About

We write about money and value – and the many places they show up.

That includes the practical side: personal finance, investing, and the stock market, the everyday decisions everyone has to make about their own money. And it includes the more unexpected side: the economics of art and luxury: auction records, the history of priceless objects, the strange forces that decide what a painting or a rare object is really worth.

We started this for two reasons.

The first is curiosity. These are rich, fascinating fields, and they’re too often kept behind jargon, credentials, and the assumption that you need a finance background or an art history degree to understand them. We wanted a place to explore them properly and to explain them in a way that’s actually easy for other curious people to follow.

The second is a conviction: that you should keep economics in mind when you look at art and luxury, because they’re deeply integrated. The price of a painting, the value of a collectible, the appreciation of a luxury good … none of it makes full sense without the economics and the markets underneath it. Looking at one without the other only ever gives you half the picture.

So that’s what we do here: researched writing that takes things you’re already a little curious about and explains what’s actually going on underneath them. New pieces land regularly: some practical, some historical, some just plain fun. All of them are an attempt to make the world of money and value a little easier to see clearly.

Thanks for reading.