Auction houses pulled in $10 billion in the first half of the year selling dinosaur skeletons, paintings, and watches to people who already own everything else. Tech wealth did this. The same guys who convinced you to pay for Twitter verification are now bidding against each other for a stegosaurus femur.
This marks one of the strongest starts to a year in auction history. Record prices across the board. A Patek Philippe went for eight figures. Some dead painter's canvas sold for more than a hospital costs to build. And apparently you can just buy a velociraptor now if you have the right broker.
The logic here is airtight. Your portfolio is up 40% because seven stocks went parabolic. You could diversify into bonds. You could buy real estate. Or you could outbid a Saudi prince for a chunk of calcium that used to be inside a triceratops. One of these makes you feel alive.
Retail traders are still arguing about whether to buy the dip on a semiconductor stock while some guy who sold a productivity app is mounting a 66-million-year-old skull in his foyer. He doesn't care about the Fed. He doesn't read financial news. He buys apex predators and hangs them above his fireplace.
The auction houses are thrilled. Sotheby's and Christie's have never seen anything like this. Their catalogs now include items that belong in natural history museums, but those institutions can't compete with a man who just vested another billion in RSUs and needs something to put next to his Basquiat.
You're checking TradingView every six minutes to see if your call options are working. He's checking his calendar to see if he won the Monet.
Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash
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