Investing in Collectibles: The Best Collectibles to Invest In

By Matt Haycox, founder of Alternative Fortune, entrepreneur and investor. Last reviewed: July 2026. This is general information, not financial advice.

Collectibles are the assets you buy for the object itself: a painting, a rare stamp, a case of Burgundy, a cask of whisky, a Rolex, a Ferrari, a graded rookie card, a Birkin, a pair of unworn trainers. The field is enormous and hard to fence off. It runs from centuries-old markets like stamps, coins and fine art to categories barely a decade old, and takes in everything from multi-billion-pound sectors down to niches as small as vintage pinball machines or first-edition books. What turns any of them from a hobby into an asset class is the same thing. Enough buyers who will pay more for the object later than you paid now, and a market of dealers, auction houses, indices and graders that exists to price it. Added up, that market is large and growing, roughly US$308 to 321 billion in 2025 on Grand View Research figures, with forecasts reaching US$467 billion to US$535 billion by the early 2030s.

What draws institutional money is the length of the record. The Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index, the standard benchmark for “investments of passion”, rose 38.6% over the ten years to its 2026 print, even after a two-year correction that Knight Frank says has now “stabilised.” Behind that sits a structural tailwind. Deloitte and ArtTactic estimate that around US$992 billion of art and collectibles will change hands over the next decade as wealth transfers between generations.

Key takeaways

• Collectibles are physical objects bought for the object itself, from art and wine to watches, cars, cards and handbags, and turn into an asset class when scarce supply meets durable buyer demand.
• The strongest sub-classes have matched or beaten equities over the long run, but the headline index returns are repeat-sale averages skewed by top lots, not the price you transact at.
• Access runs up a ladder from liquid luxury ETFs and listed brand proxies, through fractional platforms, to direct physical ownership, and liquidity falls as your claim on the actual object rises.
• The main risks are no yield, wide buy-sell spreads, storage and insurance carry, thin liquidity, and an unregulated cask-and-club corner where fraud is well documented.
• They suit a patient investor with liquid income assets elsewhere and specialist knowledge in one market, not anyone needing income, quick sales or a passion index treated as a return forecast.

Why collectibles are an asset class

Collectibles hold value because the supply is fixed and the demand is emotional. A dead artist paints no more canvases. A distillery that filled 500 casks in 1998 cannot fill a 501st, and Hermès caps how many bags a client can buy. When the supply cannot grow and buyers keep coming, prices rise.

On the long-run numbers, the better examples have kept pace with or beaten equities. Contemporary art returned roughly 11.5% a year from 1995 to 2023 against about 9.6% for the S&P 500 on Masterworks/Citi data. Rare whisky, on the Rare Whisky 101 Apex 1000 index, ran up 403.3% between 2013 and 2023, about 17.5% a year. Fine wine, on the Liv-ex 1000, is up 288.3% since January 2004. The pull is real, and named operators describe it the same way. Leonardo De Keersmaeker of Timeless Investments, quoted in the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2026, puts it as “a lot of interest driven by the tangibility and the emotional factor. It’s about diversification of assets, with a fun story to tell.”

Three things temper that. First, the last three years were a correction, not a rally: whisky fell 19.3% from its summer-2022 peak, wine is down around 25% since 2022, and some classic-car models dropped 20% to 30% since 2024 to 2025, per Business Standard. Second, the headline return indices are built from repeat sales, the same object bought and sold again, which carries survivorship and selection bias, because the winners get resold and the duds sit in a drawer. Third, the concentration is stark. The art data provider Sebastian Duthy of Art Market Research is blunt about where the gains come from, telling Spear’s that “much of the performance of art was driven by the stellar prices paid for museum quality works of art by ultra-wealthy collectors.” The index is not the market you can actually buy at retail.

Net of all that, the best collectibles have been a genuine store of value with low correlation to shares. They also carry no yield, wide spreads, storage and insurance costs, and a real chance the specific thing you bought never joins the winners’ index.

The sub-classes

The category is too broad to catalogue, and no two markets make their money the same way. Scarcity a brand builds on purpose, spirit maturing in a cask, the grading that turns a card into a tradable asset, the finite output of an artist who has died. The engine changes every time, which is why these markets rarely move together.

Watches are the most liquid luxury object, and none more so than one model. Our deep dive on the Rolex Daytona unpacks why a steel sports watch trades almost like a currency, with waitlists doing the scarcity engineering that keeps secondary prices above retail. Watches are one of the strongest ten-year performers on the Knight Frank index.

Handbags are the surprise entrant that beat the index. Our deep dive on the Hermès Birkin shows how a two-bags-per-year quota system produced value retention that most equities would envy, a resale market where Hermès averaged 138% value retention in 2025, per Robb Report.

Classic cars sit at the high-friction, high-emotion end of the market. Our deep dive on Ferrari V12s explains why provenance and rarity, not horsepower, set the price, and why the electric transition may be quietly minting scarcity in the analogue survivors.

Trading cards are the fastest-moving corner of the whole market. Our deep dive on sports cards covers how grading turned a schoolyard hobby into a liquid, financialised asset, a market where 26.8 million cards were graded in 2025, up 32% year on year, per Sports Illustrated.

Whisky is the maturation-and-scarcity play, and the best ten-year performer on the passion indices. Our deep dive on Japanese whisky shows the discipline the category rewards, and the oversupply and fraud risks it now carries at the cask end.

Fine wine is the most systematised collectible market, with a real exchange behind it. Our deep dive on Burgundy is the case study in how finite production and drink-down scarcity create returns, and how quickly that reverses when the buyers step back.

Rare coins are the oldest collectible market of all, and the one where the index you pick changes the whole story. The broad PCGS3000 index of US coins has returned about 1.11% a year since 2000, weighed down by common material, while its Key Dates and Rarities sub-index ran at 4.81% a year over the same period, per PCGS; Knight Frank’s global coins index, weighted to rarities, rose 47.5% over the decade to end-2024. Coins show a pattern that runs through the whole category. The rarities compound and the generic pieces barely keep up.

Rare stamps built the template for treating collectibles as an asset. Stanley Gibbons has priced them since 1856. Its GB250 index of investment-grade British stamps compounded at roughly 11 to 12% a year through the mid-2010s, per Institutional Asset Manager, though the public index has not been maintained as a live series since the company restructured, so current data is genuinely thin. It is a quiet, illiquid, specialist market with a very long memory.

Jewellery and coloured diamonds are the portable end of the category, concentrated value you can carry across a border. On the Knight Frank index, signed jewellery rose 33.5% over the decade to end-2024 and coloured diamonds 3.8%, with the branded houses, Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, carrying the premium. Diamonds were broadly flat again through 2025.

Rare books and comics trade with no return index at all. Auction records exist. The average rare-book sale price slipped about 11% in 2023, per Rare Books Digest, and graded comics were mixed through early 2025, with Golden Age issues up around 5% over the year while modern books fell, on GoCollect data. But there is no same-basket benchmark to compound. The value sits in the specific copy: provenance, condition, edition state.

How to invest in collectibles: the vehicle ladder

The choice runs from a share you can sell this afternoon to a physical object you store, insure and eventually have to find a buyer for. The trade-off at every rung is the same. The more liquid the vehicle, the less you own the actual object and the more you own a claim on it.

At the top sit diversified luxury ETFs. You buy the trade, not the trophy. The Amundi S&P Global Luxury UCITS ETF tracks around 80 luxury holdings at a 0.25% total expense ratio. Next are listed equity proxies, the businesses that sell and service the objects. Watches of Switzerland Group carries a market capitalisation of around £1.72 billion, and Richemont, owner of Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, reported CHF 21.40 billion of revenue in the year to March 2025, per Richemont. These move with the luxury cycle, not with any single object.

Below the proxies come fractional platforms, which buy one asset and sell you a share of it. Masterworks, the best-known, holds US$941 million in assets and 883,000 users, and has bought 430-plus works and sold 23, with realised returns ranging 4.1% to 77.3%, per stockanalysis.com, a spread that tells you the average is not the outcome. Further down are cask and spirits programmes, and here the ground is genuinely dangerous. The UK cask market is largely unregulated, and the Advertising Standards Authority upheld complaints against Whiskey & Wealth Club in 2025 over misleading 8% to 18% “solid returns” claims. At the bottom rung is direct physical ownership, the painting, the bottle, the car, the bag, the purest exposure and the most hands-on, with bonded warehouses, vaults, garages, insurance and eventual resale all on you.

How the markets compare

Only some collectible markets have a published index. The ones that do can be lined up directly on return, recent direction and liquidity:

Compiled by Alternative Fortune from filings and market data, as at July 2026. Knight Frank sub-index figures are to end-2024; the Stanley Gibbons stamp index is no longer publicly updated. Return indices built on repeat sales carry survivorship and selection bias; treat them as directional, not as the price you will transact at.

The numbers on collectibles as an investment

The numbers pull two ways. Over the long run, the passion indices have compounded at rates that beat equities in the strongest sub-classes. Over the last three years, several of those same sub-classes have fallen, giving back much of the 2021 to 2022 boom. Any fair read of collectibles has to hold both.

One structural signal is collateral. As collectibles matured, lenders began treating them as security. The art loan book alone reached US$28.7 to 33.3 billion in 2025, and 51% of wealth managers now offer art-related services, up from about 25% in 2011, per the Deloitte Art & Finance Report. Banks don’t lend against things they can’t value or sell, so a loan book that size tells you the market has matured.

Tax and structure: what to ask your adviser

This is not tax advice. The only rule that holds is that there isn’t one. Treatment depends entirely on where you are and what you own. Two examples show how wide the gap gets.

In the United States, gains on “collectibles”, which covers art, coins, wine and other alcohol, gems, metals and cards, are taxed at a maximum long-term rate of 28%, per the IRS, higher than the roughly 20% top rate on shares, and a 3.8% net investment income tax can apply above certain income thresholds, plus state tax. In the United Kingdom, the treatment can run the other way: HMRC treats all cars as wasting assets and classic cars are therefore exempt from capital gains tax, per the HMRC manual, and wine can qualify as a wasting asset too, though HMRC notes that fortified or long-keeping fine wines may not.

So the same economic gain can be tax-free on a collector car in one jurisdiction and taxed above 28% on a painting in another. The questions to put to an adviser: Does my jurisdiction have a special “collectibles” rate? Does this specific object count as a wasting asset with a short deemed life? Is there a low-value chattel exemption? If I use a fund or platform, how is the vehicle taxed at source, and does a treaty change what I owe? Structure is not a footnote here. It can be the difference between two returns.

The risks of collectibles investment

No yield, all carry. A share can pay a dividend while you wait; a painting costs you insurance and storage while you wait. Every year you hold, the object has to appreciate just to cover its own carry.

Wide spreads and thin liquidity. Auction buyer’s premiums, dealer margins and platform fees mean the price you buy at and the price you sell at can be 20% to 30% apart. On the low-liquidity sub-classes, art, classic cars and casks, finding a buyer at all can take months.

The index is not the market. Repeat-sale indices are built from objects that resold, which flatters the average. The specific thing you own may never join the winners.

Fraud and unregulated structures. The cask and “investment club” corner is the sharp end: UK investors lost £3 million to alcohol-investment fraud in 2023, per The Spirits Business, and an FBI-flagged UK whisky scam defrauded elderly US residents of US$13 million, per InsideHook. Regulation that protects share buyers often does not reach these products.

Taste and cohort risk. Value depends on the next generation wanting the same objects. Grading, authentication and provenance failures, or simply a shift in taste, can strand a category.

Common mistakes investors make

• Buying the index, owning a lottery ticket. Treating an 11.5% art number or a 403% whisky number as your expected return, when those are basket averages skewed by the top lots.
• Ignoring the carry. Forgetting that insurance, storage and fees compound against you every year the object sits.
• Chasing the last boom. Piling into whatever ran hardest in 2021 to 2022, exactly the sub-classes that have corrected 20% to 30% since.
• Confusing an unregulated cask scheme for an asset. Signing up to “8% to 18% solid returns” claims that regulators have already ruled misleading.
• Skipping provenance and grading. In cards, watches and art, an unauthenticated or ungraded object is worth a fraction of the graded equivalent, and can be worth nothing.

Who this suits

Collectibles suit an investor who already has liquid, income-producing assets and wants a tangible, low-correlation store of value they understand and, ideally, enjoy owning. The category rewards patience, specialist knowledge in one sub-class rather than dabbling across seven, and a tolerance for years of carry with no yield. It does not suit anyone who needs income, needs to sell quickly, or is treating a passion index as a return forecast. The investors who do well tend to buy things they would be glad to own even if the price never moved.

Frequently asked questions

Are collectibles a good investment? The best sub-classes have kept pace with or beaten equities over the long run, contemporary art at roughly 11.5% a year against the S&P 500’s 9.6% from 1995 to 2023 on Benzinga data, but they carry no yield, high costs and real down years, with several sub-classes correcting 19% to 30% since their 2022 peak. They can be a good diversifier for someone who understands the specific market; they are a poor substitute for income assets.

How do I invest in collectibles without storing a physical object? You can buy a diversified luxury ETF at a 0.25% expense ratio, such as the Amundi S&P Global Luxury UCITS ETF, listed proxies like Watches of Switzerland or Richemont, or fractional shares of a single asset through a platform such as Masterworks. Each trades some ownership of the actual object for liquidity and lower friction.

Which collectibles have performed best? On the passion indices, rare whisky led with roughly 17.5% a year over 2013 to 2023, per Rare Whisky 101, and Hermès handbags retained around 138% of value in 2025. Watches have been among the strongest ten-year performers on the Knight Frank index. Past leadership does not carry forward; whisky, one of the best performers, is also one of the recent fallers.

Are collectibles taxed differently from shares? Yes, and it depends on where you are. In the US, gains on collectibles can be taxed at up to 28%, per the IRS, above the top rate on shares; in the UK, classic cars are exempt from capital gains tax as wasting assets. Ask an adviser how your jurisdiction treats the specific object and any fund or platform you use.

What are the passion investments people talk about? “Passion investments”, or “investments of passion”, is the term the Knight Frank Luxury Investment Index uses for collectibles bought partly for enjoyment and partly for value: art, wine, whisky, watches, classic cars, cards, jewellery and handbags. The name captures the point that the emotional pull, not just the return, is doing the buying.