is the bubble due to burst?

Just a simple fact by the way. Where I live. Siberia...you can't be homeless because you will freeze to death without a house. Most accidents happen when your car. Breaks down in wintertime. That why you can only drive in colonnes in the north. come from the Netherlands though.

 

"Homeless" can mean a lot of things. Here in the US roughly half of the homeless are that way due to mental illness and lack of treatment or lack of accepting treatment/self medication through substance abuse. I have first hand volunteer knowledge of this and it is backed by statistics. Any city has homeless "shelters" where they can live and get food/clothing if they wish. Pretty much all of the necessities are provided if they will accept it. But dealing with mental illness is not a strong point of the US and is a serious issue our health system has brushed it aside for too long.

 

I accept your experience. But what I saw was not just that also completely out of control inner cities. Gangs dangerous. Anyway I really hope things will get better. By the way I Aldo saw form where ppl had to fill in their etnic background. African american or Spanish or whatever. Here in Russia you got more the 150 nationalities never seen such a form here. African american??? I thought they are all Americans. Who care where there grand grand parents came from.

 

Took a better look at the cars that traded. An awful lot of major POS cars that sold for 2-5 times their value. Cars that ordinarily you'd need to pay some one to just get it off your hands. Mixed in some nice rare cars, but few. What happened there I can't figure it out?

 

From every first hand account Ive seen on here most of these were **** cars going for great money, how do you explain that?

 

I was bidding (or rather, not bidding) remotely so can't say I've seen first hand but from the accounts I heard, I got the impression that there were a lot of "civilians" with little market awareness and with five, maybe low six, figures of disposable income who really really wanted to leave the building with a car and got caught in the frenzy.

 

This is 30% of the high end art market. It is a great way to move cash. Drug lords have been doing this for years. I wonder how much of the high end classic car market is money laundering by criminals.

 

They don't necessarily have to be criminals. There's a lot of scared money in Europe and China. You know, if you see it coming, duck.

 

When I was an art dealer I worked with the FBI. The money laundering schemes used by the cartels/mob were pretty complex. Lots of well know high dollar sales were involved in the 80's.

 

I posted this on the Duemilla Ruote thread, but maybe it belongs here:
Strong results for everything - Italian, German, British, vintage, classic, modern. Most of the cars sold had no documentation, no history and no provenance, and many had sat for 7 years; very few were even turned over before the auction, and mechanical condition was a lottery. Almost all went for well over high estimate, and also at close to top of the market prices for cars with impeccable provenance, history and condition. So if these all sold for such high prices in a no reserve auction, it could be a sign that the market is healthy and has bounced back to 2015 levels.

Or it could be isolated madness that has no bearing whatsoever on the wider market beyond the 4 walls of the auction hall.

A 2005 Bentley Conti GT for over 70K Euros; a BMW E46 M3 SMG (i.e. not manual) convertible for 42.5k? No paperwork, history or provenance, and unclear how long they have been sitting - possibly several years. Even if these were zero or very low miles cars (and they weren't), that's twice the retail price from a top dealer, and there are hundreds immediately available. These are just old, used cars, like this one:
2008 Volvo XC90 | Duemila Ruote 2016 | RM Sotheby's. For completeness I checked values of these things (I hope my wife didn't get the wrong idea...), and this is the highest price by some distance I could find at this age - the odometer looks like it reads 45,000 km, and take a look at the the engine bay. It's just an old family wagon that has been gathering dust for a long time, and one of, erm, over 450,000.

And you have to store it for 10 days until release (of which you will pay 7 days' storage at an unspecified rate), then wait '6-8 weeks' before you can register it (with this large number of cars being processed by Italian bureaucracy, that sounds optimistic to say the least), and it's unclear if you will ever get any paperwork other than the libretto.

Does this auction really tell us anything about the true values of any of the cars sold, classic or otherwise; or does it tell us something about human nature? If anyone can offer an explanation for these prices other than auction fever, I'd be fascinated to hear it. Well done RM - I hope the winning bidders cough up.

 

A random anecdote but one that is first-person and bears obliquely on the themes running through this thread: I've scratched my head when German bonds traded into negative yield territory, then gaped when Switzerland issued the first new offering at sub-zero yields. Then three weeks ago I did a presentation for a colloquium of family offices in Zurich, representing a wide range of nationalities: European, middle-eastern, Asian. I was making a pitch for investing in the US healthcare economy, which approximates in size the entire German GDP, and is growing about as fast as China adjusted for exaggeration. (~5.5%)
Coincidentally, the morning of my presentation, Austria issued the first ever 70-yr bond, priced to yield a meager 1.5%
During cocktail hour, I got in conversation with several managers and asked incredulously, "who is buying this stuff, and why?" The unanimous reply, from managers from several continents, was, in effect, "who cares about returns? Relative to available returns in my country, 1.5% risk-free from a Grade A risk country like Austria is more than sufficient. I'll shovel as much cash as I can get out of the country into a safe haven like that..."
Now, I don't believe the collector car market has been driven much by Asia or the middle east for that matter. But I came away from the encounter feeling like I'd glimpsed a viewpoint I hadn't fully grasped about international attitudes around various assets...

 

Yes and that is the problem. A realization is setting in that fiat money is not trustworthy at all (it never has been over time) and looking ever less so by the month. Look at India where they cancelled 100 and 500 rupee notes, meaning anyone having money in their mattress there is now very unhappy with 90% purchasing power gone, overnight. I'd be interested to learn what countries those managers were from that they are buying Euro denominated bonds. Although I do understand, the theory is that if (or when) the Euro blows up, the quality of the central bank of the country the bonds were issued matters.
Actually that isn't just theory.

 

hhmmmmm surgeon from Atlanta area? If so I may have seen his F40 a few days ago. I think he had two. Congrats on the sale and a very nice pay day! What do you invest in? Collector Automobiles lol?

 

His cars are rarely seen in public, if ever, and he has just one F40, FWIW.

Yes, it was a very nice pay day, thank you! This is what I work hard to do, getting great examples to avid collectors.

What do I invest in?

I'll give you three guesses...

 

+1

Congratulations all the way around for everyone involved.

 

While the high dollar cars might still be selling for big money, at the lower end I think things are definitely pulling back. Take a look at the auction results for Ferraris from the Hilton Head sale last month. It was a lot of '80s cars (which were the last to the party), but the prices look like they were from 2010 or before!

 

Where are the auction results for this Hilton Head sale you refer to?

 

Hmmmm did you see that Laferrari sell at 7 mm this past weekend at Daytona? I know...last one, charity and all. I was surprised the F60 is now estimated to be 10mm as well.

 

They are in the current issue of Ferrari Market Letter.

 

10mm! LOL! Why not 100mm ?

 

Yes! I think 100mm will be possible in less than 5 years. The Dow Janes avg is highest ever and there is going to be more money for spending.

I agree 10mm is NOT the limit for cars when <5,000 made.

There are probably 100,000 billionairs and doubling every year now. There is no bubble, just bubble brains!

 

What currency????

 

There about 1,800 billionaires globally, only a handful that I know of are interested in cars.

 

+1 I commented on this along time ago. The richest people I know, 2 of them in the 200+million dollar net worth and 1 in the billionaire category. NONE of them care about or collect cars. They all drive their S-class and Audi a8s, BMW 7 series etc.

They collect money, and vacation properties, and that's about it.

 

lol