9/03/2015

Art Stocks Take a Tumble


Sakte's Market Notes recently posted on the loss of value in the 17 art market stocks they track.  The index fell by nearly 22%, with only three showing positive returns.  Additionally, all are showing lower values than at the beginning of the year.

Skates reports
Art might be a good value-preservation asset at times of market turmoil, but art stocks are not. August market volatility did take a toll on the universe of global listed art industry companies, chopping 21.9% away from their combined market value in August alone, with Skate’s Art Stocks Index closing 32.8% down for the year to date so far on August 31.

Out of 17 stocks included in Skate’s Art Stocks Index, only three produced positive returns in August (Artnews S.A., artnet.com AG, and owner of the Art Basel franchise, MCH Group), but all three are still trading below their closing prices at the end of last year.

The worst performers in August were Shutterstock, Etsy, and Demand Media, with 37%, 31%, and 21% negative return this month, respectively. Only last year Shutterstock was briefly valued above Sotheby’s, and now it is barely worth half of the world’s largest listed auction house, which also remains the world’s most valuable art industry firm by market capitalization.

This scorecard is particularly worrisome for any art industry companies contemplating IPO any time soon—all recent IPOs from the industry turned out to be a disaster, with Scholium, Etsy, and Poly trading well below their IPO prices, and investors in the most recent Etsy IPO seeing half of their investment value destroyed in just few months.
Source: Skate's


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