May is the peak of the spring auction season in New York with major Impressionist and Modern (IMPMOD) and Post War and Contemporary (PWC) sales as well as important American (AMP) and Latin American painting (LAP) sales. Major Traditional Chinese Works of Art sales took place in Hong Kong. Our data collection and reporting efforts based on 34 Sotheby’s and Christie’s world wide auctions that occurred in May produced 584 repeat sale pairs representing most collecting categories. These pairs allowed us to create the Mei Moses® world all art tracking index for May 2013 which produced the aforementioned 0.80% loss as compared to the closing value for year end 2012. We need to point out that the tracking result is based on the assumption that all the pairs collected to date in 2013 are used to estimate the year end result assuming no other pairs are added to the database throughout the remainder of 2013. Thus the May tracking result would be the calculated year end result based on that assumption.

The index shows marked improvement over the previous months but weakness in the comparison to equities over the last 12 months. While the May PWC and TCWA sales were quite strong, and discussed in our prior true returns report, they were not strong enough to overcome the weak performance of the other collecting categories. Especially weak were the IMPMOD in Amsterdam and Paris and Old Masters (OLD19C) in London. Our world all art index is still below its 2012 year end value.

The average auction interval of the 584 objects was about 17.4 years. This is similar to the average holding period in our entire database.

Source: MeiMoses