We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP240: Investing in Fine Art Like a Stock w/ Scott Lynn (Business Podcast)

Episode Date: April 28, 2019

Stig and Preston talk to the founder of Masterworks, Scott Lynn. Scott is the creator of a company that allows investors to purchase a share of a fine piece of artwork from legendary artists like Mon...et, Picasso, or Andy Warhol.   IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: The bull and bear thesis behind investing in fine art The key metrics behind valuing fine art If fine art has a place in your portfolio Why art by great artists might be value traps How the ultra-rich are moving the market  BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Learn more about Scott’s company, Masterworks Citibank’s report about the Global Art Market NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Fundrise 7-Eleven The Bitcoin Way Onramp Public Vanta ReMarkable Connect Invest SimpleMining Miro Shopify HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to today's show. As regular listeners know, Stig and I like to press the limits of creative and unique ideas. And on today's show, we have an interview with art collector, Scott Lynn. Scott has been an entrepreneur building new and innovative companies for over 20 years. And throughout that time, he always had a passion for collecting art. Then in 2018, Scott created a company called Masterworks, which is a platform that securitizes fine art by filing. the ownership of various paintings with the SEC. So Scott was the first person to enable investors
Starting point is 00:00:35 to collectively purchase in trade shares in multi-million dollar works of art by artists like Picasso, Monet and Warhol and many others. So get ready to hear a fascinating discussion with the creative Scott Lynn. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Preston Pish.
Starting point is 00:01:17 And as usual, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson. All right, guys. We are super excited to be here with Scott Len. And Scott, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. Thanks, Stig. So, Scott, we've covered many types of investments here on the Investors podcast, but Art is clearly a new frontier for all of our listeners. I personally know so little about this topic and I find it quite fascinating.
Starting point is 00:01:44 So talk to us about how you got started in this sector of investing. I am super pumped to hear how you respond to this. I think like mini collectors, I first started collecting art really out of passion. But, you know, like many collectors, it made a lot of mistakes along the way and then eventually learn that art could also be an investment. From our perspective, we see this asset class, which is really enormous. If you listen or read any of the statistics on art as an asset, class, the Lloyd estimates that there's $1.7 trillion in fine art in between ultra high net worth
Starting point is 00:02:14 collectors' homes. There's 50 to $60 billion a year to sells in terms of volume, two to three percent turnover. So it's this very interesting investment, but the problem with it, and we hear this all the time, is that the only way to participate is if you have a couple million dollars by a painting. So it's this really unique outperforming asset class that really nobody can afford, unless you have a lot of money to acquire the art. We think it's a natural asset class to be securitized. You made such an interesting leap, right? So you collected art, clearly very interested in art. You could say that about a lot of people. I would say you took it just not one step further. I guess you took it like a mile more than anyone else. Could you talk to us some
Starting point is 00:02:52 about that thought process? You know, how did it become an idea and how did it turn into what it is today? You know, my background has really been inserting tech companies really at the same time with collecting art. My approach was really how to productize this from a tech perspective to make it accessible to all types of people. So I think that's probably the unique perspective. You know, most people in the art community are not tech people. And with tech guys I know are not, our people. So that's maybe the unique perspective that we bring.
Starting point is 00:03:19 Very high level, some of the correlation studies that have been done, and one that we like to cite a lot is the Citibank study from 2015 where the CIO at Citibank, private bank, concluded that individuals should allocate between 1.4 and 4% to art, depending on what percentage of their portfolio they hold into liquids. And I think a lot of that conclusion is really just based on two factors. One is that the asset class overall, just the fine art market overall, independent of the blue chip segment, has outperformed the S&P for the past 20 years by 180%. The second thing that I think is important is that it's really an uncorrelated asset class. So if you look at the dot-com bubble first thing in 2000, the art market actually increased over that period. The highest correlation to a financial crisis the art market has had was actually in 2008, 2009, when the market fell, or I think the Pfell 58%, the art market declined 26%, so that had roughly a correlation factor of 0.5. But in general, the asset class is uncorrelated to almost all other asset classes, which we find
Starting point is 00:04:19 very interesting when taken in context of its outperformance as well. And why do you think that is the case? Typically, whenever we talk about cycles and economic markets, you would say that some goods you would need regardless of the economy. Fine art seems to be an asset class you definitely don't need, not including you, perhaps God. That seems like an asset class you don't need whenever you need money in the economy's bad. Yeah, I think there's lots of our history majors running around that might disagree with you on that, but in general I would agree with you.
Starting point is 00:04:51 We don't actually know what drives our prices. And there's lots of academic or theoretical conversations we can get into on this. But the one hypothesis that we have is that our prices are correlated to ultra, ultra, ultra wealth creation. around the globe. Whether you talk about that in terms of growing inequality or however you want to characterize that, it does seem like that's what it's probably most close to correlated to. We have an ongoing research project right now. We're trying to prove that, but we haven't yet concluded it. It is a global market. So I think the latest stats on the industry show that 40% of the art market is in the U.S., 20% in the U.S., 20% in the U.K., 20% in China, the rest is
Starting point is 00:05:27 is primarily Western Europe. So it's this global market of people with multi-million dollar art collections that are effectively trading one to $10, $50 million paintings between each other that really drives the market. The easy way to think about the art market is probably to think about it in two different components. One is the primary market, and I would think of just the primary market as being paintings that have never been sold before. So these are usually living artists represented by galleries. That's a really different segment of the market than what Masterworks focuses on, which is
Starting point is 00:05:55 the secondary market, which are paintings that have been sold multiple times, and they're usually by artists that are no longer living. We tend to think about the market in those two ways. And then within the secondary market, there's what we refer to as this blue chip segment, which is roughly 60% in terms of dollar value of the art market overall. And this blue chip segment tends to be from household brand name artists like Picasso, Monet, Warhol, Posciat, etc. Usually names that you've heard of.
Starting point is 00:06:20 That primarily is Masterworks focus, but that's a very high-level way to think about the market. Scott, talk to us more about this blue-chip art that you speak of. When we refer to the term blue chip, This is a term that a company called Art Price has really created. We're just referring to the top 100 artists by sales volume. These are the top selling artists. They tend to be, from our perspective, the most interesting risk-adjusted returns in the art market, meaning that the volatility if you invest in a blue chip painting is relatively low.
Starting point is 00:06:48 Very, very unlikely that your investment would ever go to zero. But they provide relatively steady returns. These are paintings that can return 8, 9, 10, 12, 15% a year, somewhat predictably. without taking a lot of risk. So to us, that's the segment of the market that can be most institutionalized and is the most interesting. It's a very high level.
Starting point is 00:07:07 We talked about ultra-wealth creation on a global basis that's happening in countries outside of the U.S. as well as in the U.S. Independent of that, there's this very interesting dynamic in the art market that's almost unlike any other asset class
Starting point is 00:07:20 where you have a continual decline in terms of supply on an artist-by-artist basis. So one of the things that you see in the art market is if you take an artist, Take a well-known artist like Jackson Pollock, for example. Pollock, in his lifetime, created hundreds of drip paintings that he's well-known for, but there's only 20-something of those drip paintings that are left in private collections today.
Starting point is 00:07:40 And the reason that supplies declined is because after collectors have died or after they decide to pass in their collection of museums, the number of artwork available in private collections just continues to decrease. So although Jackson Pollock is a well-known brand and a well-known artist, the number of paintings that are available for purchase continues to decline every year. So in part, I think that continuously declining amount of supplies is what does drive prices up as well. So I would think about segments of the art market as being broken into old masters, modern and impressionism, post-war, contemporary, or kind of the primary segment. We did this research piece in our research center on Masterworks where we looked at returns by segment of the market and that we looked at volatility to effectively create a sharp ratio.
Starting point is 00:08:23 And it's interesting what you find when you look at those different segments, one of the things that surprises, people most often is that if you, just very generally speaking, were to purchase a Rembrandt today, very well-known Dutch artists, it would be unlikely that you would actually make money on that painting if you held it 10 or 20 years. And part of that is because in the art market, we see taste change over time. And right now, most of the people that are net new buyers are interested of buying contemporary post-war paintings, some modern impressions and paintings, but they're not really interested in buying old masters. We're just not really seeing any appreciation in that segment of the market. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:13:12 I guess as an art buyer, you need to know what the change and preferences are before people know Yeah, I think that's right. And we, you know, as a buyer, I guess as an asset manager, look at those trends, right? We look at the trends in appreciation rates, artists that are sort of moving into this blue chip segment. And we look at trend in depreciation rates or artists that are moving out of this blue chip segment to try to predict that. You know, the good and the bad news about the art market is that nothing ever happens fast. No, unlike the technology industry that I'm used to, you know, you can see changes overnight or changes within a number of months. We don't really see that in the art market at all these trends occur on a compounding basis over a number of years. Those are the trends that we watch to try to figure out how different artist markets are changing or how the market overall is changing. Primarily, liquidity comes from up selling the painting to another private collector, right? That's the number one thing that drives liquidity. We work with investors to help them sell their shares at times if they need to get out of the investments. But people generally should think of this as a seven-year investment. It's an illiquid investment that they allocate single digit percentage of their portfolio to,
Starting point is 00:14:11 and don't really expect to have access to that until the end of the life of the investment. Maybe let's walk through the low of funds of how we think about acquiring a painting and then ultimately liquidity. So we'll go out, we'll acquire a painting with $10 million of our own balance sheet capital. We will then file that painting with the FCC to go public. And the going public process is very similar to how you would think about taking a company public, effectively, and that's one equivalent. Once the painting is public, we then sell shares in the painting. At any time after that, a collector can come make an offer to buy a painting. and then if the paintings fell,
Starting point is 00:14:42 the proceeds are distributed to those shareholders or investors. So the art market, a lot of people don't realize this, but the art market is very similar to the real estate market in that. A huge portion of art sells
Starting point is 00:14:52 through public auction. There's millions, most likely, of public comps that have been tracked over the years within the art market. I think, in fact, one of the things that we tend to focus on are paintings that have sold
Starting point is 00:15:03 two or more times at public auction so we can understand appreciation rate or depreciation rate for particular objects. And there's been 60,000 times, the paintings have sold two or more times at auction. So there's this really huge deep data set in the art market that helps us understand trends and value for a particular artist
Starting point is 00:15:19 or a particular period. So when we're looking at acquiring a painting, we're looking at historical comparable paintings that have sold by the same artist of the same style that are roughly the same example to try to understand how have paintings similar to ours appreciated collectively and how do we think our painting is appreciating historically to try to predict future appreciation rights.
Starting point is 00:15:38 Scott, talk to us about risk. Here on the show, we always talk about protecting your downside risk first, and then if you purchase an undervalued asset, the upside will just take care of itself. So as we consider the downside, what causes an art market to crash? People have been collecting art for thousands of years. The biggest crash in most recent history was the early 1990s with the Japanese sell-off. That was the most significant crash. But recently, other than the financial crisis, we haven't really seen any significant downward movement. in our prices. Now, is what we do see, and I think is what is much more common, is we see
Starting point is 00:16:15 specific artists' markets decline rapidly. For example, one artist that we've really seen decline just from a market perspective is Damien Hearst. Damien's paintings for various reasons or sculpture or whatever have really declined in value over the past 10 plus years. So I think we do see it on a particular artist basis. But other artists, you know, conversely, like based on all the data we have now, Monet in particular, we see a very low likelihood that, you know, that that his paintings decline in value. When we look at all of the paintings that we have had by Monet that have sold two or more times,
Starting point is 00:16:46 we only see a 3% chance that Monet has ever declined in value based on the second sale. That's a very interesting data point to us. And I think within this blue chip segment overall, we really view Art as a very, very, very good sort of value. So if Art is declining in value, it's declining 10%, maybe it's declining 20%, but 50% declines or 100% declines are just very, very uncommon.
Starting point is 00:17:09 We think a portfolio of art makes sense, just like a portfolio in most asset classes make sense. And it is interesting. I mean, when we look at the blue chip segment, we don't see a huge standard deviation in terms of returns by artists. So we might see a range of returns somewhere between kind of 8% and 15%. That's large, but it's not like we're seeing 1% to 40%. So there is a reasonably narrow band within this blue chip segment of returns. And I guess we tend to focus on that. Would you please tell us a story, a personal story, where you've been wrong and where you've been
Starting point is 00:17:44 right about art valuation and what you learn? I'm sure you have quite a few. I have quite a few. So I think one of the things that new collectors often get wrong, and I've seen this many, many times over, and this definitely describes myself, is new collectors tend to focus on the artists themselves and not the examples by that artist. So if you take an artist like Picasso, Picasso created over 50,000 objects in his lifetime, and when I was first collecting, one of the things I did is I want to ask. and I bought this whole lot of Picasso ceramics from one of his neighbors in France. I think I can't even remember the number.
Starting point is 00:18:16 I think I acquired like something like 100 ceramics by Picasso. And, you know, they were in all these crates packed of straw. And I remember receiving out what to do with them. But I was thinking that long term, this would be a great investment. And the problem with that approach really is that if you look at Picasso ceramics, they're addition, right? They're made in these massive additions. You know, he was maybe involved with it, but wasn't intimately involved with the creation of those ceramics.
Starting point is 00:18:37 So they have his name on him. but they're not really that unique, not that special. Collectors of Picasso would certainly not aspire to one day own on the Picasso ceramic. And I think that was a good lesson on, you know, having all these objects by a very brand name artist, but not having any particular object be necessarily that good. And therefore, those objects are not really appreciating that much of the future. I think if you look at the value of Picasso ceramics today, they're probably very similar to what they were 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
Starting point is 00:19:03 They haven't really changed that much. All right. So, Scott, let's also give you an opportunity to talk about. one of your really good purchases. Yeah, for better or for worse, I've had lots of those stories. I had a 76-77 decooning, which Willem-Ducine is one of the more important American artist, woman won at the moment as arguably the most important painting in American history. And I acquired this painting from Christie's a number of years ago.
Starting point is 00:19:28 So I think that painting, and I don't, I'll get these numbers specifically wrong, so don't quote me on this. But I think I acquired that painting for, I want to say $7 or $8 million, and then came close to doubling. the value on that in about two years, sold it shortly thereafter. There were just a whole bunch of reasons that that was the right time to acquire that painting and then the right time to sell it. There are opportunities like that that exist in the artwork. And I mean, we don't certainly guide investors to think about those types of returns with our products, but they do exist for time and time. What is a good return? I know you talked before about risk-adjusted returns. And we talked about that, you know, the asset class is different than what we usually
Starting point is 00:20:06 you're talking about, keep in mind the types of risk we incur, what is a good return in the art market right now? I think it depends on the segment of the market you're talking about. So, for example, if we go back to my earlier comments about the primary market versus the secondary market, there's a lot of people that just invest in the primary market for new artists, living artists that are looking for 30, 40, 50, 100% plus returns. And that's a very speculative game, but a lot of those artists also have a high probability of going to zero as well.
Starting point is 00:20:34 But to us, this is just a very interesting risk-adjusted asset class where you can theoretically outperform the market without taking much risk or at least less risk than how we view develop equities. You know, the art market is funny and a little bit hard to predict, but it's always collectors who are purchasing these painting. A collector usually has a very specific collection of their focus on building out. So, for example, personally, because I have this very specific collection of post-war artists from 1946 through the early 1960s. And, you know, I'm always looking for one or two artists to kind of round out that collection or complement it because my focus is really on building that collection. So, Scott, I'm assuming most people listening to this are like me and have a very limited understanding of art investing. So what would you recommend for them to become better informed about the methodology? It's a good question.
Starting point is 00:21:24 I mean, I will point you back to masterworks.io to our resource center. We've assembled for investors, one of the most comprehensive resource centers of all third-party resources as well as internal research that we published. And it really helps. I think people think about the art market holistically and from a very high level before deciding to purchase a painting or to begin collecting. That's where I would chart. And then there's a whole host of other websites like ArtNet or Art Price that allow you to research specific artists or comparables by different artists. look at historical auction records and really dive into the data. The advice that I would give myself and the advice that I give all a new collector is focus on the example, not the artist.
Starting point is 00:22:04 Because usually if you look at the data, that one particular object, that's an A object or that particular artist will always appreciate much faster than the third tier object by the brand name artist. That's the one piece of advice that I would stick to. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. and customers now expect proof of security just to do business.
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Starting point is 00:25:55 It's a really great question. Just step back from that question a little bit and talk about kind of the evolution of how the art market has got to where it is today. You know, if you go back to the art market in the U.S. in the 50s and the 60s, a lot of the decisions around what is great art were controlled by critics. People like the last name of Rosenberg, Greenberg, et cetera. And they were really the tastemakers in the art world. Today, that critic culture has died out to a great extent and has really been replaced by galleries or dealers who decide what is good art, but they also have a financially vested interest in making that determination. So it definitely is a messy and difficult to understand industry for someone entering the art market
Starting point is 00:26:33 today. My best advice on navigating that, unfortunately, is probably just to work with people you know or trust with art advisors, rely on maybe the auction house. more so than specific dealers. If you don't have comfort with a dealer, auction houses tend to be a bit more transparent in their approach. It is a difficult industry to navigate if you know nothing about it. There's the concept in traditional industries where if you are giving advice to someone to purchase something, then you are effectively a fiduciary.
Starting point is 00:27:01 You have an obligation to inform your client how much money you're making, for example. That dynamic does not exist in practice in the art industry, whether or not a lot of dealers do have a fiduciary obligation. I think it may be somewhat debatable, but in practice, dealers don't really subscribe to that concept. I do think it's very important that people be very aware that those that are recommending purchases or those that may have a financial interest in transaction will probably not disclose it.
Starting point is 00:27:27 You know, it is sort of a buyer-beware dynamic, and I think anyone new approaching industry should be careful with that. So, Scott, one of the things I found really interesting is in the Citibank Report you reference, there's a huge spike in the Chinese market when it comes to art. Why do you think that we're seeing this now and how does that change anything? Yeah, I mean, China has been a huge net contributor to the art market overall and we think it is a permanent change in the art market. You know, you've seen most large galleries in New York open up in Hong Kong. There's a huge, huge Chinese collector base that's just coming rapidly into the market.
Starting point is 00:28:02 We don't see that slowing down anytime soon. You know, we have seen historically in the art market, other countries kind of come in and move out. Like Russia, for example, used to be a large overall percentage of the art market. Most of the money in Russia that's been collecting sort of these very expensive paintings, no longer doing that. So we have seen that trend, but we definitely don't expect to see the Chinese market decline anytime soon. I mean, there's just so many new billionaires being created in China every day. And a lot of those people are very interested in art and contemporary art scene in particular. We don't really see that trend changing anytime soon.
Starting point is 00:28:34 Scott, thank you so much for accepting our offer to come on the show. This was such a fascinating topic that is just completely out of anything that Stig and I have covered in the past. So if anybody out there listening to this wants to learn more about you and your company, where can they look? The best place is just our website, which is www.masterworks.io. And then as I mentioned before, there's a great resources center on the website that has lots of third-party content as well as just content that we've created and researched on
Starting point is 00:29:03 Art is an asset class. And you can also sign up and invest directly on the website as well. Thank you, Scott. Thank you so much for your time to come here on The Ambassador's podcast and talk to our listeners about collecting art. Really appreciate it and hope to be back soon. All right, guys, that was all that Preston and I had for this week's episode of The Investors Podcast. We see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to the investorspodcast.com. To get your questions,
Starting point is 00:29:33 questions played on the show, go to Asktheinvestors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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