DIVERSIFYING WITH COLLECTIBLES

The collectibles market is booming. During the pandemic, folks with old collections dug them out, new collectors came to market, and trading activity and prices across categories from sports memorabilia to fine wines soared.

“I can’t even count the number of people who contacted us during the pandemic who hadn’t touched their collections in more than 10 years,” says Scott English, executive director of the American Philatelic Society in Bellefonte, Pa., who welcomed attention on stamps when four 1918 Inverted Jenny stamps—so-called because they were printed with an upside down airplane—fetched a record US$4.9 million at Sotheby’s last year.

Sales of global collectibles are expected to grow to US$692 billion from $412 billion over the next 10 years, according to Market Decipher, a Canadian market research firm.

For investors, a long view is advisable, says David Savir, CEO of Element Pointe Advisors, a wealth management firm in Miami. “Many collectibles are at values that may not be sustainable for the next two to three years,” he says. “Anyone buying should be holding them for over a decade and not expect to profit in the short term.”

The highest level of trading activity is in sports collectibles, boosted by the entry of sports-related nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which exploded to $1 billion in sales last year—bigger than the entire 2020 NFT market—and are expected to reach $2 billion this year, according to the London-based consultancy Deloitte.

The overall NFT market surged to $24.9 billion last year, including digital creations from high-end fine art to collectibles. Sales of popular collectible series haven’t waned: In March, sales of Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks hit $257 million and $81 million, respectively, according to CryptoSlam, an aggregator of NFT data.

Tangible sports memorabilia aren’t taking a back seat to NFTs: Sales in the traditional $4 billion arena have been breaking records. Last year, a Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic rookie NBA trading card sold for $4.6 million—the most fetched for a basketball card—and a 1952 Mickey Mantle card hit a record for baseball cards, at $5.2 million.

For classic cars, the first quarter of each year is when three of the biggest car auctions take place, says Juan Calle, co-founder and CEO of Classic.com, a site that tracks car market data. This year’s quarter closed with a total sales volume of $1.3 billion, double the same period last year, Calle says.

While other categories have less practical value, they can be attractive diversifiers for investment portfolios.

Consider fine wine’s low correlation to the S&P 500: just 0.3, which is lower than gold, real estate, or any traditional portfolio-balancing asset class, says Anthony Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Vinovest, which runs a portfolio of 500,000 collectible wine bottles stored in custom-built warehouses around the world. “We’ve seen a big uptick in interest from people who you wouldn’t traditionally think of as wine enthusiasts,” he says.

The wine market tends to shrug off factors that send stocks reeling, but has other sensitivities, such as tariffs and even gift-giving policies in authoritarian nations. When China banned gifts to government employees in 2011, popular Bordeaux wine values plummeted, says Robbie Stevens, Americas Territory Manager for London-based Liv-ex, a global marketplace for fine wine.

The broad Liv-ex 1000 index was up 19% in 2021, driven primarily by the popularity of Champagne and Burgundy. In the 12 months through March, Liv-ex’s index for Champagne was up 47.8%, and for Burgundy, 36.8%.

But no category is immune to broad economic trends, says financial advisor Savir. “Collectibles are more vulnerable to price declines in a recession than other assets, given the nonessential nature of many of them.”

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Penta magazine.

As tech leaders race to bring Windows systems back online after Friday’s software update by cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed around 8.5 million machines worldwide, experts share with CIO Journal their takeaways for preparing for the next major information technology outage.

Be familiar with how vendors develop, test and release their software

IT leaders should hold vendors deeply integrated within IT systems, such as CrowdStrike , to a “very high standard” of development, release quality and assurance, said Neil MacDonald , a Gartner vice president.

“Any security vendor has a responsibility to do extensive regression testing on all versions of Windows before an update is rolled out,” he said.

That involves asking existing vendors to explain how they write software, what testing they do and whether customers may choose how quickly to roll out an update.

“Incidents like this remind all of us in the CIO community of the importance of ensuring availability, reliability and security by prioritizing guardrails such as deployment and testing procedures and practices,” said Amy Farrow, chief information officer of IT automation and security company Infoblox.

Re-evaluate how your firm accepts software updates from ‘trusted’ vendors

While automatically accepting software updates has become the norm—and a recommended security practice—the CrowdStrike outage is a reminder to take a pause, some CIOs said.

“We still should be doing the full testing of packages and upgrades and new features,” said Paul Davis, a field chief information security officer at software development platform maker JFrog . undefined undefined Though it’s not feasible to test every update, especially for as many as hundreds of software vendors, Davis said he makes it a priority to test software patches according to their potential severity and size.

Automation, and maybe even artificial intelligence-based IT tools, can help.

“Humans are not very good at catching errors in thousands of lines of code,” said Jack Hidary, chief executive of AI and quantum company SandboxAQ. “We need AI trained to look for the interdependence of new software updates with the existing stack of software.”

Develop a disaster recovery plan

An incident rendering Windows computers unusable is similar to a natural disaster with systems knocked offline, said Gartner’s MacDonald. That’s why businesses should consider natural disaster recovery plans for maintaining the resiliency of their operations.

One way to do that is to set up a “clean room,” or an environment isolated from other systems, to use to bring critical systems back online, according to Chirag Mehta, a cybersecurity analyst at Constellation Research.

Businesses should also hold tabletop exercises to simulate risk scenarios, including IT outages and potential cyber threats, Mehta said.

Companies that back up data regularly were likely less impacted by the CrowdStrike outage, according to Victor Zyamzin, chief business officer of security company Qrator Labs. “Another suggestion for companies, and we’ve been saying that again and again for decades, is that you should have some backup procedure applied, running and regularly tested,” he said.

Review vendor and insurance contracts

For any vendor with a significant impact on company operations , MacDonald said companies can review their contracts and look for clauses indicating the vendors must provide reliable and stable software.

“That’s where you may have an advantage to say, if an update causes an outage, is there a clause in the contract that would cover that?” he said.

If it doesn’t, tech leaders can aim to negotiate a discount serving as a form of compensation at renewal time, MacDonald added.

The outage also highlights the importance of insurance in providing companies with bottom-line protection against cyber risks, said Peter Halprin, a partner with law firm Haynes Boone focused on cyber insurance.

This coverage can include protection against business income losses, such as those associated with an outage, whether caused by the insured company or a service provider, Halprin said.

Weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the various platforms

The CrowdStrike update affected only devices running Microsoft Windows-based systems , prompting fresh questions over whether enterprises should rely on Windows computers.

CrowdStrike runs on Windows devices through access to the kernel, the part of an operating system containing a computer’s core functions. That’s not the same for Apple ’s Mac operating system and Linux, which don’t allow the same level of access, said Mehta.

Some businesses have converted to Chromebooks , simple laptops developed by Alphabet -owned Google that run on the Chrome operating system . “Not all of them require deeper access to things,” Mehta said. “What are you doing on your laptop that actually requires Windows?”