An art lesson for stock exchanges
Trading places are all the rage. Shares in the NYSE Group rose 25 per cent on its first day as a public company last week. The New York Stock Exchange's rival Nasdaq has gone further by making an approach to buy the London Stock Exchange.
Another kind of trading forum is also doing well: the art auction house. Sotheby's shares gained 10 per cent on the day it announced unexpectedly strong growth in revenues. The rush to buy and sell art is reaching levels not seen since the 1980s, when Japanese buyers flooded the London and New York auctions.
Exchanges and auction houses gain from the spread of global capitalism. It not only increases wealth but the velocity at which that wealth is circulated. Hedge fund managers boost the revenues of exchanges by heavy trading of shares and derivatives. They relax by buying art with the millions they make.
Sotheby's and Christie's behave more like merchant banks than financial exchanges. They provide a bespoke service to the elite who want to buy and sell unique, precious items. Human beings still assess paintings individually and bang gavels at auctions while traders in futures pits and on the NYSE floor give way to electronic trading.
But US exchanges in particular can learn from auction houses, which have done things to which they still aspire. The NYSE wants to expand globally and to diversify into new businesses. Despite a genteel image (slightly foxed by the 2000 price-fixing scandal) Sotheby's and Christie's are ahead of it in both respects.
The big auction houses used to rely on European and US buyers (except during the 1980s Japanese real estate boom) for their sales in London and New York. They now draw buyers from Asia and Russia. "There are people from all over the world who have realised a lot of wealth in the past 20 years and are having fun deploying it," says Bill Ruprecht, Sotheby's chief executive.
The art market has also diversified. Instead of relying on Impressionist works, Old Masters and antiques, the auction houses sell everything from Chinese modern art to Young British Artists. That has been encouraged by a new generation of wealthy people, including many hedge fund managers, who prefer contemporary art to the works their parents liked.
Above all, the big auction houses have squeezed out competition. They have taken over some of the work that used to be done by dealers: they arrange many private sales as well as holding auctions. They also defeated an attempt by Phillips de Pury to break into the inner circle a few years ago by offering price guarantees to attract business from sellers.
This reflects the network effect that benefits big auction houses. Once a critical mass of buyers and sellers is attracted to a single forum it is hard to draw them away. The same effect holds for exchanges. A recent attempt by Eurex, the futures subsidiary of Deutsche B?rse, to take US futures trading away from the Chicago Board of Trade was also defeated.
So exchanges have also been good investments. The growth of financial trading - US futures trading has risen at 25 per cent a year since 2000 - has pushed up the shares of US exchanges to dizzy heights. That they have barely started to expand overseas, or explore new areas of business, adds to their allure.
On the long view, the markets are on to something. Now that US stock exchanges have stirred from their slumbers, many factors work in their favour. The size of their domestic capital markets gives them the muscle to acquire others, as Nasdaq wants to do. They can follow the European example by adding futures and options to their product range.
But there is also a more sobering lesson from the experience of the art auction houses. Most exchanges have not been listed for long enough to have seen troughs in their valuations as well as peaks. Sotheby's, however, was a public company during the late 1990s dotcom boom, when its shares shot up, and afterwards, when they plunged back down again.
The things-are-different-this-time argument goes as follows. Auction houses used to depend on a small group of buyers from a few countries who collected a narrow segment of art. Now that their revenues have diversified, both in geography and the types of art they sell, they are less vulnerable to a catastrophic blow from one financial event.
In a crisis, however, markets are more correlated than it seems in the good times. Long-Term Capital Management, the ill-fated hedge fund, found that out painfully in 1998 in the Russian debt crisis. A mishap that caused a plunge in stock markets and the collapse of several hedge funds could easily sap demand not merely from New Yorkers for modern and Impressionist art but from many buyers for all kinds of things.
That goes in spades for exchanges, which rely on rising trading volumes to maintain their high valuations. A dislocation in financial markets would cause a lot of frantic activity in the short-term, which would be good for futures and options exchanges. After that, exchanges would have to adjust to slower times than they have been enjoying in recent years.
This does not mean that exchanges are likely to go out of business. But they are subject to the same swings in fortune as auction houses. Nobody would have made money by betting against the growth of capitalism and asset trading in the past three decades but it has been a bumpy ride before and it will be so again.
证交所应向拍卖行取经
交
易场所正在走俏。上周，变身为上市公司的纽约证交所集团(NYSE Group)首日上市交易，结果股价大涨25%。而其竞争对手纳斯达克(Nasdaq)则更进一步，正着手收购伦敦证交所(London Stock Exchange)事宜。
另一种交易场所的表现也很不错，那就是艺术品拍卖行。在苏富比(Sotheby’s)宣布其收入取得意外强劲增长当天，该拍卖行股价上涨了10%。自20世纪80年代日本买家蜂拥进伦敦和纽约的拍卖行以来，还从未出现过目前这般狂热的艺术品买卖热潮。
证交所和拍卖行都从全球资本主义的蔓延中获利匪浅。这一趋势不仅增加了财富，也提高了财富的周转率。对冲基金经理们大量交易股票和金融衍生品，推动了证交所的收入，随后他们又用赚来的大把钞票去购买艺术品赏玩。
苏富比和佳士得(Christie's)表现得更像商业银行而非金融交易所。它们向那些想买卖珍稀、贵重物品的上层人士提供预订服务。在这里，人们仍然逐一为绘画作品估值，并在拍卖会上一锤定音，而在期交所和纽约证交所，场内交易员正让位于电子交易。
不过，美国的证交所尤其要向拍卖行学习，因为，证交所还在渴望去做的事情，后者已然做过了。纽约证交所想要在全球扩张，并希望实现业务多样化。而对于苏富比和佳士得，尽管留给人们一个上流社会的形象（这种形象因2000年的操纵价格丑闻而微微受损），但在上述两方面，它们都超越了纽约证交所。
大型拍卖行在伦敦和纽约的销售一度依赖于欧洲和美国买家（20世纪80年代日本地产繁荣时期除外）。现在，它们正从亚洲和俄罗斯吸引买家。苏富比首席执行官比尔?鲁普雷希特(Bill Ruprecht)说：“买家来自全球各地，他们在过去20年间积累了巨额财富，也有兴趣来支配这些钱。”
艺术品市场还实现了多样化。从中国的现代艺术，到英伦新秀艺术家(YBA)的作品，拍卖行的拍卖品不再单纯是印象派作品、早期绘画大师作品和古董。这个趋势是由新一代富人推动的，其中包括很多对冲基金经理。相对于父辈，他们自己更喜欢当代艺术品。
最重要的是，大型拍卖行已经挤走了竞争对手。它们接手了一些曾经由经销商做的工作：除了公开拍卖，也安排许多私人销售。它们还通过价格担保方式从卖家那里招揽生意，粉碎了Phillips de Pury拍卖行几年前试图打入核心圈子的企图。
这一点体现了让大型拍卖行受益的网络效应。一旦被吸引到一个场所的买家和卖家达到一定数量，他们就很难再被拉走了。同样的效应也适用于证交所。最近，欧洲期货交易所(Eurex)试图从芝加哥期货交易所(CBOT)抢走美国的期货交易，最后也遭挫败。欧洲期货交易所是德意志证交所(Deutsche B?rse)的期货业务子公司。
因此交易所也成了一种很好的投资对象。金融交易的增长（从2000年起，美国期货交易年均增速为25%），推动美国各家上市交易所的股价纷纷攀上令人眩目的高点。这些交易所几乎刚刚开始海外扩张或探索新的业务领域，这一特点也增加了它们的吸引力。
长远来看，市场是清醒的。美国的股票交易所已经从睡梦中醒来，很多因素都对它们有利。它们的本土资本市场规模庞大，这使它们有能力收购其它交易所，就像纳斯达克想做的那样。它们还可以效仿欧洲的例子，增加期货和期权产品。
但艺术品拍卖行还有一些让人冷静的教训可供借鉴。大多数交易所的上市时间不长，它们的估值还没有经历过大起大落。而作为一家上市公司，苏富比的股价在上世纪90年代末随互联网热潮大涨，而后又随之大跌。
但有些人认为，此一时彼一时。以前，拍卖行常常依靠一小群来自不同国家的买主，而这些买主只收集特定范围的艺术品。但是现在不同，从地缘分布和拍卖品种类而言，拍卖行的收入来源已经多元化，不太容易因为某一个金融事件而遭受灾难性打击。
然而在危机发生时，市场的关联性要超过平时。时运不济的长期资本管理公司(Long-Term Capital Management)就是在1998年俄罗斯债务危机中，痛苦地发现了这一真理。一场灾难导致股市暴跌以及数家对冲基金破产，不仅可以轻易地打击纽约人对现代艺术以及印象派艺术品的需求，也会打击很多其它买主们购买各种产品的需求。
这样的事必然也会影响那些依靠高成交量来维持高市值的交易所。短期内，金融市场的混乱会导致许多疯狂交易行为，这当然会令期货和期权交易所受益，但在此之后，交易所将被迫适应相对冷清的状态，告别近年来的繁荣时期。
这并不意味着交易所可能会破产，但它们将像拍卖行一样受制于财富的波动。过去30年里，如果不是借助资本主义以及资产交易的增长，没有人能挣到钱。但这是一条崎岖的路。过去是，未来也是。
