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Rena回来继续给大家发速度越障啦~~~ 接下来的还有好多战友要陆续杀G~~ 逻辑小分队的truf TX明天杀G，咱阅读小分队的kait亲后天杀G，接着是小白TX，Teddy MM，和花儿~rena先在这里预祝大家杀G成功!!!!!! 还有iBT的绿光祝她明天杀T成功~ 大家加油!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Art as investment
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Investing in art is very different from buying a painting that matches your lounge suite. While some investable art may be visually beautiful, like a Claude Monet hanging over a fireplace, more often art is there to provoke a reaction, to question and challenge, and to put a spotlight on the darker side of society.
Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which recently sold for $120m (R955m), is not exactly a painting for the bedroom wall, but it is possible to blend aesthetics with investment.
Art is not an investment in the true sense of the word. It does not generate dividends or interest and, in fact, costs you money to maintain.
The value is often only truly recognised when it is sold. The capital value is the only upside and is therefore a store of value rather than an investment.
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However, art is certainly an asset class that can provide significant returns, but usually over a long period of time – the average collector holds on to their artwork for about 27 years.
So while it may not be ideal for your basic retirement plan, it certainly can over 30 years develop into a very valuable asset.
The best way of approaching this asset class is to see art as an interest that has the potential of becoming a very valuable asset class.
It is one of the few interests or hobbies where you can educate yourself while at the same time create an asset base of great value.
While there is nothing wrong with buying a piece of art because you like it, it is not the same as investing in it.
One needs to learn about the world of arts just as one would investigate and read up about a share or a unit trust before investing.
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Most of us will buy an artwork in our life time, but we seldom take the time to do our homework.
A good starting point is to visit galleries and art auctions. Stephan Welz, founder of Stephan Welz & Co auction house, which represents Sotheby’s interests in South Africa, says when starting an art collection you should stick to the recognised artists, in much the same way as a share portfolio should be made up of blue-chip companies.
A good auction house or gallery will be able to advise you on who the recognised artists are and what they are worth. But you should also be doing your own homework by attending auctions and seeing what prices certain artists are commanding.
It is only in an auction that the true market value of an artist or specific artwork can be determined because art is only physically worth what someone else is prepared to pay for it.
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There is, however, also room for a new artist in a collection.
As one may invest a small portion of one’s portfolio in newly listed companies, a well-chosen newcomer can increase significantly in value.
However, this is not for novices and it is, as with investing in a small company, even more important to do homework. New artists also create opportunity for the small-budget collector.
If you are buying into the blue-chip league, you need a starting investment of R50 000.
For half that amount, you could pick up a new artist.
However, the risks are far higher.
The risk with new artists is that sometimes their prices can be overinflated as they are still to be tested in the auction environment and they are harder to resell.
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But when it does, the payoff can be immense. For example, a William Kentridge etching in his early days went for R8 000.
Today that is worth about R500 000. But not every new artist is a Kentridge and is far more likely to remain in obscurity than to succeed.
If you have a smaller budget and want to buy into more established artists, you can start with collecting limited edition signed lithographs (prints) of well-known artists.
You don’t need to be rich to be an art collector, although it does help. There are many famous collections by people of ordinary means.
For example, a book-keeper built up a collection worth many tens of millions of rands, yet he never owned a car because he could not afford it. His investment was his passion.
Some people would rather buy an artwork than take an overseas trip.
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Retail renaissance
The internet and mobile phones are at long last turning boring old retail banking into an exciting industry, says Jonathan Rosenthal
“IF YOUR BANK could start over, this is what it would be,” trumpeted the marketing campaign for the launch in 1999 of Wingspan, an internet bank. The following year the bank was gone. In September 2000, a few months after the dotcom bubble burst, it was absorbed by its boring American bricks-and-mortar parent, Bank One (now part of JPMorgan).
For all the high hopes that the internet would transform banking, most other internet banks launched around that time met with a similar fate. Citi f/i, an online bank started by Citigroup, was folded back into its parent in 2000. NetBank, an American pioneer of internet banking, soldiered on for longer than most but was shut down by banking regulators in 2007. On the other side of the Atlantic, Egg, Britain’s first stand-alone internet bank, shook the market in 1999-2000 when it gained more than 2m customers within months of starting up. But within a few years it, too, had in effect disappeared, its customers having been sold first to Citigroup and then to Barclays and the Yorkshire Building Society. It was an ignominious end to a bold experiment in online banking that had caused palms to sweat in banking centres around the world.
The promise of internet banking had seemed obvious. More than most other industries, banking was already largely digitised. In most rich countries the cash that people carry in their wallets represents only a tiny fraction of their assets and is used for only a small portion of their spending. The rest exists only in the pattern of magnetic charges and flickering electronic impulses of banks’ data centres.
Moreover, banking is something few people enjoy. If offered an alternative to queuing up in a branch to get served, surely customers would take it up avidly? After all, large numbers of bookshops and music stores have already closed as people have taken to buying online, even though browsing in such places was rather fun. Going to the bank is not much fun. All the more reason to do your banking from your armchair.
Yet, except in a very few rich countries, there are 10-20% more banks today on main streets the world over than there were a decade ago. Instead of superseding banks, the internet has simply made them a little more convenient. Conventional banks have added internet banking, mobile banking and even video banking to their offering. Yet all the while they have expanded their branch networks.
In retrospect, the years in the run-up to the financial crisis were a golden age for banks. Even the dullest of them could earn high returns by taking big risks. And few really bothered to try to cut costs when their revenues were being massively boosted by a debt-fuelled bubble. Since the mid-1990s Europe’s big retail banks have managed to cut their costs relative to income by an average of just 0.3% a year, reckons Simon Samuels, an investment analyst at Barclays. Yet even that modest figure flatters the banks. He calculates that costs over the period increased by an average of 8% a year. The only thing that saved them was that revenues increased a little faster.
The effect of the debt bubble was more insidious than it appeared at first glance. In encouraging universal banks to build up their investment side, and some retail banks to dabble in exotic instruments that they did not always understand (demonstrating that even boring retail banks can blow up), it made them take their eyes off their bread-and-butter business. Yet basic retail banking was, and remains, their main engine of profitability. McKinsey, a consulting firm, reckons that it accounts for more than half banks’ worldwide annual revenue, which in 2010 amounted to $3.4 trillion. It has also proved, in the longer run, to be the most reliable generator of consistent profits and high returns on equity. A ranking of the world’s biggest banks by return on equity correlates closely with the proportion of revenue they make from retail banking, rather than from racier investment banking.
During the bubble years retail banking was a dead end for ambitious managers. Pay was higher at investment banks, and the corner offices at universal banks would go to executives who had climbed up the ranks of the investment banks. But recently retail banking has been getting a lot more attention, for several reasons. The first is that it needs it. In the rich world the bursting of the debt bubble, slowing economies and low interest rates have changed the economics of the business. Banks are now having to put their best talent to work at the retail end to reduce costs and restore profitability.
Second, technology is changing fast. Smart mobile phones are encouraging customers to interact with their banks in new ways. Technology also promises fundamentally to alter the economics of low-margin banking staples such as processing payments. With new tools to store and crunch massive amounts of data, banks and technology firms such as Google and PayPal hope to transform the business of swiping a credit card. Rather than merely generating an instruction to move money that might be worth a few small coins, the information that comes with such a payment might open up new sales and advertising opportunities that could we worth hundreds of times as much.
Money is special
This report will argue that retail banking is going to be the most exciting part of the banking business over the coming years. Yet unlike the bricks-and-mortar bookshops, travel agents and record stores that have been swept away by the internet, banks have two enormous advantages in adapting to change and adopting new technologies. The first is that in the minds of consumers, money is still special. Few customers like to switch banks, even if they are unhappy with their own, and even fewer seem ready to trust one without a physical presence. That is changing with time, but slowly enough to allow banks to adjust.
The second is that, in a sense, banks are technology companies. Many have hundreds, if not thousands, of people working in huge information-technology departments. Most are ready to adopt new ways of serving their customers. The most obvious sign of this is the changing nature of bank branches.
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发表于 2012-5-25 16:37:45
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恭喜rena取得720的好成绩~！谢谢你继续坚守岗位哈~~
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