Absolutely. Would love to know more about interesting artists who exclusively make NFTs. Who’s doing interesting work?

As if we needed anymore evidence that this whole NFT business is hot air, a guy just sold a fart as an NFT for $85...here

Bloody hell the price of the DFace ones crazy

As has been mentioned before I think NFT will be good for Digital artists. Before now a lot of digital art was overlooked when made into prints. I think it is great that Digital artists whether sound, video, image or any combination can now have editions that are controlled via NFT.

A good piece of digital art on a decent screen would look well and those produced by digital artists who have spent time on the medium will look better than crossovers.

The rush to NFTs for so many artists is strange. What I do like is that some artists who are very experienced in Digital mediums(even NFTs in the past) have not rushed into it this time including some POW artists. These are the ones I will be watching.

D Face must be happy tonight....150 applications on edition of 5 (x3) at $10k each plus 3 one off editions at 25k with minutes to go.....All taken

niftygateway.com/collections/dface

I can see every single big artist getting involved in this....Easy money for the artist.

Hirst is planning a big Nifty release soon with 5000 unreleased images stored in a vault

At least I know my kids will be alright when I kick the bucket, leaving them to fight between Nyan Cat and Darth Noooooo NFT's.

These NFTs are clearly just about money and have nothing to do with street art. One good thing, I guess, is that you can remain anonymous

Prospectors and gold rush fever. There’s no end to our sense of entitlement, greedy, jealousy and envy.

Guys are buying screensavers thinking what exactly? Read a book, watch a movie,s**t once look downs over visit a gallery, breath in life and fricking leave your screen on eBay. Oh and that VICE documentary posted earlier CLASSIC.

Signing off anus with an opinion 🤔

So many people getting on their high horse with crypto art. There is a degree of hypocrisy, just start a thread on 'the value of Banksy' and you will get 5 pages overnight. The urban art market has long gone - any half decent Banksy prints are the price of a terrace house and 75% of which will soon be lost in the far east forever. The rest is a flea market (ie Banksy postcard tat) or artists ripping off artists (Harland Miller gets diluted into Conor Brothers etc. Maybe if the crypto market was priced at £50 cost with a potential 500% resale things would be more positive on here.

Right now is the height of collecting anything - from NFT to baseball cards. All of them, are at extreme peak prices. Any second hand price for art to cars to watches are over the top right now. There are so a many wealthy people sitting at home trying to spend money anyway they can.

Bascially - NYtimes is screaming this with a new article about it every week. I think when the media starts to report on how hot markets are, is usually when you want to begin your exit strategy out of them before it all collapses or busts.

www.nytimes.com/2021/03/20/style/spending-rich-people.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

By Jacob Bernstein
March 20, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET
Rich people who shopped too much used to be called collectors. Now they — and those belonging merely to the aspirational class — are all investors.

It’s not just that they’ve spent the last year splurging on stakes in untested, newly formed public companies that have yet to produce products, much less profits. It’s that during the pandemic, seemingly every luxury acquisition has become a so-called alternative asset class.

Rather than elbowing past each other for reservations at the latest restaurants from Marcus Samuelsson and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, or getting into bidding wars for apartments at 740 Park Avenue, they are one-upping each other in online auctions for jewelry, watches, furniture, sports cards, vintage cars, limited-edition Nikes and crypto art.

Bread lines grew longer, Birkin bags got hotter.

A number of retailers were reticent to speak about the trend, stating that they did not wish to be on the record talking about nearly sold out $90,000 earrings during a time of growing wealth inequality.
John Demsey, the executive group president of the Estée Lauder Companies, voiced that concern even as he admitted a primary quarantine pastime.

“All I do is go through watch porn,” he said. “I’m selling watches, I’m buying watches. It’s crazy. I have no reason right now to buy a watch. I’m at home all day at a computer. Time is staring me right in the face. What reason do I have to look at my wrist? But I want a tangible sign of something, so I’m looking at watches.” And many other people are too.

Rolex Day-Dates that sold on the secondary market in 2020 for $30,000 are now going for upward of $50,000 on some resale sites. The Nautilus 5980, a rose gold chronograph sports watch from Patek Philippe that has a retail price of $85,000, can seldom be found on 47th Street for much less than $200,000.

One reason for surging prices, according to Benjamin Clymer, the editor of the watch site Hodinkee, is that “Switzerland shut down, so demand was there while the supply was dramatically reduced.”

But also, he said, “the wealthy that used to spend money on travel aren’t using it, so everything collectible is skyrocketing in value.”

Coffee Tables and Porsches

That includes cars, a hobby that began for Mr. Clymer in 2011 and took off in 2015, when a multimillion-dollar strategic investment in Hodinkee helped transform him from blogger to mogul.

In the summer of 2020, Mr. Clymer went searching for a 1973 Porsche 911 Carrera RS.

One had sold shortly before the pandemic through the auction site Bring a Trailer (or BaT, as it’s known) for $560,000 but Mr. Clymer figured it might be a buyer’s market. Perhaps he could get it for less.

He found a beauty from a dealership that hadn’t listed the price on its website. It was in mint condition. Mr. Clymer asked for a quote and nearly fainted upon hearing the answer: $1.2 million.

“I said, ‘You’re crazy.’ Less than a month later it was sold.”

By Thanksgiving, auction houses were sending out news releases almost daily touting their record-breaking sales.

A pair of Conoid lounge chairs from the famed woodworker George Nakashima, which in 2019 commanded around $10,000, sold in October 2020 for $23,750 through the Chicago auction house Wright. A Mesa coffee table by T.H. Robsjohn Gibbings, a British architect whose name is barely known outside of the furniture world, brought in $237,500 in December; the overall result of the sale was $2.5 million, roughly double what the house did at the same sale a year before.

In February, a digital artwork of Donald Trump facedown in the grass, covered in words like “loser,” sold for $6.6 million, a record for a nonfungible token, or NFT, so called because there’s no physical piece for the buyer to take possession of.

Fittingly, the image was paid for in Ethereum, a form of cryptocurrency that, among millennials, is almost as well known as bitcoin. Two weeks later, Christie’s sold another NFT by Beeple, this time for $69 million.

The prices for the best vintage sports cards reached Warhol levels. In January, a 1952 Mickey Mantle was sold through PWCC Marketplace for $5.2 million. In March, Goldin Auctions, a sports collectible site, held its annual winter auction. “We grossed $45 million,” said Ken Goldin, the founder and C.E.O. “Last year, it was $4.7 million.”

One of Mr. Goldin’s repeat customers is Clement Kwan, the former president of Yoox Net-a-Porter and a founder of Beboe, an upscale line of cannabis vaporizers and edible pastilles that The New York Times has called “the Hermès of Marijuana.”

“Since the pandemic started, my financial portfolio has gone up 50 percent,” Mr. Kwan said from Miami last week. “My collectibles went up by 200.”

Mr. Kwan’s windfall came after learning in 2019 that a documentary about Michael Jordan was going to be released the following summer on Netflix. That led him to buy up sets of Mr. Jordan’s rookie cards at around $30,000 each. He also took a stake in Bleecker Trading, a bespoke sports memorabilia store in the West Village.

In May of 2020, Mr. Kwan sold a Jordan rookie card for nearly $100,000. By January, a particularly in-demand Jordan rookie card sold through Goldin for $738,000.

The renewed interest in Mr. Jordan extends to sneakers.

Last May, Ariana Peters — who, along with her sisters Dakota and Dresden Peters, owns what some believe is the most valuable sneaker collection in the world — had her biggest sale in five years of being in business: a pair of autographed 1985 Air Jordans that fetched $275,000.

In 2019, the sisters sold 572 pairs of sneakers, at prices that began at $500, Ariana Peters said in an interview. In 2020, they sold 879.

Ms. Peters actually sounded somewhat surprised talking about all this, perhaps because she and her sisters only got into the business because their father, a retired real estate developer named Douglas Roy Peters, bought so many pairs of sneakers they were running out of places to put them.

Ms. Peters, who lives in South Florida, now houses the collection in a storage facility that’s been customized to look like the Miami Heat’s basketball court.

Leveraging Nostalgia, From Nintendo to Pokémon

Those unprepared to shell out high sums for vintage collectibles are getting in on the action through recently established mutual funds.

Rally, an Android and iPhone app that sells fractional shares in everything from Rolex GMTs to dinosaur remains, had 100,000 users at the start of the pandemic and oversaw $12 million in inventory. Rob Petrozzo, its chief product officer and co-founder, said in an interview that the company now oversees $30 million of merchandise and has over 200,000 users. According to the company, the average age of a Rally user is 28, and most are male.

The way the app works, investors buy, sell or trade their shares as if they were stocks. New product launches are actually called I.P.O.s.

“The equities space and the cryptocurrency space over the last couple years created really savvy investors who understand the dynamics of the market, so it’s a complement to their Coinbase accounts and their Robinhood accounts,” Mr. Petrozzo said.

One of Mr. Petrozzo’s “investors” is Nicholas Abouzeid, the 24-year-old head of marketing at MainStreet, a 50-person firm that helps start-ups find and claim tax credits and incentives from the government.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Abouzeid was talking over Zoom from the bedroom of his home in Woodbury, Conn. In his long-sleeved white T-shirt and wood framed glasses, he looked like any number of young white men who might work for Mark Zuckerberg or Josh Kushner. Behind him were shelves of memorabilia — super plastic toys, sealed Nintendo games from the ’90s and collectible Nike Sacai Waffle sneakers.

In the actual stock market, Mr. Abouzeid made last year what he described as “more than what somebody should make in a year,” buying and selling positions in high-growth technology companies such as Slack, Stitch Fix, Shopify and Fastly. “I’m in and out all the time,” he said.

He extracted much of his profits and put them into Pokémon collectibles.

On one level, it’s born of his nostalgia for the game, which he began playing in sixth grade. On another, it’s “an alternative asset class and a way to diversify,” as he put it.

His holy grail item is a first-edition “Booster Box” of Pokémon cards.

Upon its 1999 release, the set cost $110. In January, Heritage Auctions in Dallas sold one for $408,000.

Mr. Abouzeid doesn’t have that kind of money, but in a June 2020 “I.P.O.” from Valley Road, he purchased 125 “shares” of one at a price of $25 each.

They’re now worth $120 each, giving him a profit of around $13,500 (which is at least 300 percent more than he earned from his Slack holdings).

Jackson Moses, a colleague of Mr. Abouzeid’s at MainStreet, invests in biotech stocks and vintage whiskey. But Johnson & Johnson and Jack Daniel’s don’t interest him.

His Merrill Lynch account contains shares of companies like Sarepta Therapeutics, a maker of precision genetic medicines that treat rare neuromuscular and central nervous system diseases. His fridge is filled with rare, vintage Kacho Fugetsu.

“When my parents saw them in my apartment, they got really worried,” he said. “They said, ‘Is there something we need to talk about?’ But I don’t even open them.”

Earlier this month, when rising interest rates sent high-flying tech stocks into a tailspin, Kacho Fugetsu provided what Mr. Moses called “the perfect hedge.”

Of course, he’s aware that the ascent of his whiskey collection also could come to an end, but that at least has an upside. “Then I’ll finally have an excuse to drink it,” he said.

I agree with this timing. The market is still surging you've got to be a bit selective and can't just throw a dart. There's still money to be made. Will the rug get pulled out at some point? My personal take is that there will be a massive correction and 90% of the pieces will basically become worthless, 5% will be flat and another 5% will grow. Buying the artists that already have a following outside of NFT is probably the safest bet. 

IMO there are still too many people coming into the space for the bottom to fall out right now. Also, too many of the artists we talk about here on UA have drops in the works and that alone should prop up the market for another few months. 

Hate to break to you but people are traveling already. NYC is now packed with people.

Get out of you moms basement buddy. Mr. Doodles and NFTs... Not the best investments you can do but go ahead and promote them all you want.

You will want to sell before the "sell off" if you want max returns. 

It still maybe be a few months too early but it's almost getting time to start looking before the mass sell off of items.

This hype and media attention might last for another year or so... but that doesn't mean the market will still be at peak prices.

I think a lot of people here don't know about how these collector markets do have cycles and its really important to jump off at the right timing. It's really hard to sell thing when things looks so rosy but that's what makes a good investor. 

Time will be ultimate judge, but if history has anything to do with it, you should we aware this won't last forever in some of these markets. 

No one is traveling? OKAY..... 

www.cnn.com/2021/03/20/business/travel-rebound-coronavirus/index.html

Why does it have to international travel. There is a lot of domestic traveling going on. Domestic travel is huge money in the US, Europe and China.

I don't recommend to travel but traveling has picked up pretty significantly since the beginning of the year. It's only growing.

Airline stocks were great purchases when it all crashed to zero. They were able to sell off old planes to Amazon and Fedex and restructure their businesses, which is what all the airlines have been waiting years to do.

Just seeing the New York streets today compared to just a few months ago... It's getting crowded again. All last year the city was a ghost town, it was actually really nice, but now you can see the tourist from all over the world slowly coming back. I thought NYC was going to be ghost town for a very long time but there is already signs of it coming back.

nypost.com/2021/03/19/tourists-coming-back-to-business-starved-nyc/

We will see if people start pulling money out of these hobby markets as things go back to normal or the hype continues for a couple more years. But things are slowly going back to normal... slowly.