Nontraditional assets you can show off at a party

The wealthy are parking their money in more fun places than they used to: trinkets and treats. Vintage video games, trading cards, rare wines, and other collectibles have gotten a massive influx of cash in recent years, setting new sales records as nostalgia drives Americans to buy cool li’l things as a hedge against market volatility.

A collection of things you probably can’t afford:

• In February, Logan Paul sold a rare Pikachu Illustrator card for $16.5 million, smashing the previous Pokémon card sale record that he set just five years earlier.
• A 1945 bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti sold for a record $812,500 in March, a 46% jump from its price eight years earlier.
• And, in 2021, the record for the most expensive video game was smashed when an anonymous buyer snagged a sealed copy of the 1985 game Super Mario Bros. for $2 million.

It’s not just nostalgia for the ’80s and ’90s. A yearning for the Jurassic period has the wealthy spending exorbitant amounts to own dinosaur bones. Since 2020, three nearly complete dinosaur fossils have fetched over $30 million apiece.

Remember Rembrandt? The booming collectible market stands in sharp contrast to the sputtering art market, which reported a global sales increase of just 4% last year after declining the previous year, according to the latest annual report from Art Basel and UBS.—MM