Garyvee’s Recent Comments About a New Explosive Asset Class Are the Most Significant in History.
It’s here, thriving and reshaping how future generations invest.
Photo By Andrew Kelly On Wiki Media (Commons)
Do you ever feel like society put entrepreneurship on a pedestal, and now it’s the turn of aspiring investors?
Every Tom, Dick, and Sally, who once had “CEO” in their Instagram Bio, clicked the ‘edit profile’ button and changed it to “Investor”.
It’s as trendy as a fashion runway.
It’s what we do as humans. Flex first. Then worry about execution later.
Empty barrels make the most noise.
Like any market, people who aren’t all in or practitioners at their craft get found out, and their helter-skelter behaviour moves them onto the next thing.
When it comes to spotting consumer trends and making smart investments, Gary Vaynerchuk has superhuman powers.
He’s a freak.
It’s like he can see around corners.
It’s a trait tattooed into his DNA since he was a kid selling lemonade to people passing by in their cars. He’d watch where the people in the vehicle were looking and strategically place his sign in their potential eye line.
When he worked in his father’s liquor store, he obsessed over where people would walk into the store and what they would look at and strategically placed deals for wine products in their eye line.
These may have started as small fry traits, but as the numbers grew, so did Gary’s wins. His very first three investments he ever made were Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
While he only earned $50,000 a year in his father’s liquor store, he went on zero holidays, had limited days off, and saved money like an assassin.
One day he received a call from Mark Zuckerberg (a small fish back then) asking Gary if he wanted to buy his parent’s Facebook stock because they were trying to buy a house.
Without hesitation, Gary said “yes” and wrote out a $200,000 check which amounted to his entire savings. He’s gone on record to say the investment made him “tens of millions”.
At the time, investors were still wondering how Facebook would profit. But with their advertising model, Gary believed they were onto a winner and, more importantly, backed Mark Zukerberg’s skill to execute.
He famously now phrases this investment strategy as “Betting on the Jockey, not the horse.”
The serial entrepreneur with a Babe Ruth-esque investing record is now saying an asset class is growing right under our noses, and it’s more than a growing trend.
It has every chance of changing how future generations invest in things.
GaryVee — Source
“If you look at TikTok and Instagram accounts of 15,16,17-year-olds you have 16 olds in their bio with “Investor”, and I’m like, this is profound.
But I see a bigger convo, the rise of people saying, “I’m an investor too,” and then the rise of what they want to invest in.
So now you’ve got 15 to 30-year-olds that think about investing, but they don’t want to buy a one-family bedroom and make recurring revenue on rent; they want to buy a pair of Nikes that will go up 2x.
They want to buy John Marant Rookie cards. They want NFTs to go in their social media profile. And they want it to go up in value.
That’s very different from buying 75 shares of Turner.
Investing is now pop culture and fashion.
Everyone now sees it as a viable cultural thing you do, and they’re just going to do it (invest) in new stuff.
So alternative investments are a big deal, and it hasn’t even started.”
There’s a New Wave of Investors That Go Beyond Cryptocurrency.
In the past, investing typically revolved around stocks, real estate, and saving money. Anything beyond that, like investing in fine art, was considered for the ultra-wealthy.
But today, things are different.
Investing has become a part of our culture, with more and more young people online sharing investment videos. It’s no longer limited to parents or the wealthy — everyone wants to be involved.
And anyone can get started in a matter of minutes. In the upcoming decades, portfolios of alternative investments will expand far beyond the traditional ways people invest in the stock market or property today.
We’ll see continued investments in Cryptocurrencies and Sneakers, NFTs, Sports Cards, Comic Books, the 80s and 90s Pop Culture Memorabilia, Video games, toys, clothing, and other collectables.
Superman’s first DC comic book came out in 1939 and sold for $5.3 million in a private sale in 2022.
The sale of a 9.5 graded Micky Mantle (№311) shattered records, fetching an astounding $12.6 million. The iconic sports memorabilia is the highest-priced collectable ever sold.
It’s what Garyvee is trying to convey. We’re starting to care about different things.
Garyvee — Source
“What all these alternative investments have in common is that they represent a societal shift in what it means to invest and who gets to participate.
Young people or even 40-something-year-olds like me don’t want to buy old, expensive ass art.
I don’t want a picture of some random Englishman or a scene of a hillside to hang on my wall.
I want to build a case and display my stack of 150 Hakeem Olajuwon rookie cards. I want to show my friends my sports cards and comics or pull out my crypto wallet and show off my NFTs.
The alt space is here and thriving, and it’s changing the way future generations think about investing.”
Final Thoughts.
Garyvee doesn’t ever appear to miss.
He’s always early to this stuff.
He reads human behaviour like some Jedi, and it usually plays out.
Technavio announced in a market research report that the global sports trading cards market size is expected to grow by USD 6.71 billion from 2021 to 2026.
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It’s mostly down to the growing trend of where millennials are spending their disposable income because of their natural affinity to the games and collectables they grew up with.
It’s nostalgia.
Most of these collectables are just pieces of cardboard and paper with some ink which seems crazy given the high sales.
Or are they?
Either way, it’s ironic when people tell you Bitcoin is silly or a greater fool theory when we’ve been doing the same thing with physical assets for hundreds of years.
Heck, it brings you to one fundamental question. Why should anything hold value?
Because Society decided it does.
Alternative investments are thriving and becoming deeply rooted in culture.
It’s only just begun.