A leading London wine merchant is embroiled in a spat with a US celebrity chef over claims it is refusing to repay cash he ploughed into its investment scheme.
Eddie Gallagher, who hosts a food show on Amazon Prime, claims that the UK merchant Oeno was failing to sell $7,500 (£5,700) worth of wine he owned through the company despite repeated requests to liquidate his account and sell the produce.
The row comes amid a crisis for fine wines after a supply glut sent prices plunging, leaving merchants struggling to offload bottles for their investment clients.
Boom and bust in alternative investments. Ho Hum.
Early in, early out, can work. Late in pretty much never does.
There was a lovely calculation by The Economist some time back. If, on Jan 1 each year, you put your money into the best performing investment of the previous 12 months – then did that again next year etc – then pretty quickly you ended up with 0.01% of the starting sum. If, on Jan 1, you put it into the worst performing of the previous year then soon enough you were richer than the entire world.
Just how booms and busts work.
He could always just drink it?
Julia, nah! It’s “buying and selling wine”, not “drinking wine”! 🙂
Tim – just curious, this idea from The Economist – is that buying the worst performing individual stock, the worst performing industry, what exactly?
Asking for a friend.
But seriously, this sounds like something worth trying. If you’ve ever seen one of the investment performance charts that look like the periodic table it seems to say, “buy last year’s loser”.
Sector. At what level of detail I can’t recall. Well above individual stocks. Might be as high as “US Equities” or “Yen bonds”.
For the friend of Esteban:
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2013/01/12/the-best-the-worst-and-the-ugly
12 Jan 2013 — Buying a fund in the best-performing sector of the previous year earns a higher average return over the next year than either the worst . .
But if you wait that first year out and then move in, so you invest in the worst-performing sector of the previous year but one . . .
One notes that the Economist’s calculation does not require the input of the many thousands of qualified, highly paid economists we are were told are such an asset to the UK economy.
It’s all about reversion to the mean
The best performing stocks will eventually reduce performance to the average for the whole index, may take a few years of course but investment is supposedly a long term game
Over sensible investment periods of say 10 years plus this will always be true
Similarly poorly performing stocks in any one year will probably improve to the mean
All things being equal of course, is it’s not an IBM in denial about the future
That’s why individual stocks are so risky, for very NVIDIA in ascendence there is an IBM in decline
Which is why the smart investor uses a passive index investment ETF or fund to invest across the whole index rather than individual stocks picked by active managers who reliably fail to pick winners over similar periods
Hmm – anyone called Vanberry in this saga?
Large bourbon for the first person to identify the twin allusions .
llater,
llamas
One notes that the Economist’s calculation does not require the input of the many thousands of qualified, highly paid economists…
A highly paid economist would tell you that on this sort of timescale they would expect no mean reversion, because if mean reversion were to be expected the market would already have traded on it.
A very highly paid economist might tell you that that’s only approximately true, for reasons you’d have to pay them to explain.
From an investment point of view, when confronted with something like this my question is always “What is your exit strategy? When liquidating your investment, you need a buyer to buy it. Can you describe this buyer & their reasons?” Usually, that is rewarded with a lot of silence.
“What is your exit strategy?” To hold shares unto death so that they will escape CGT.
(Unless Two-Tier changes that, of course.)
When I worked for Johnson Fry in 1990s they ran a Worst Performing Fund plan with M&G, which had quite a following, switching funds every January. One year, the system dictated cash, which upset enough investors that JF offered an alternative. That year investment funds tanked.
Oeno was failing to sell $7,500 (£5,700) worth of wine he owned through the company
With the problem being that whilst he thought he had $7,500 worth of wine, the people buying considered it to be perhaps $3,000 worth or less.
With the problem being that whilst he thought he had $7,500 worth of wine, the people buying considered it to be perhaps $3,000 worth or less.
Yep. The point being he didn’t own $7,500 worth of wine, that might have been what he paid for it or what it was worth at market peak, but now he own $3,000 of wine or whatever someone else would pay.
So basically his wine investment tanked due to a lack of liquidity in the market leading to a glut of liquid.
The greater fool theory in action.
BiND,
There was a huge rise in prices during Covid, and as he bought Penfold’s Grange 2018, I’m guessing he bought that at peak.
Fine wine has actually been a pretty good investment for some decades. But because it’s a luxury thing, the price can vary considerably. I wouldn’t invest in it, personally, though.
From an investment point of view, when confronted with something like this my question is always “What is your exit strategy? When liquidating your investment, you need a buyer to buy it. Can you describe this buyer & their reasons?”
A greater fool?
It seems Bloke in Spain’s business is the only one in which the customer comes first.
The Economist strategy was buying the stocks that were out of fashion and assuming that *some of them* were *not* just about to go bust. One would lose on a few that actually did go bust but win more on the ones that were excessively cheap because people were scared that they were about to go bust.
The most fashionable stocks were almost always significantly overvalued because quite a few relatively incompetent investment managers bought the stocks that had gone up the most to early-December so that they could report a portfolio that included a lot of stocks that had performed particularly well during the year without telling anyone that they had performed particularly well *before* they had bought them and *not* after they had bought them. Oh, yes: they also dumped stocks which had significantly underperformed so that they were bargain-basement cheap at the year-end.
[Before you ask: no, I never did that – I cared more about getting it right in my own opinion than in any one else’s, except occasionally that of my immediate bosses whom I knew to be better at investment than I was, – so I was never allowed to meet clients in case I said “the wrong thing”]
John – you’re lucky. Clients are very odd people, and you literally would not believe some of the stuff that happens in customer meetings with the NHS’s finest brains
But, Ricky Gervais was right.