Mei Moses City Indexes

Mei Moses has recently expanded their tracking databases for collecting categories to now include city data.  Our friends at Beautiful Asset Advisors keep expanding the quantitative information and tracking data for users with constantly expanding sets of repeat sales, and breaking the data and indexes into categories and now city indexes.  These city indexes now can give the appraiser regional information on how well art sectors are performing compared to other financial indexes.

The recent BAA press release stated

Data from over 100 world wide auction sales through mid year 2011 shows that six of the nine new Mei Moses city based collecting category art indexes tracking values substantially out performed the 6% and 2.5% gain in the S&P 500 and the FT all shares total redurn indeses from year end 2010.

Semi annual tracking performance through June 2011

Mei Moses Mid Year City Collecting Category Art Indexes

Index Last 6 month Change

AMP-NY    -6.09%
LAP-NY    8.00%
BRP-LON    -8.17%
IMPMOD-NY 7.79%
IMPMOD-LON 22.64%
OMS19C-LON -9.18%
OMS19C-AM 12.79%
OMS19C-NY 7.21%
PWC-NY 13.77%
S&P500 T0TAL RETURN 6.00%
FINANCIAL TIMES ALL SHARES 0.80%
FTAS TOTAL RETURN 2.50%

We use this report to announce the results of our world wide data collection and reporting efforts based on almost 100 Sotheby’s and Christie’s world wide auctions that occurred in the first half of 2011 which produced over 1600 repeat sale pairs for which we have auction information on both purchase and sale prices achieved. In this report we discuss, for the first time, the financial performance of our new nine Mei Moses® City Based Collecting Category art indexes. We report on the performance for the first half of 2011 with comparisons to the performance of equity indexes in the U.S. and U.K.

MARKET PERFORMANCE – MID YEAR TRACKING RESULTS FOR THE FIRST SIX MONTHS OF 2011

Our newly expanded database provides sufficient and timely incremental data to allow analysis of the financial returns achieved by the world art auction market on a continuous basis. We have sufficient data so we can now create city based semi annual tracking reports for six of the seven collecting categories studied by Mei Moses® from the
cumulative sales that have transpired during the year up to mid year. (American before 1950 (AMP), Latin American (LAP), British after 1850 (BRP), Impressionist and Modern (IMPMOD), Old Master and 19th century (OLM19C), Post War and contemporary (PWC)) The vast majority of sales, by dollar volume, for AMP and LAP collecting categories take place in New York (NY) those for BRP take place in London (LON). We also have sufficient data to create individual OMS19C city indexes for NY, LON and Amsterdam (AM); IMPMOD city indexes for NY, LON and a NY PWC index.

For each index tracking value we create we assume that the sales in each year-to-date period represent transactions for the full year. The table on the first page shows the percentage change from the 2010 end-of-year value to the projected 2011 end-of-year values based on only the first half sales for each of the new indexes. These 2011 values assume that no additional repeat sale pairs would be added to our database between the end of the first half of the year and the end of the entire year for each collecting category. The table also compares the city collecting category art indexes with the actual mid year closing values of three equity indexes. (Financial Times All Shares with and without dividends reinvested (FTAS TR, FTAS) and the Standard & Poors 500 Total Return (S&P 500 TR))

The two strongest city based collecting category indexes in the first half of 2011 were IMPMOD-LON, and PWC-NY with returns of 22.6, and 13.8 percent respectively over their year end 2010 values. This performance was caused by the strong major IMPMOD sales in LON in June and the strong major PWC sales in NY in May. Three of the city collecting category indexes produced negative returns OLM19C-LON, BRP-LON, and AMP-NY of -9.2, -8.22 and -6.1 percent respectively from year end 2010 values. This performance was caused by weak May LON sales and very weak AMP sales in NY
throughout the first half of the year.

Click HERE to visit the BAA site and follow the Recent Press Release tab to download the newest press release on the city city tracking reports.

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