Alternative Investments
What Is a Hedge Fund? Strategies, Fees, and Who Can Invest
A hedge fund is a pooled, lightly regulated fund that uses strategies like long/short, macro, and arbitrage. Here are the fees, eligibility rules, and real returns.
Features & Analysis
Long-Form Research on the Art Market
Deeply reported features from the Masterworks Research Team, published weekly.
Art as an Investment
What Institutional Due Diligence Looks Like for Art Investments
How funds, family offices, and private banks vet a painting before buying: authentication, provenance, title, condition, valuation, AML, insurance, and tax.
Data and Research
What Indices Track Art Market Performance, and Their Limitations
A guide to the major art market indices (Mei Moses, Artprice, Artnet, Knight Frank, Masterworks), how each is built, and where every one of them falls short.
Masterworks Explained
What Factors Determine the Timing of a Masterworks Exit
How Masterworks decides when to sell a painting: the 3 to 10 year horizon, where the market sits in its cycle, fair value signals, buyer interest, and the SEC process.
Wealth & Estate Planning
What Counts as High Net Worth? HNW, VHNW, and UHNW Defined
HNW, VHNW, and UHNW defined by investable assets, with tier cutoffs, population sizes, the SEC thresholds, and how the service model changes by tier.
Portfolio & Investing Fundamentals
What Are Real Assets? Real Estate, Infrastructure, and Commodities
Real assets are tangible assets with intrinsic value. A guide to real estate, infrastructure, commodities, gold, and where art fits on the spectrum.
Wealth & Estate Planning
Wealth Preservation: Playing Defense With a Large Portfolio
Once a portfolio is large, the job shifts from growth to protecting purchasing power and surviving drawdowns. The threats, the tools, and the trade-offs.
Portfolio & Investing Fundamentals
Understanding the Sharpe Ratio and Risk-Adjusted Returns
What the Sharpe ratio measures, how to read it, the Sortino and information ratios, and why illiquid assets like art need de-smoothed, selection-corrected numbers.
Portfolio & Investing Fundamentals
The Yield Curve and What an Inversion Signals
What the Treasury yield curve is, why it inverts, its record as a recession signal, and how a long-horizon allocator reads the signal without timing illiquid assets.
Portfolio & Investing Fundamentals
The Wealth Effect: How Asset Prices Drive the Economy
The wealth effect is the tendency to spend more as asset values rise. How housing and stocks differ, how it moves the economy, and what it means for art.
Portfolio & Investing Fundamentals
The Permanent Portfolio: A Four-Asset All-Seasons Approach
Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio holds 25% each in stocks, long bonds, gold, and cash, one asset for each economic regime. The logic, the record, the critiques.
Art Market Explainers
The Most Expensive Paintings Ever Sold: 2026 Ranked List
The most expensive painting ever sold is da Vinci's Salvator Mundi at $450.3M. Our 2026 ranked list of top private and public sales, with what each signals.