Investing in Fine Wine from the Perspectives of Diversification and Costs

Abstract

This paper examines the meaningfulness of fine wine as an alternative investment, with particular focus on the costs of investing in fine wine. Is fine wine suitable for further diversifying and thus improving the risk-return profile of portfolios invested in global equities and bonds? This analysis takes place in an initial stage on an index basis and in a second stage on the basis of real investment opportunities. The reference currencies are the US dollar and the euro. In order to observe stock indexes, the MSCI World Index is used, and for bonds the JPM World Government-Bond Index is deployed. Regarding the data for investment in fine wine, the main focus is on the Liv-ex-50 Index. The time period is defined by the availability of the data. For the observation of indices, the period is from the beginning of 2004 to May 2018. For observation on the basis of a real investment the period is from March 2010 to May 2018. In the case of the real investment, index funds are used for the data analysis of equities and bonds. As there is no index fund for fine wine, the Liv-ex-50 index is used including all of the costs of a real investment. Various portfolio compositions are used for the periods indicated. On the one hand, a portfolio of 50% equities and 50% bonds is compared to a portfolio of 45% equities, 45% bonds and 10% fine wine. On the other hand, a portfolio of 25% equities and 75% bonds is compared to a portfolio of 20% equities, 70% bonds and 10% fine wine. As benchmarks, the annualised return, the standard deviation and the Sharpe ratio of the respective portfolios are calculated. The results for the periods indicated are sobering. The inclusion of fine wine leads - at an index level - to only a slight improvement of the annualised return, but to a marked increase in risk. When considering the real investment, the considerable costs of an investment in fine wine come to bear. The annualised return is lower and at the same time the risk is higher than that of portfolios which do not include fine wine. It is only when the index is viewed in euros that a slight improvement of the Sharpe ratio in one portfolio can be recorded. When costs are considered, the inclusion of fine wine leads to a worsening of the Sharpe ratio in all cases. This results is a significantly more critical verdict on this diversification opportunity than was noted in the previous studies by Masset and Weisskopf (2010), Masset and Henderson (2010), Bouri (2014), Bouri et al. (2016) and Aytac et al. (2016). By contrast, our results confirm the studies which point out the high costs of investment in fine wine and which reach largely negative findings when analysing real investments in wine investment funds (Burton and Jacobsen, 2001, Masset and Weisskopf, 2015).