WEB SITE ORGANIZATION©
JIANPING MEI AND MICHAEL MOSES
In addition to the Home page the website is organized into five additional sections as
indicated by the upper horizontal tool bar. Each section has a main page and several sub
categories that appear on the left hand side tool bar when the section is selected.
Sub section availability is dependent on the chosen premium subscription level.
The main page of each section is available without charge.
The Market Insights section contains the annual updates of our analysis of the New York
auction market as far as returns, risk, and correlation performance of art as compared
to other assets. It will also contain our tracking reports issued in early April, July
and November describing the progress of the market within the current calendar year.
It will also contain any special research reports that we feel might be of interest such
as our analysis of the financial performance of Matisse and Picasso that we created some
years ago during their combined show in New York or the current relationship among art,
equities and real estate.
The Index Data Section contains graphs for the all art index since 1875. Graphs for the
all art index as well as most of the collecting category indexes for the last fifty years
are also available. Graphs for indexes based on special studies will also be available
such as the one we created based on our analysis of purchase price and performance.
The Asset Allocation Studies section will report on our analysis of the diversification
benefits of art. We will illustrate the risk return tradeoffs of including art in a diversified
portfolio of stocks, bonds, cash and gold. We will also visually demonstrate the optimal
allocation percentages to these asset classes at various return levels. We will also demonstrate
optimal portfolio results for individuals with a fixed pre existing art collection.
The user gets to choose which art assets to include and which historical time period to
use for historical performance.
The Art Valuation section will allow the user, for their own personal use, to employ an
applicable Mei Moses® art index and a user designated prior purchase price or appraisal
value to create a current "mark to market" valuation level based on art market changes over
the intervening time period. This methodology may be useful in creating art valuations for
potential object sales or insurance valuations of existing works in your collection or price
estimates for proposed current purchases at auction or from a dealer. Individual subscribers
will be entitled to an unlimited number of valuations per year for their own non commercial
personal use. Daily restrictions may apply however based on total volume of traffic.
The Artist Returns section, new in 2009, provides information on the returns achieved at auction
for the works of each of the150 artist with the largest number of repeat auction sales
represented in our repeat sale database. We believe this will be the most comprehensive analysis
of individual artist returns available anywhere. For each artist we graph the compound annual
return ("CAR") of each repeat sale pair as a function of the year the work was purchased.
We also provide summary statistics on the mean and standard deviation of the CAR of all the
repeat sale pairs for works of these artists.
The CARs for individual artists are not comparable because the repeat sale pairs have different
ownership dates and holding periods. To enable an appropriate comparison between and among artists,
we normalize the returns for each artist's works relative to the broader market. We calculate the
excess return for each repeat sale pair as the difference between the CAR of that pair and the
CAR for our all art index over the same holding period, and calculate the summary statistics
(mean, standard deviation) of the excess returns for all the repeat sale pairs of each of the
artists analyzed.
The Home page also allows access to some of the articles and interviews involving
the Mei Moses® indexes and the research results of Beautiful Asset Advisors®.
There have been several thousand articles that have used this information since it first
became available in 2001. A complete list can be found if you use your search engine using
"mei moses" as the preferred search object.
The Home page also allows access to reactions to our research and the website from art,
insurance and financial market participants. The bottom of the Home page allows access to
bios of the principals and how to contact us. Also in this section we respond to some of the
most frequently asked questions (FAQ's) about our research such as: Why do we only use
auction information? Why do we use a repeat sale methodology? How do you handle works that
do not sell at auction? How do I know which collecting category to use? Lists of representative
artists from each collecting category are also given.