Monthly newsletter for May 2022

Dear All,

It has been an incredibly busy month in the markets, and last week was definitely a wake up call to the fragility of the economy at the moment. The good news is that whisky as a category has remained incredibly resilient against these headwinds. We will share a few new industry data points that came in over the last month, to dive deeper on what we see happening.

Over the last month, the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index released their 2022 report showing that the whisky category has performed relatively well at +9% annual return, whilst Rare Whisky 101’s APEX 1000 returned +12.13% annually at the end of April. For reference below you will see our portfolio returns since inception against some key global indices:

We continue to see that whisky has been less volatile than stocks (proving our original supply-demand investment thesis) and our 36 month returns are a touch ahead of gold and global equities, and significantly ahead of bond and real estate indices. We have also seen a rapid flight to safety in real assets during Covid-19 and periods of higher inflation. We now await to see how prices hold up during periods of recession, which is now likely before the end of the year.

Over the last month, we saw some great increases in a couple of our key bottles over the last month like our Karuizawa 1980 Moon Above the Sea at Daimotsu Bay (up +66%) and Karuizawa 1981 Eight Headed Dragon (up +22%). This indicates a continued strong secondary whisky market out there for collectors that know what they are picking and holding onto.

Marek, Marc, Neil, Gary