Mei Moses Tracking Report

The Mei Moses Fine Art Index has just released their tracking report on sales through April 2014. In summary, the report clearly states art is under-performing equities, but there has been a significant improvement of 5% points since the end of March. The Mei Moses World All Art Index moved from a decline of 12% for the year to date to 7%.

The report does not have last weeks rather anemic impressionist category sales included.  It will be interesting to see how the index is impacted by those sales, and this weeks contemporary sector sales in New York.

Mei Moses reports

     INSIGHTS ON ART MARKET FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE THROUGH
APRIL 2014 BASED ON THE MEI MOSES® FAMILY OF ART INDEXES©
                           
                                     JIANPING MEI & MICHAEL MOSES

SOME SIGNS OF STRENGTH DEVELOP IN THE WORLD WIDE ART AUCTION MARKET AS U.S. EQUITIES HOVER NEAR ALL TIME HIGHS

IMPROVEMENT IN THE WORLD WIDE AUCTION ART MARKET STARTED TO DEVELOP IN APRIL REDUCING THE YEAR TO DATE LOSS TO ABOUT 7% IN THE MEI MOSES® WORLD ALL ART INDEX.  THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT FROM LAST MONTHS 12% YEAR TO DATE DECLINE.  HOWEVER ART CONTINUES TO UNDERPERFORM EQUITIES©  

Our expanded data collection efforts provide sufficient and timely incremental data for analyzing the world art auction market on a continuous basis.  We create monthly tracking reports for the Mei Moses® world all art index for the cumulative world wide sales that have transpired during the year up to the end of each month.  We treat the sales in each successive year-to-date period as if they represented transactions for the full year. The figure on the first page shows the 2012 end-of-year value for the new index (set at a value of 1.0) and twelve alternative projections for 2013 end of year values based on the successive monthly sales.  There are no auctions in August so we do not include that month in our analysis.  The twelfth point becomes the true value for 2013 since it is based on all transactions in that year.  This process is replicated for the current year.

The figure also compares the world art index with the monthly closing values of two total return equity indexes.  We now also supply a three month moving average of the world all art index for those individuals who feel that the relationship between this average and the actual index, like the fifty day moving average in stocks, provides information as to whether it is currently a good time to make purchase or sale decisions.

Our data collection and reporting efforts based on 25 Sotheby’s and Christie’s world wide auctions that occurred in APRIL 2014 produced 185 repeat sale pairs mainly from Traditional Chinese (TSWA) and Post War and Contemporary (PWC) works of art sales in Hong Kong.  There were less important PWC sales in Europe as well as minor old master (OLM19C) sales in Europe and New York and a small American Painting (AMP) sale also in New York.  These pairs allowed us to create the Mei Moses® world all art tracking index for April 2014 which produced the aforementioned
7.0 % loss as compared to the closing value for year end 2013.

Source: Beautiful Asset Advisors