Monthly newsletter for January 2023

Dear All,

Welcome to 2023! Hope that you have had a great start to the year, and that you are gearing up for an exciting couple of months. For those that are planning their summer vacations already, seems that Scotland is all the rage at the moment, with the FT covering an enticing Hebridean sailing voyage from Oban to Jura, and the Straits Times recently published a relatively solid beginners guide to whisky tours in Speyside (clearly sponsored by Balvenie though).

The first announcement we have for this month is the launch of a 3rd tier of pricing for entry into SVC. Over the years of portfolio growth (now almost +80% since inception) we have effectively outpriced our offering from investors that have shown interest in joining the Collective. With the current availability of a full redeemable preference share (RPS) and 1/4 RPS, today we launch a 1/50 RPS unit, which is effectively a more reasonable SG$3,333 at this month’s market price (a very auspicious number as we go into the Chinese New Year celebrations next week!) If you are still interested in joining the Collective, please do reach out to us to see how you can join the team!

At SVC we are already preparing to close off our 4th year of operations in April, and only have a few more months to try and beat our annual returns record for our investors (we like to put ourselves under a bit of pressure!) Unfortunately December has knocked us back a bit as we are seeing a return to the pre-Covid seasonal lows that the auctions tended to fetch this time of year. Pre-Covid we used to see average auction prices drop -10% during December/January, which made it a great time to find a bargain. Strangely, during the pandemic we found this trend actually paused for 2 years, no doubt due to consumers being stuck at home with not much to spend their bonuses on. This year seems to see the exaggerated return of these pre-Covid trends, no doubt due to a potential recession on the horizon or collectors spending their money on much needed vacations. We will soon see if the lows set over the last couple of weeks were anomalies or the new norm, but we are relatively confident that it is the former. 

Some lowlights in our portfolio that we will be keeping our eyes on in the upcoming months were the Hanyu 1991 Ichiro’s Malt ‘Card’ #371 / Five of Clubs dropping -45% and Karuizawa 1999 Memories of Karuizawa Cask #855 slipping -44%, thus ultimately resulting in a -0.89% drop in our portfolio returns this month. Even though this is a relatively modest drop given the seasonality effects mentioned above, we are monitoring the market closely now that the auctions have restarted in earnest, but our long term macro view for the rare and collectable whisky market has not changed.

In industry news, Whisky Auctioneer has seen sales surpass £50m in 2022 with 10,500 new registered users over the year. Testament to the ongoing growth of the industry, and new collectors coming into the market. Time magazine also recently released an article that covers a few tips on how to collect rare whiskies from a Sotheby’s auctioneer, including details on what to look out for like rarity, quality, branding and counterfeits.  In terms of latest releases, we have been looking carefully at a half cask of Macallan 32 year old and the next batch of the Buffalo Trace Antique collection this month.

恭喜发财 (gong xi fa cai) to all our Asian based collectors! We wish you and your families a great start to the year of the rabbit.

Marek, Marc, Neil, Gary