Since the great financial crisis of 2008, the interest of international investors in collectibles; precious metals and jewels, pictorial and sculptural art, watches, to which one can add, not unpredictably, since 2009, the new cryptocurrency sector and its NFT’s, has steadily increased. In fact, to avoid a global economic recession, the international monetary authorities have decided to monetize the enormous debt accumulated during the two decades following the globalization process after the fall of the Berlin Wall, creating monetary inflation by injecting into the credit systems an enormous amount of surreptitious liquidity. Thanks to the deflation that characterized the 2010/2020 decade, the inflationary resurgence did not manifest itself but following the shutdown decision to deal with the pandemic, inflation in Western economies quickly dropped back to double-digit percentages.

The two promoters of the BTG fund, one active in the logistics sector, the other a collector and amateur racer, already in 2016 analyzed the viable alternatives to identify a class of assets that had real concreteness to protect against the loss of value of fiat currency and that offered reasonable growth potential in relation to its niche and unique characteristics. As both have many years of experience and skills in the automotive sector, among other things of a complementary nature, it was natural to turn our attention to collectible cars, albeit with particular attention specifically to limited production cars with high commercial value, therefore mainly sports cars homologated for road use.

In 2017, Better Than Gold Fund was launched, a Maltese PIF under the aegis of TALITI SICAV, probably the first fund of this type that invests exclusively in collector cars. In general, the investment car market has grown exponentially over the last two decades, causing these real assets to reach peak prices in 2021/22, at the end of the pandemic, but continuing to attract strong interest in recent years during which the market became more selective. Considering the important US market for example, in 2024 the collector car sector is estimated to be worth 19 billion dollars, where the average age of buyers is around 45. Demand is strongly linked to demographic factors, in the sense that interest shifts to automotive production of the following decades as the age of enthusiast’s advances. Specifically, the generation of “Baby Boomers”, born in the aftermath of the Second World War, were attracted by the cars that fascinated them in their youth, therefore the 50’s and 60’s, but today they are less active and have given way to the next generation interested in the 70’s, therefore to the so-called “Young timers”.

The fund’s strategy is, however, aimed at avoiding these trend phenomena, focusing only on limited production and one-off models, therefore the very high range, even recent and new factory cars, for which the demand from new collectors, often young successful entrepreneurs from rich Asian, South American and Middle Eastern countries, is constantly increasing augmenting investment of a fundamental nature, which seeks protection from inflation and a valid diversification to paper investments in securities, not to mention the priceless satisfaction of owning an object for which you have a passion.