what I value in life. Art collections evolve over time and can serve as deeply personal and meaningful reflections of a collector’s life. Art can also be an investment. 

Am I sorry I didn’t buy a canvas by an almost unknown “sort of street artist” (called Banksy) when I was advised to while on a skiing trip in 2004? Yes, I am. My love of art and the fact it’s possible and pleasing to see significant gains from it are separate. 

Viewing art solely as an investment is frowned upon in some circles and it is an interesting (and controversial) topic to unpack. Art as a commodity can seem to undermine its intrinsic value and overshadow the artistic, cultural and creative aspects of the work. 

Additionally, focusing on the investment potential can and does lead to speculative (and unsustainable) bubbles and the inflation of prices arguably beyond the artistic merit of the work, which is unhelpful, certainly for the artist in the long term. (Though isn’t this the case in all markets?) 

Perhaps the key difference is that there is an individual here, in the emerging art market at least, who is being valued (or not), commodified, invested in or sold. That particularly stings as art is so intrinsically connected to the very being of the artist who made it – unlike other alternative investments, such as a luxury watch, for example, or a fine wine, which can be objectified without fear of exploitation.

Is it profitable to invest in art collectables?

What if art were immune to these influences? Then there would be no art market and how then would artists survive, outside of charity and philanthropy? And what about the artists starting out? 

Life as an emerging artist is an insecure life choice and this is where my mission with New Blood Art began 20 years ago. It is very difficult for emerging artists to make a viable living from their work, though the market has changed radically over the last two decades. 

It used to be an artist could hardly sell work outside of friends and family without the structure of a gallery set-up, and artists do still face challenges in reaching potential buyers, establishing credibility and showcasing their work to a wider audience without a gallery behind them. That said, there are far more opportunities now, and with the rise of online platforms and particularly social media, artists are increasingly finding alternative ways to market and sell their work directly to collectors. I think these opportunities will only increase over the coming years and big disruptions could be on the horizon. 

The art market could look quite different in a few years. “While the art market contracted over the last year, total online sales in 2023 were almost triple pre-pandemic levels, and more works sold online last year than ever before (including during lockdown),” says Artnet in its latest intelligence report from March. “This suggests that both buyer and seller behaviour around transacting virtually has changed for good.” 

There are benefits to investing in fledgling artists at degree show level. You only play the upside – their work will never be priced lower and if their career takes off, then the value of their early works can increase significantly. There’s an appeal for early works. They can be more emotionally raw and relatable. 

For a collector, there is also a sense of having been “in on the ground floor” with an artist’s early works, which can make pieces feel more special – to have discovered an artist before they became more mainstream.

Prize-winning emerging artists

At New Blood Art, we now work in collaboration with universities and art colleges, inviting art department heads and art tutors to nominate their most talented, committed and innovative artists each year for the Emerging Art Prize. This marks a new evolution in curatorial technique, inviting greater input from tutors, heads of departments and art colleges to nominate emerging artists. 

Tutors and lecturers from art colleges and universities are invited to nominate outstanding graduating artists from their fine art degree programmes. You will find at newbloodart.com a list of 2024 graduating artists who have been nominated by their university art departments for this year’s prize. Many of the artists we first platformed following their degree shows are now 20 years older and in mid-career. 

These artists are making a living from their art, and you will find them situated in our Masters section. We have numerous examples of artists whose work you could have bought in the low hundreds when they first arrived with us after their degree shows and who now would sell for ten or 20 times that amount. 

This year, we showcase some outstanding artists nominated by their tutors, including Christian Sloan, a Northern Irish sculptor graduating from Edinburgh College of Art; Alice Wheeler, a photographer (her work, The Son, is pictured above), also from Edinburgh College of Art; and a wonderful Print Master’s graduate from the Royal College of Art, Sean Pearl.

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In the third quarter of 2023, 22 million antidepressants were prescribed to an estimated 6.8 million patients. Sadly, mental health problems are not limited to adults – 1.5 million children will need additional mental health support following the pandemic, according to a report from the Centre for Mental Health. The NHS is struggling to cope with the increased demand – the size of the workforce dealing with mental health has risen by 22%, but that has been outpaced by referrals, up 44% since the pandemic. Around one in six adults in England have a common mental health disorder, and roughly half of mental health problems start by the age of 14. Last year the government spent £12billion, or 9% of the total NHS budget, on mental health services. 

Job insecurity, long working hours and high levels of personal debt have been linked to the six-fold rise in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs since the 1980s. Similar trends are being seen in the US and other countries, and social psychologists such as Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have suggested that the rise of smartphones and social media are partly to blame.

Are smartphones the billion-dollar solution for depression?

But if capitalism and smartphones are part of the problem, perhaps they could also be part of the solution – whether through funding more effective drug treatments or the use of mobile phone apps such as MoodKit, iBreathe, Happify, Me (for self-awareness), Quit That!, Reframe and I Am Sober (for addiction). 

The two apps with the highest number of downloads are US-founded Headspace and Calm. They were launched more than a decade ago and offer breathing exercises, sleep stories read by celebrities and guided meditations. Together they have raised just under half a billion dollars but are yet to float on the stock market, despite the technology-focused Nasdaq index more than doubling in value over the past five years. In 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Calm, which had been valued at $2billion by VC backers in 2020, had laid off 20% of its staff. 

Good examples, perhaps, of the frothy valuations that US venture capitalists put on their funding rounds not matching the reality that stock market investors see.

Could psychedelics treat mental health?

Another promising area of progress is using psychedelics to treat mental health. Millions of people have experimented with these drugs outside of a clinical setting since the 1960s, if not legally. 

Now Compass Pathways (Nasdaq: CMPS), atai Life Sciences (Nasdaq: ATAI), Cybin and MindMed (Nasdaq: MNMD) are trying to get their drugs through the regulatory hurdles for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and similar conditions, such as generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anorexia nervosa. 

Compass Pathways, MindMed and Cybin have all passed Phase II trials, with Compass now expecting preliminary results from a Phase III trial later this year. Phase II means that the drugs work, but Phase III has to confirm that the treatments are not only safe and effective but superior to existing treatments. Drugs can fail Phase III trials, of course, but early evidence suggests that psychedelics can be more effective than traditional anti-depressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). 

Although SSRIs are useful for managing depression, they are not a cure. Robert Whitaker in Anatomy of an Epidemic has suggested there is evidence that the longer patients rely on current therapies such as SSRIs, the worse the outcomes tend to be. 

Psychedelics, in contrast, are taken infrequently and work by enhancing emotional processing, so the benefits tend to be longer-lasting. Even if psychedelics do prove to be an effective treatment for depression, however, the path to profitability may still have obstacles. Psilocybin, for example, can’t be patented, as it occurs naturally in 180 species of fungi. 

Breathing exercises, meditation, yoga, physical activity, sunlight, journaling and cold-water immersion are all considered helpful when treating depression too, but they tend not to be subject to expensive double-blind clinical trials. They are also impossible for large corporations to patent and generate a profit from. 

As a result, drug companies are making their own synthetic compounds, which they can patent and then put through clinical trials. An estimated $2.9billion of the $3.26billion in capital raised by the 73 biggest psychedelics companies has been spent on drug development, says the Financial Times, and hundreds of patents for psychedelics have been filed with the US patents office.

The investment hurdles for psychedelics

Decriminalisation and legalisation
Ironically, a risk to the business model might be decriminalisation and legalisation. In Oregon supervised psilocybin use has been legal since 2020, and state lawmakers are intending to follow suit and legalise psilocybin for both therapeutic and recreational use in New York, according to the New York Post. 

The drug would still need to be consumed at specific service centres, where customers would be supervised and guided through their hallucinogenic experiences in a controlled environment. Companies have already sprung up to train and license trip supervisors, according to The Guardian. 

Decriminalisation would benefit a subculture of people who already obtain psychedelics illegally for therapeutic use with informal “trip-sitters”, as well as removing the criminal penalties for possession of psychedelics, while not creating a legal framework. 

In the UK psychedelics are considered a class A drug, possession of which risks a maximum sentence of seven years in prison and an unlimited fine. Despite the penalties for class A drugs, psychedelics remain widely available. According to the Office for National Statistics, 38% of people aged 16 to 59 claim it would be “very” or “fairly” easy for them to obtain illegal drugs within 24 hours. Not only are illegal drugs available, they tend to cost less than a few pints in a pub as, unsurprisingly, dealers tend not to declare their earnings to HMRC. Hiring an Airbnb for the weekend in a quiet location with a trusted friend is also likely to cost significantly less than official treatment protocols developed by the likes of Compass and atai. 

Recouping drug development costs
In contrast, the listed companies need to charge thousands of dollars to recoup the cost of getting their compounds approved by regulatory bodies. So far Compass has spent roughly $340million putting COMP360 through clinical trials. Cybin, Seelos Therapeutics and MindMed have spent less than that, but the figures still run into hundreds of millions of dollars. As of September 2023, Compass had $248million of cash, following a $125million financing in August 2023. Management believes existing cash will be sufficient to fund activity into late 2025. 

In the US, insurers and government programmes such as Medicare and Medicaid play an important role in determining the extent to which new drugs will be covered. It is hard to know what these third-party payors will decide with respect to reimbursement for psilocybin therapy. 

Outside the US, governments tend to negotiate attractive prices for new drugs, and this is one area where the UK’s NHS benefits from economies of scale. Treatment-resistant depression currently costs the US healthcare system between $17,000-$25,000 per patient per year, according to the psychedelic companies. 

The treatment centres already exist and are delivering services such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and ketamine. The latter has a psychedelic component, but its use is already approved as an anaesthetic, so it can be used for TRD when other approaches have failed. That said, the benefits of ketamine are short-lived and it failed a clinical trial in 2012 because it failed to outperform the placebo effect when given to cancer patients for pain relief in conjunction with opioids. 

CMPS, ATAI and MNMD shares are all down more than 50% in the last two years, but some of that reflects the loss of confidence in speculative healthcare stocks. Psychedelics could yet pass the Phase III trials, but even then they might struggle to recoup the costs of development. In a narrow sense, that will represent a failure. 

In a broader view, though, where health services are struggling and millions are in distress, the rehabilitation of psychedelics will be a huge benefit, if not an investment opportunity.

This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.

HMRC has issued a new warning to crypto users that they may have to file a self-assessment tax return before the 31 January deadline and pay any tax due on gains.

It comes amid concerns that many people who invest in crypto assets, and have benefitted from any income or gains, may be unaware of the tax treatment and their obligations to declare and pay tax on them.

The deadline to complete a tax return for the 2022-2023 tax year and pay any tax owed is 31 January 2024.

HMRC’s own research published in July 2022 found that one in 10 of the adult population held crypto assets such as NFTs, and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Litecoin.

“People sometimes forget that information about crypto-related income and gains needs to be included in their tax return,” says Myrtle Lloyd, HMRC’s director general for customer services.

“Some people affected may not have had to do a tax return before, so it is important that people check. With the self-assessment deadline just a matter of weeks away, I am urging people not to put off completing it.”

Do I need to submit a tax return if I have crypto assets? 

If you have sold crypto for a profit during 2022-2023, you may have reporting and tax obligations, so you should consider whether you need to file a tax return. 

It’s also necessary to declare crypto losses if you want to offset those losses in future tax years.

Crypto profits are normally liable for capital gains tax. This means anyone with cryptoassets should declare any gains above the tax-free allowance on their self-assessment return. For 2022-2023, the CGT allowance was £12,300. It is currently £6,000.

HMRC gives the following examples of when tax may be due:

• If you received cryptoassets from employment, if they’re held as part of a trade, or are involved in crypto-related activities that generate an income
• If you sold or exchanged cryptoassets for money, exchanged one type of cryptoasset for another, or used cryptoassets to make purchases
• If you gifted cryptoassets to another person
• If you donated cryptoassets to charity

So, if you disposed of cryptoassets and your total taxable gain was above £12,300 in 2022-2023, or if you received cryptoassets from employment and income tax and National Insurance contributions have not been paid through PAYE, you will need to file a tax return.

If you are unsure whether you need to complete a tax return, you can check by using the free online tool on gov.uk.

Dawn Register, head of tax dispute resolution at the accountancy firm BDO, says the warning from HMRC highlights its “growing interest in those people who have made gains from crypto assets but have failed to declare them”.

She adds: “Part of this may be down to lack of knowledge. However, ignorance of the rules won’t give you a free pass.”

What happens if I miss the deadline? 

If you have a “reasonable excuse” for missing the 31 January deadline, HMRC may agree to waive any penalties.

However, not knowing that you need to declare and pay tax on crypto investments will not be considered a reasonable excuse. 

“If people don’t declare what they are required to and HMRC discovers that additional tax is due, it can charge late payment interest in addition to tax-geared penalties of up to 100% of the tax – or more if the holding was based offshore,” comments Register.

An initial £100 fine, which applies even if there is no tax to pay, is levied on those who miss the self-assessment deadline. The later you file a tax return after the deadline, the bigger the penalty - for example, after three months you could rack up a fine of £900, then after six months, a further penalty of 5% of the tax due or £300, whichever is greater, is imposed.

Watch out for interest on top of your tax bill too, which applies if you miss the deadline. The rate is now 7.75% a year (up from 6% in January 2023 and 2.75% in January 2022).

What should I do if I have undeclared crypto income or gains from previous years? 

Last November, HMRC opened a disclosure facility for people needing to declare previously undeclared crypto gains.

This means you can tell HMRC using the online service. It also contains information about how many years you should disclose - this depends on whether you deliberately misled the taxman about your crypto holdings.

If you have an unclaimed loss from the last four tax years then you can claim this by just writing to HMRC.

Because many consumer brands have been around for 100 years or more, it is easy to assume that they are immortal, churning out cash for their owners through thick and thin. But this is not the case. We are all prone to survivorship bias: the human tendency to forget what has disappeared from view. Brands that are eclipsed by something better, or disappear due to regulation or people’s changing preferences, may linger as a nostalgic memory, but their phenomenal success is forgotten. 

How do you define a brand? A popular definition is a product, service or concept that is distinguished from competitors in the minds of consumers by its name, qualities and reputation. This implies that it can command a premium price. Many businesses, such as shops, airlines and cars, achieve brand recognition but struggle on that last test or, as in the case of petrol stations, fail completely. 

Companies spend huge amounts of money trying to create new brands, but once the initial marketing blitz ends, sales often drop off. The new brand may stagger on for a while, but it then dies. Successful brands require long-term advertising and marketing support that is carefully pitched to sustain the price point, innovation in packaging and an understanding of the changing preferences of customers. 

The recent problems at Diageo and LMVH show that it is easy to overestimate brands’ pricing power. The willingness of customers to pay up for premium drinks labels has faded, yet cutting prices may devalue the brand. Drinkers have other priorities for spending money amid the post-Covid squeeze on their wallets. No doubt these brands will recover, but some that were once huge never have.

The death of Marlboro Man

Marlboro was the most famous of the many cigarette brands, which were killed off as advertising, sports sponsorship and other forms of marketing were banned by governments around the world. 

The Marlboro brand was created by Philip Morris in the 1920s as a woman’s cigarette but was repositioned in the 1950s using the image of the “Marlboro Man”, a cowboy complete with a Texan hat. This gave a rugged, outdoors male image while the addition of a filter to the cigarettes, once regarded as effeminate, was supposed to make cigarettes safer to smoke. 

Supported by heavy advertising, sales quadrupled in two years and Marlboro quickly became the world’s most popular cigarette. Other cigarette companies resorted to undermining it by seeking a ban on its advertising. The death from lung cancer of a succession of actors who had featured as the face of the “Marlboro Man” did nothing for the brand’s image. Marlboro still sells 240 billion units a year and is the top-selling cigarette worldwide, but the value of sales has fallen by a third since 2015, and the latest country to ban its advertising was Indonesia in 2012. 

Bye-bye Babycham

Bambi’s favourite tipple, Babycham, is a sparkling perry developed by drinks company Showerings in the early 1950s. Initially, sales were disappointing but when its price was quadrupled to four shillings a bottle, they took off. 

It was marketed as a “Champagne perry” (pear cider) with a trademark “Bambi” deer and was the first alcoholic drink to be marketed on television. Its appeal was as a sophisticated brand for young women to drink in the pub. Their mums drank port and lemon, or Guinness. 

Sales peaked in the 1970s at 144 million bottles a year. In 1978, the Champagne houses sued to stop the use of their trade name. Although they were unsuccessful, Babycham stopped calling itself a Champagne. Sales declined and attempts to revive it were only temporarily successful as its target market switched to wine and other cheaper alternatives. Showerings floated on the stockmarket in 1960 and was bought by Allied Lyons in 1968, but the Showering family bought the brand back in 2021 from an intermediate owner. Let’s see how successful they are.

Blackberry: The first smartphone

Mobile phones first appeared in the 1980s as large, clunky brick-like devices, but the phones soon got smaller and their battery lives increased. Nokia came to dominate the European market with its handy pocket-sized phones, but fiddly texting was the only service other than the capacity to make phone calls. 

The first BlackBerry smartphone appeared in the late 1990s and took the market by storm, being able to send and receive emails. It worked on several different wireless networks, offered security and used its own servers. Before Wi-Fi became widely available, at a time when bandwidth was also in short supply, customers enjoyed the ability to read messages and delete emails without downloading the text. Companies liked the control it gave them over corporate usage. 

At its peak in 2011, BlackBerry had 85 million users. But then Android and Apple arrived, which cut the ground from under BlackBerry’s feet as they offered better technology, while mobile networks were also developing rapidly. By 2016, BlackBerry was down to 21 million users. Some traders still reminisce nostalgically about their BlackBerries, but none would swap their iPhones for one now. The lesson for investors is that brands have tremendous longevity if carefully nurtured, but they do not necessarily last forever.

This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.

Read more

• Marlboro Man stubs it out
• The future of vaping – the "healthier cigarette"
• Building a powerhouse beauty brand
• Money makers: a brand for every occasion

Vinyl is experiencing a resurgence thanks to exclusive artist tracks and nostalgia, providing a boost for record collectors.

Seeing newer generations taking a turn back in time to collect physical media, artists like Taylor Swift are releasing vinyl-exclusive bonus tracks, signed editions and exclusive artworks.

The Oasis reunion tour in 2025 shone a spotlight on merchandise like posters, vinyls and CDs, prompting fans from back in the day to look for hidden gems in cabinets and attics.

While it’s more common to pour money into the stock market, collectable investments can also prove to be lucrative.

This could be anything, from first-edition books to fine art or even unique items like dinosaur fossils and vintage dolls, which could be worth thousands.

Some vinyls in particular could fetch you as much as £10,000 depending on their condition, according to research by music technology firm A2D2.

If you have held on to your record collection from when you were younger, you could be sitting on a fortune. We take a look at what’s making vinyl records popular again.

What makes vinyl valuable?

There are many reasons why vinyl records can become valuable, such as the popularity of an artist or a band, or because it’s rare. The more unique something is, the more it could be worth.

That also feeds into another factor: demand. The fewer copies a vinyl has, the more in demand it is likely to be – especially if there’s a unique feature that pushes up the price, such as an autographed or promotional record, early mono pressings, foreign editions or altered track listings.

Condition is also important, with the most pristine versions commanding the biggest sums. That may unfortunately mean tatty covers or well-played scratched discs could struggle to attract buyers.

It also means that if you buy a copy, you may not want to play it too much to preserve its value

10 valuable vinyl records

Here are some of the UK’s most valuable records that could be gathering dust in your home or waiting to be discovered in a charity shop.

Johann Strauss II – Waltzes by Johann Strauss Jr (1956)One for classical music collectors, this rare 1956 Century Symphony Orchestra recording features the then-up-and-coming artist Andy Warhol’s cover art. According to Discogs, the Warhol cover was discovered by a collector at a record fair back in 2007, costing just two euros. Since then, many copies have reappeared. In mint condition, it is valued at up to £4,400.The Beatles – Please Please Me (1963)

A valuable gem from the fab four, the early UK Parlophone pressings of Please Please Me with the black and gold label are highly sought after and sell for around £6,000.

The Beatles – White Album (1968)

Original copies of this seminal album have traditionally fetched up to £10,000, especially those in top condition with low serial numbers and the original Apple logo. However, a copy once owned by the late John Lennon sold at auction for £128,000.

Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin (1969)

The first pressing of Led Zeppelin's debut album, with its turquoise typography and a unique 'Superhype' credit, is a collector's dream. One version sold for £7,100 in 2013.

A Fleeting Glance - A Fleeting Glance (1970)

This self-titled album has fleeting copies known to exist – fewer than five – making it one of the rarest psychedelic progressive rock albums to exist. The last sale almost hit £6,400.

Complex – Complex (1971)

Complex's self-titled psychedelic progressive rock album can go for up to £10,000. Much of its value is due to its rarity, as it was limited to just 99 pressings. A pristine mint copy was once picked up for a mere £1 and later sold for £10,000, according to A2D2.

Leaf Hound – Growers of Mushroom (1971)

This album from the English hard rock band is described as the number one most collectable rock record by Q Magazine. Mint condition copies are known to sell for up to £4,100.

Dark – Dark Round the Edges (1972)

With only 40 copies ever pressed, A2D2 says owning a mint condition copy of this album could enhance your collection's value by up to £8,350. It’s considered to be one of the most valuable records of all time by NME, and has sold for prices of up to £25,000.

Sex Pistols – God Save The Queen (1977)

A first pressing of this infamous record on the A&M label, which was quickly withdrawn, can also command a price of up to £6,000.

Joy Division – An Ideal For Living (1978)

Mint copies can sell for as much as £4,700. With only 1,000 copies pressed, this four-track EP from Joy Division is a collector's favourite. According to Bonhams, the vinyl record has a note from their manager Rob Gretton to radio presenter John Peel in red ink, with the words: “We did send you a copy about six months ago and we weren't going to release it because the sound quality wasn't very good...we would be grateful if you could give it another spin and tell your listeners that it is now available in the shops.” The inner sleeve has Peel’s handwritten track timings in black felt-tip.

How much did the most expensive Oasis vinyl ever sell for at auction?

Oasis is one of the most globally recognised and successful Britpop groups, so it’s no wonder that the reunion after a 16-year hiatus was met with excitement from fans and music lovers worldwide.

It saw an increased demand for the duo’s merchandise, with original Oasis T-shirts, hoodies and CDs selling for around £500 on eBay.

The most expensive Oasis vinyl ever sold was a pristine edition of Oasis' debut album Definitely Maybe, for £250 at Wessex Auction Rooms, according to The Sun.

Instruments are also garnering significant attention. A Silver Sparkle Gibson Les Paul Florentine guitar used by Noel Gallagher on the 1997 Be Here Now album sold for £226,000 at auction house Propstore in November 2024. We look at how to make money from the Oasis tour in a separate guide.

Where can I find reputable auction houses or marketplaces that specialise in rare vinyl records?

You could research record shops in your area to find one that buys and sells vinyl records. It’s a good idea to visit the shops in person.

Here are a few places worth checking:

• Omega Auctions is one of the most popular auction houses for music memorabilia and vinyl records. They host around 10-15 vinyl auctions every year. Some of their most popular sales include David Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Starman’ that sold for over £200,000.
• Wessex Auction Rooms also holds specialist vinyl record auctions throughout the year.
• Record Planet in the Netherlands is known as the largest vinyl show in the world. It was established in 1993 and has since hosted the event for over 30 years.
• Discogs is a marketplace that lets you find sought-after records, sell your collection and helps value an item. You can search for vinyl records, see similar sales made in the past and get a rough idea of how much it could be worth.

What is the step-by-step process for getting a rare vinyl record appraised for sale?

If you’re thinking about selling your vinyl collection, make sure you understand how to appraise your records to determine the value.

Some of the main factors that appraisers look for are the condition, rarity, demand, type of music, genre, artists and special editions.

If you’re lucky, even a single record could fetch hundreds or even thousands of pounds if it’s well preserved and rare.

Atlas Records outlines the key steps you need to follow for a professional vinyl appraisal and to determine how much your record is truly worth.

 One of the biggest mistakes investors can make is focusing too much on one asset class, such as stocks, bonds or real estate. 

These traditional asset classes are usually considered the foundation of any portfolio, but it’s also important to consider potential alternative investments, some of which have achieved even better long-run returns.

The top-performing non-traditional asset 

Knight Frank’s Wealth Report offers an excellent insight into the assets that have and haven’t done well over the past decade. According to the report, most wealthy individuals saw their net worth decline by a double-digit percentage last year, with investments in stocks and shares leading the way. On average, equity investments slumped by 18% last year.

On the other hand, alternative assets, such as art, watches, wine and whisky, yielded a strong positive return.

The price of rare whisky increased by 3% last year, which looks favourable compared to equity market declines – but this is only part of the story. Whisky has been by far the best-performing alternative asset class over the past decade, according to the index.

In the past ten years, the average price of rare whisky bottles has increased by a total of 373%. Rare vehicles are the only other alternative asset class that’s even come close to this, with a cumulative increase of 185%.

Cask Scotch whisky is in high demand 

Other sources suggest that Scottish whisky has recently outperformed the global results described in the Knight Frank data. A recent industry report on the Scottish whisky market noted an increase in cask prices of 14.9% in 2022. The research identified Laphroaig as the best-performing Scotch whisky cask distillery of 2022, with the prices of its casks jumping 18.8%.

The entire Scotch whisky category has benefited from the removal of import tariffs on single malt Scotch whisky in the US, and there’s hope that a free trade deal with India will increase supply to this market – the largest for Scotch whisky in the world.

The Indian market is already showing promise. Diageo - owner of the Johnnie Walker brand of whisky and the world’s largest spirits producer - reported a double-digit increase in sales at its Indian arm in its latest financial year. Worldwide, the group’s Scotch whisky sales jumped 25%. 

Overall, the total value of Scotch whisky exports exceeded £6bn for the first time in 2022, as drinkers and investors alike woke up to the opportunities in the market.

While the market for Scotch whisky does have attractive growth prospects, it requires skill to know where to look for the best returns – buying a couple of bottles of Scotch from the supermarket won’t cut it.

That’s why it’s important to have an experienced adviser to help you through the process.

An experienced adviser service 

Vintage Acquisitions (trading name of Brooks & Whitaker Limited) helps investors identify and capitalise on opportunities in the Scotch whisky cask market.

The company is committed to bringing investors the most sought-after, premium-grade cask whisky. It has access to distilleries other providers may not be able to offer thanks to its years of experience in the industry. Vintage Acquisitions works only with distilleries that have a proven track record of excellence and helps its clients purchase a “young” cask sourced from renowned distilleries.

With a young cask, investors can wait for the cask to mature gracefully – the longer the wait, the greater the increase in quality (and value). Vintage Acquisitions works with investors throughout the process, helping to buy, store and eventually sell the cask.

Fully licensed by HMRC, Vintage Acquisitions allows investors to manage their holdings through a secure, interactive online portal, which also provides access to all documentation. All casks are stored safely in an insured, bonded facility, meaning they’re free from duty and tax, and there is a choice of six flexible exit strategies when the time is right.

As an added bonus, cask whisky is capital gains tax-free. It can also have inheritance tax benefits, useful for estate planning, although this will depend on your personal tax situation and is subject to change.

Sam Brooks, Founder of Vintage Acquisitions added “Purchasing casks of single malt Scotch whisky is rapidly becoming a popular choice for both new and seasoned investors looking to secure long-term personal gain, or alternatively for a child's future.”

Need more information? 

To find out more about the purchase process, storage and insurance, download your Whisky Cask Investment Guide at www.vintageacquisitions.com 

“That’s quite nice, isn’t it,” says Gregory Swartberg, coming into the room. I turn around. “The collage for the Queen’s Award… That’s what you were looking at, right?” 

I confessed it was. Swartberg is the founder and CEO of fine wine specialists Cru Wine, a ten-year-old start-up that has ranked among the Financial Times’ list of the 1,000 fastest-growing European companies for the last four years. 

In 2020, the then-Prince of Wales handed Swartberg the Queen’s Award for Enterprise and it was a photo of the occasion that Swartberg had caught me admiring. 

“He’s a great person,” says Swartberg of the new king as we settle down to talk fine wine (the next best thing to drinking it) at Cru Wine’s office in Kensington. “He had a funny joke in which he said that he uses some of the excess English wine to run his Aston Martin.”

Whether that says more about the king’s appreciation for English wine or luxury cars I will leave to you. But what is beyond doubt is that Cru Wine has come a long way since Swartberg started the business at age 25 in 2013, leaving behind a career in mergers and acquisitions to pursue his hobby. He had grown up in Provence, and he was 17 when a formative experience set him on the road to wine. 

Sent to his father’s wine cellar to fetch a bottle for dinner one evening, he settled on “Château Sheep”. “It can’t be expensive,” he thought. His father disagreed when the young Swartberg popped open a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild. “I did get into trouble,” he concedes. “Ultimately… I did buy the same bottle back a few years later when I managed to make some money.” But the learning curve, though steep in price terms, was worth it. “[It’s] what kicked off my passion for wine,” he says. “And it has become my favourite wine now off the back of that.”

Did he have trouble getting people in the wine trade to take him seriously at such a young age? “No, I think people took me seriously,” he says. Swartberg did his homework, reading up on wine and studying at the prestigious Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) in London. 

A “certain level of knowledge… creates a certain level of trust and credibility” with his customers, says Swartberg. Then again, the business is young and so are some of his clientele. “Young people like buying with us… because we do have that little bit more of a younger, modern image than some of our traditional [competition].”

Cru Wine, "digital-first"

Cru Wine sees itself as “digital-first” and cru-wine.com features an investment platform through which collectors can grow and track their wine portfolio. It was the difficulty in having access to “all the knowledge that [buyers needed] to buy the right wines” that inspired Swartberg to start the business (his typical customer spends £20,000 to £30,000 a year). 

“We’re really active on social media and we really try to make it as easy as possible [to get wine data online].” 

That has gone down well with the younger cohort – the 32- to 45-year-olds. So, people like Swartberg, then. “Yes, some of [my friends] love wine, we get together and we drink wine.” Others don’t drink at all, which is “a bit of a newer trend”. Any good non-alcoholic wines out there? “No, they haven’t cracked it.”

Swartberg advises new collectors to start with “the usual suspects… [but] try to mix it up a little, enjoy, have fun… because next to [wine] being a great investment, it’s also really fun”. It can be tax-efficient, and investors, he’s found, like putting their money in something “tangible”.

The world of wine – and Bordeaux in particular – is still old school and relationships with experts in the field are as important as ever. That’s why Swartberg is unconcerned when I bring up the issue of “wine fraud”, where fake labels have been put onto bottles of the “good stuff” – a plague on the industry in recent years. 

Cru Wine only buys from “very reputable merchants we’ve been working with for years, or directly from wine producers”. Buyers also get an “ownership certificate”, which allows the wine to be traced. 

In any case, the business is insured, he points out. But fraud is a problem generally. “If anything, it should be tackled even a bit harder than it is.”

What’s next for Cru Wine?

So, what’s next for Cru Wine? Swartberg has his eye on India, which still levies a hefty tariff on wine. “One day that might drop… and a middle class… will [emerge that will] also start drinking wines.” The US is also developing a “culture of wine drinking”. 

As for New World wine, “We’ve been promoting California for a while”, he says. “The quality is really high… We work with a number of wineries directly”. Plans are afoot to open an office there. But for now, “the company is still very much Old World”, which mainly means Bordeaux, where Cru also has an office. 

“We’re right in the middle of ‘en primeur’” (when new wine is bought before it’s even been bottled) and the 2022 vintage is “great,” says Swartberg. It’s not a homogeneous vintage, wines from some areas are better than others. 

“You do have to select carefully, you can’t just buy across the range, so having a wine merchant that you trust… is definitely the right approach… And frankly, I do recommend people to buy this vintage because the quality is particularly good.”

This article was first published in MoneyWeek's magazine. Enjoy exclusive early access to news, opinion and analysis from our team of financial experts with a MoneyWeek subscription.

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• Whisky as an investment: Turning wee drams into profits
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The MoneyWeek investment trust portfolio was set up in 2012 with a simple principle: to help readers build a global, all-weather, set-and-forget set of investments. We chose six London-listed investment trusts covering various investment styles, assets and countries.

We’ve made some changes to these trusts over the years, but the underlying approach has always remained the same. The six choices are currently Personal Assets (LSE: PNL), Mid Wynd (LSE: MWY), Scottish Mortgage (LSE: SMT), Caledonia (LSE: CLDN), Law Debenture (LSE: LWDB) and AVI Global (LSE: AGT).

The portfolio returned 9.3% on an equal-weighted basis in 2024, compared with 11% for the FTSE All Share and 22.1% for the MSCI World index. Still, these figures only tell half the story. On an underlying basis, using net asset value (NAV) rather than share price, the portfolio added 12.3%.

The gap between NAV and market performance is particularly apparent at Scottish Mortgage and Caledonia. The latter’s share price returned just 0.6% in 2024, while its net asset value increased by 9.6%, thanks to the strong performance of its listed equity portfolio and direct private investments. Scottish Mortgage returned 24% in 2024 on an underlying basis, but a share-price return of 16.8%.

Discounts persist

The continued disconnect between underlying investment returns and share prices has become a persistent and concerning trend for the investment trust sector. The sector’s weighted average discount to net asset value (NAV) has hovered between 15% and 20% for the past two years. While some discounts narrowed last year – notably Edinburgh Worldwide and Baillie Gifford US Growth – the performance of Caledonia and Scottish Mortgage illustrate investors’ continued caution. Caledonia’s discount to NAV expanded from around 30% at the beginning of 2024 to nearly 40% by the end of the year. Before 2020, the discount rarely exceeded 20%.

On the plus side, AVI Global has been making the most of this disconnect. The value-focused trust has built a portfolio of companies and other trusts trading at a deep discount to the underlying NAV. Its biggest winner last year was US private equity giant Apollo, which it sold in November for a total return of 166% over three years – a 41% annualised gain.

At the other end of the spectrum, Law Debenture has traded at a premium to its net asset value for much of the year, and despite its UK value focus, it clocked up the second-best performance in the portfolio. The trust produced a total return of approximately 14.3% (NAV return 12.2%).

Substantial positions in NatWest, Marks & Spencer and Rolls-Royce helped its performance – Rolls-Royce and NatWest returned 92% and 83%, respectively. These results are a great reminder of why value investing is still relevant, especially in unloved markets.

Gold glitters

Personal Assets chalked up a return of 6.6% on a NAV basis and 6.2% on a total return basis. The trust started the year with 10.7% of its portfolio invested in gold bullion, a well-timed decision as the yellow metal returned 27% in 2024. Exposure to high-quality equities (28% of NAV at the end of November) also helped the portfolio, while short-dated bond exposure provided stability. Exposure to inflation-protected bonds (just over a third of the portfolio at the end of November) proved a drag.

Aside from Caledonia, the biggest disappointment in the portfolio was Mid Wynd. We’ve been closely watching this trust – the smallest in the portfolio – for the past three years.

Towards the end of 2023, the trust’s board replaced long-standing portfolio manager Artemis with Lazard Asset Management, which replaced all but two holdings in the portfolio. The changes have yet to yield the desired results. The trust returned just 8% on a NAV basis in 2024, underperforming its benchmark by 14% for the third year in a row. We’ll be keeping an eye on this trust to see if Lazard can turn the performance around.

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I recently visited Cask Trade’s founder, Simon Aron, on a sunny Friday morning at the firm’s offices on Regent Street to talk about whisky investing.

The offices are like a sweet shop for adults. Rows of toffee and caramel-coloured whisky samples line the shelves, a few tantalisingly labelled “Secret”. I ask Simon what that means. He says he’ll tell me later.

Whisky investing by the cask

Cask Trade (casktrade.com) is also something of a secret among whisky collectors and investors, albeit one that is becoming better known.

The company buys whole whisky casks from distilleries for resale. “Generally, people find competitors first,” says Simon. “Those are the people that are saying you will make 30% a year… and the distilleries will buy back the casks [at the end], which, of course, never happens. But it’s a nice story to tell because, obviously, this is amazing.

“You buy something and they buy it back and make a profit over the years… But it’s too good to be true.”

Cask Trade buys the casks, the rare gems that the distilleries are willing to give up, and there’s not a lot of them. “I get the crumbs off the big table and I’m grateful for it,” says Simon.

That means he can never be too sure of what he’s going to get. “I will order 50 casks and I will get 18. I order 18 and I get two. I get what I’m given… [because] the good stuff is easily sellable,” he says.

“Most of the distilleries like to keep it… Anyone selling casks by the pallet, in large quantities, in their thousands, is certainly not selling a rare quantity.” So, Simon gets the gold dust and it goes onto his list, which is sent to 10,000 people worldwide. “That’s my shop front.”

Is he personally a whisky enthusiast or a whisky investor? “Both,” he says. “They’re not mutually exclusive.” His background is in IT and he’s run a number of companies over the years. “But I’ve always had a passion for whisky,” he says. In his leisure time, he would travel “back and forth” to Scotland to indulge in his hobby. He amassed 4,000 bottles before the question of where to store them all arose and he “graduated naturally and logically from bottles to casks”.

But there was to be a learning curve. He had bought a cask, and 18 months later, he asked for a sample. There’s been a bit of a mistake, he was told. The cask he thought he had bought didn’t actually exist. Fraud? “I would say it certainly wasn’t innocent,” says Simon.

The sellers “did not make sure they had ownership of that cask, [although] they provided me with documentation and invoice and they took my payment”.

In the end, Simon had to get a lawyer involved. “I was very much caught up in the whole romance of buying casks, which, you know, as a Virgo I should have been much more kind of pedantic, because I had bought and sold IT companies… I’ve literally done my due diligence [on those firms]... and I just didn’t do it, because it was whisky and it’s fun and it’s what I like to drink and, oh, to have a cask of 1992 Springbank is a dream.”

Simon warns buyers to beware of whiskies being passed off as names they’re not.

Sometimes big-name distilleries will also sell their casks under an alternative name – hence the “secret” bottle I’d seen on the shelf. It’s the difference between a perfectly nice bracelet and a Cartier bracelet, says Simon. “Make sure you’ve got full naming rights on the cask. If you don’t, that’s okay. But pay the right price.”

Build a portfolio of whisky casks slowly

In 2018, Simon started the business he wishes he’d been introduced to when venturing into cask-buying.

Cask Trade asks customers three questions. What are they looking to achieve? How long do they intend to keep casks? And what are they looking to spend? “Don’t spend all your money at once,” says Simon. “Buy a couple of casks, see what we’ve got in a couple of months’ time… It’s no different to any person collecting a portfolio of whatever.”

The lowest-price cask he has on the list that day is a “new-make” for £2,000. There’s no minimum spend. With 70% of customers returning, “I know they’re going to come back… and maybe buy another one from a different distillery”. They will want to age their cask for at least ten years “to maximise their profit”, periodically regauging – which is like doing a health check to see how many litres remain after evaporation (the angels’ share) – and sampling to see how the whisky is coming on, services Cask Trade offers.

But don’t leave the whisky too long. “One of the biggest myths… is that you keep it until it is at its absolute oldest… It’s not true.” Simon tells me of one customer who went against the advice and was quite upset when they had to accept that their whisky had had it.

It also pays to have an exit strategy in mind from the outset. When the whisky is ready, you can bottle under your own label or Cask Trade’s Regent Street label, maybe for a special occasion.

“Whisky people share whisky,” as Simon says. Or you can choose to sell it via Cask Trade’s auction site, auctionyourcask. com, where there’s a 15% buyer’s fee.

Whatever you decide, have fun with it. “Our ethos is to make sure that people enjoy… and understand the experience,” says Simon. “We’re in our fifth year of business and we love what we do.”

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According to the Knight Frank Luxury Investing Index, classic and luxury cars have returned 193 per cent over the past decade. In fact, certain classics have appreciated by as much as 25 per cent annually, with 10-15 per cent being quite common for vehicles from the nostalgic 90s.

Unlocking classic car market accessibility

When it comes to investing in classics, the primary issue for many investors is accessibility. Car selection is complex and there are long-term costs associated with storage, insurance and maintenance. All too often, potential investors are put off before unlocking this great diversification option. So, how can individual investors access returns in the classic car market without the hassle? Through asset-backed fractional investing with TheCarCrowd.

What is TheCarCrowd?

TheCarCrowd is an innovative investment platform that makes investing in classic cars simple and engaging. It is the UK’s first asset-backed fractional investment platform and TheCarCrowd is the trading name for TheCarCrowdAR Limited, which is an appointed representative of Infinity Asset Management LLP which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN464315).

David Spickett, CEO of TheCarCrowd, said: “Generally speaking, fractional investment is quite a new category,” explained Spickett. “Having seen the scepticism around things like crypto and NFTs among traditional investors, I wanted to ensure it was far more conventional and familiar. Whilst ensuring we meet the FCA’s regulation is challenging, it has also allowed us to gain far more traction among serious investors looking for viable alternatives that appeal to their interests.”

The platform has already surpassed 3,000 users and currently has 10 classics under management with a combined value of over £600,000. Of the platform’s qualified investors, the majority hold shares in one or more vehicles, allowing them to diversify within the classic car market and curate their own classic car collection. It is a new and interesting take on fractional investment – one that has already proved popular among ‘petrol heads’ and those looking to benefit from the classic car market’s substantial potential growth.

How does it work?

TheCarCrowd uses an expert panel to research and select classic cars, like a Ford Sierra Cosworth, Jaguar E-Type or Porsche GT3. It then divides the cars into 250-500 shares using an SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) and offers them to its qualified investor members. One recent example, a Ferrari Testarossa, was fully funded in less than 27 hours across 400 registered investors. As with all investments your Capital is at risk when investing and TheCarCrowd encourage all qualifying investors to discuss the opportunity with their financial advisor prior to investing.

“Unlike other categories, like funds, that may have a minimum investment of £50,000, TheCarCrowd’s offer a far more accessible entry point, with average investment around £2500,” continues Spickett. “The investment is also into a real, tangible asset. Investors can see their chosen assets in person, giving the platform a strong sense of community and shared passion.”

Safely storing, insuring and maintaining classic cars for extended periods can be expensive. This is particularly true of the models that typically see high growth. That is part of TheCarCrowd’s unique approach – the business warehouses and maintains the vehicles, with investors able to visit their investment at any time at their facilit, near Nottingham.

Deciding when to sell the assets is also an interesting process. To ensure the procedure is straightforward and fair, TheCarCrowd pre-screens purchase offers for the assets, before forwarding them to members in a democratic vote. If the majority decides to accept the offer, the car is sold. In 2021, investors achieved gross annualised returns as high as 36%, following the vote to sell the platform’s Renault Clio V6. Note that past performance is no guarantee of future performance and the value of assets may decrease as well as increase.

How to get started?

While alternative and passion investing will never be the backbone of a portfolio, it does allow investors to diversify into unusual markets and offers an outlet for their interests. Critically, platforms like TheCarCrowd are making these asset classes far more accessible. For more information and to see if you could qualify as an investor, visit www.thecarcrowd.uk/invest. TheCarCrowd is currently taking pre-registrations for a spectacular Porsche GT3 and a rallying legend, the Lancia Delta Integrale.

One of the most coveted books today, a 163-year old copy of “On the Origin of Species” is now part of Showpiece’s £9m collection of history’s rarest treasures – and it can be yours, at a fraction of the price.

Darwin related collectibles are in high demand. Recent and upcoming auctions have seen a journal sold for over £300,000, his microscope for £600,000, and expect a signed manuscript to fetch up to as much as £700,000. First editions of what was recently voted “the most influential book of all time” by academics have also sold for significant amounts; Bonhams auctioned a copy for US$500,075 in 2019. Showpiece is making it possible for one of these rare copies to now be yours.

After spending 20 rigorous years scripting “On the Origin of Species”, Charles Darwin wanted to ensure its publishing process went smoothly. Dissatisfied with prior publishers, Darwin took his manuscript to the only person he trusted enough. Geologist Charles Lyell, a younger Darwin’s mentor, arranged for him to meet with one John Murray, who had helped him publish best-selling works of his own. Together, the author and publisher settled on releasing 1,250 first editions. Upon seeing his newly printed copies, the naturalist remarked “I am infinitely pleased and proud at the appearance of my child”.

Although these sold out almost immediately, their contents stirred up controversy. Criticism caused Darwin to publish multiple revised editions, each in increased quantities relative to the first. First editions of “On the Origin of Species” gradually became more valuable, being limited in number, and the only kind to carry Darwin’s initial propositions about the origin of all life. Today, few first editions exist in circulation among a handful of private collectors, and renowned educational and scientific institutions, with even fewer being on par with Showpiece’s volume.

Bibliomania – “The gentlest of infirmities”

A passion for collecting extends to rare manuscripts, a category that has been considered valuable for decades. Initially a sign of upper-class opulence, the assembly of private libraries and book collections is today of global interest. Bibliomaniacs source rare books to curate collections representing important history, to rekindle childhood nostalgia, and out of a love for particular subject areas.

An appreciation for printing and binding also drives collectors towards procuring physical volumes. With a departure from more traditional printing techniques, and the recent digitisation of books, certain tangible elements of a book have become more desirable, motivating significant price differences between copies of similar kinds. Rare printing errors increase a book’s value, since these are rectified in reprints. Similarly, hardcovers retain more value, since printing and binding processes used to create these are of superior quality, involving more intricate designs.

According to rare book expert Oliver Bayliss, no one genre or type of book is most desirable. Collecting interests show constant fluctuation, and are often dictated by social trends. However, Bayliss reveals that a first edition of Darwin’s work, heralded as the ‘greatest work of scientific literature’ seemingly transcends these boundaries, and is regarded to possess indisputable value by collectors.

Survival of the finest

Showpiece’s volume of Darwin’s treatise, authenticated by experts, has been deemed exceptional, and in near-perfect condition. Rupert Powell, managing director of Forum Auctions, noted the presence of features missing from others of its kind. This first edition exhibits chocolate-brown endpapers, an intact ‘half title’ page missing in other copies, a folding lithograph of Darwin’s tree of life, an original ‘Edmonds & Remnants’ binder’s ticket, and 32 pages of publisher advertisements, absent in later editions. This beautiful example also boasts original, emerald green wave-grain binding, and gilt spine-lettering. Despite the typically fragile nature of simple, mid to late Victorian era cloth binding, Showpiece’s volume has remained pristine.

Showpiece’s volume also possesses extraordinary provenance, being that it is one of 500 copies that once belonged to Mudie’s Lending Library. Famous for revolutionising the manner in which Victorian literature was published and consumed, the library operated for nearly 100 years, during which several first editions were circulated far and wide, among readers and collectors alike.

Changing the game

With Showpiece, you can own ‘On the Origin of Species’, and join a global community of collectors in collecting some of the world’s most unobtainable items.

• Pieces of Darwin’s first-edition are available from £‎50, with various physical benefits on offer, at Showpiece.com.