Hello there,
Welcome to the best of the Altea Community.
Congrats to Spain on the World Cup victory!
It was a fun ride. Here’s a photo of Stefan and I celebrating their victory over Portugal a few weeks ago in Jávea. We got to the bar early to get some work done.
Let’s go
Table of Contents
New Members
Welcome to the 24 new members since last week
A few notable members..
Iman G is an entrepreneur, investor & collector living in Bali. He’s had two e-commerce exits and has spent the last five years living in and traveling to 50+ countries.
His biggest interests are real estate and alternative assets, especially high-end collectibles — with a primary focus on rare Michael Jordan cards and memorabilia. You can check out his MJs at DimeLabs.
As you can tell from his pic, he’s a long-term CryptoPunk holder.
Yuri Rutman is a long time founder, advisor, and film/tv producer & director. His last film “Trained” was released globally by the official distributor of Academy Award nominated short films, Shorts.Tv/AMC Networks.
His current project, The Violinist, is an Eastern European–inspired crime drama set in Chicago.
Altea SPV Updates
Farmland I: Investor Memo is ready
Good news: Our due diligence is complete, and the investor memo is ready.
Farmland I is our investment with Frutas del Paraguay, the first and only company to export fresh fruit from Paraguay. This SPV buys titled lots inside a 90-hectare plantation and takes an annual share of harvest profits for 22 years.
The crux of the strategy is simple but powerful: inverted seasons.
Nearly all Rojo Brillante persimmons come from Spain and ships October to January. This southern hemisphere farm harvests February to May and lands in Europe when Spanish supply has ended, very nearly alone on the market for a third of the year.
This investment is not a bet on Paraguay’s growth; it’s a farm operation that just happens to be in Paraguay.
But we like this one. It pairs real pricing power (unlike most commodities, persimmons don’t trade on an exchange) with titled land you own outright.
We’ve published our own reconciliation of the numbers rather than the sponsor’s, so you can judge it on our arithmetic and not just theirs. {% if subscriber.tags contains “*Accredited Investor” %}
Note: Full memo is restricted to accredited investors
We have prepared a comprehensive investor memo with detailed analysis and full disclosures.
However, due to regulatory and compliance requirements, we can only provide the complete memo to individuals who have self-declared their accredited investor status.
Two steps to access + invest:
- Declare your accreditation status
- Express interest (if you have not already done so).
Not sure if you’re accredited?
Express interest now. We’re looking for firm commitments by July 31, and can handle the accreditation check later.
⛩️ Japan trip: New itinerary updates
Three nights in Tokyo. One night in the Nagano highlands.
Our Japan trip is 90 days away, and we’re excited to share the trip is taking shape.
Updates:
- Hotels locked in: Cerulean Tower Tokyu Hotel (Shibuya) for 3 nights, Hotel Silk (Madarao) for our night in Iiyama
- Bonsai Day is fully confirmed: Shunkaen Bonsai Museum, a traditional tea ceremony, and a private live bonsai performance with renowned artist Mr. Saeki
- Sumo show is set. This is gonna be epic.
- Traditional tea ceremony in Shinjuku (matcha and sencha)
- Nagano day: Now includes the Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park before our distillery tour and tasting at Kiyokawa
- Vinyl hunting in Shimokitazawa added for those sticking around before departure
More details to come as we lock in the final pieces.
Only 4 Spots Left
Tokyo, sumo, bonsai masters, snow monkeys, sake at a private distillery — this trip is going to be epic.
Early bird pricing is over, but you can still lock in before it’s fully booked.
- Price: $3,999
- Bring a guest: +$2,999
- Includes: All meals, drinks, activities, events, and transportation. Everything except flights.
Don’t wait, once the 12 spots are gone, they’re gone.
Lock in your spot with a $1,000 deposit. Fully refundable up to 60 days before departure.
Altea Meetups
NYC Meetup: July 29
The next NYC meetup will be a super-casual, unstructured, dutch happy hour. Bring friends. Talk deal flow, alt investing, great sushi, politics, whatever you like. Assuming the weather is nice, we’ll enjoy the summer sunset.
- Wed July 29, 5:45pm
- Rosehill Rooftop – 125 East 27th street
Want to join? Reply to City Captains Valerie and Kaylock here, or in the NYC WhatsApp space.
New potential meetups brewing..
Stefan and I are heading to North America in September ahead of the big Japan trip. We’re planning to host meetups in a few cities:
- Chicago, likely Sep 14 or 15. (Our first-ever Windy City meetup.)
- New York, likely Sep 13. (Possibly including a Giants game.)
- L.A., likely week of Oct 5. (This could be a big one.)
- France. Working on something for this fall.
More to come soon.
New Discussions
Lots of chatter this week around Rally Rd’s decision to end direct ownership in favor of a publicly-traded ETF.
“Interesting change of direction from Rally. Not sure how this pans out for existing shareholders of items on Rally.”
— Iman G
“I had a slightly better relationship with Rally than Wyatt. But even I pretty routinely got the cold shoulder from almost everyone there.
Personally, I was rooting for them up until the NFT stuff in 2021. When they took a hard turn towards Gary Vee and all those Web3 grifters, I thought man, they’re gonna regret this move.” — Stefan
“As TheCarCrowd I kind of sit on both sides of the fence. A passionate asset manager with deep knowledge and commitment to the asset class but also having an asset agnostic tech platform to allow listing of any asset for syndicated / fractional / tokenized ownership (let’s face it, it’s all the same just different wording and legal underpinning!)
My view…is that you have to have solid economics within the asset class to give better potential for good returns.
Good returns drive higher intent and capital outlay from your audience which generates more long standing investors putting in more capital and causes you less operational stress.
Low returns, low share prices and uneducated investor audiences give rise to lots of operational headaches, increased costs, low retention and eventual spiralling cost per acquisition that’s signs the death warrant.” — David Spickett
“Rally and Masterworks (not sure how they’ve been doing) really sparked my interest in the fractional alternative asset space.
Rally probably ran out of steam due to the high CACs and efforts to educate the layman investors were part of the problem.
Personally reg A did not make sense purely from the costs associated.
Alternative assets that generate no yield need to be bought as close to market price (or cheaper) as possible. Any additional fees increasingly inhibit the possibility for the investors to see good returns, even when looking with a long term lens.” — Viral Kothari
- Lucas King challenges an article claiming “clever stock picking won’t deliver outperformance” and backs it up with his own 9-ETF factor portfolio, which beat both total-world and US large-cap benchmarks over the past 18 months
“Diversification is dead! Long live diversification! ” — Lucas King
- The stick shift is dead. Long live the stick shift.
- Why CryptoPunks refuse to die.
- Here’s a fun stat for data center doomers:
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We’ve just launched a WhatsApp Space for Altea — a faster, more direct way to connect with the team and with each other, in real time.
This is the casual, real-time layer of the community. Quick chats, GIFs, questions, memes, low-key chats.
Or join via QR code:
⚽ Altea World Cup Fantasy
Congrats to longtime Altea member Cory, who grabbed the Altea World Cup fantasy league by the throat in round one and never let go.
Stefan went all in on Paraguay from the start, which didn’t really work out for him, while I pipped James in the final round to snag a runner-up medal.
Cory wins a hand-blown whisky tumbler to toast his success.
New Due Diligence
Dylan Robertson digs into a Kraken pre-IPO secondary opportunity
“What got me most excited is the regulatory positioning.
Kraken holds one of the few full MiCA licenses in Europe alongside MiFID II derivatives approval, and Binance is exiting the EU entirely on July 1 as part of the MiCA enforcement deadline.
That’s roughly 40% global market share potentially looking for a new home, in a region that’s already Kraken’s largest market.” — Dylan Robertson
That’s it for today!
