It’s been a busy few weeks on the Altea circuit! Three cities, three very different vibes, and one terrific community.
One thing I love about Altea Events is the variety of formats they take. Some are larger meetups in wide open spaces (like when we hung out in an Austin aircraft hangar) while others are intimate, curated dinners.
- In New York, we gathered in midtown for a unique collectibles showcase at Comic Con.
- Meanwhile, our very first Hong Kong meetup took place over Cantonese noodles, Chinese wine (which is a thing), and a 50-year old bottle of Scotch whisky.
- And in LA, we climbed behind the wheel with an afternoon at Hollywood Classic Cars, a private vintage car showroom in East Hollywood.
But what each event has in common is the shared understanding that alternative investing takes all sorts of ridiculously cool forms.
Let’s start in New York. 👇
Table of Contents
NYC Collectibles Showcase 🗽
Our fall series kicked off in midtown Manhattan, with a special collectibles showcase smack during New York Comic Con (NYCC).
Since 2006, NYCC has been the biggest pop culture and collectibles event on the East Coast. Held at the Javits Center, it’s now in its 19th year, attracting 200,000+ fans, investors, and creators from around the world. It’s a celebration of the passions that fuel many Altea members: comics, cards, sneakers, and books.
But while hundreds of thousands of Comic Con-goers swarmed Hudson Yards, our Altea city captains Kaylock Yam and Valerie Fristachi hosted an exclusive, invite-only Collectibles Showcase in nearby midtown.
Part roundtable and part showcase, this event was chock-full of valuable passion assets, as well as great discussions with some of the sharpest collectibles experts in our community.
Before the event even began, tables filled with Magic: The Gathering Alpha/Beta cards, player-exclusive sneakers, and first-edition books drew people in.
After a round or two of refreshments, a lively roundtable discussion kicked off among 20+ community members, some who go back years, others who have just recently joined.
One of our newest members is Oliver Bayliss, founder of Bayliss Rare Books, a London-based firm dealing in exceptional first editions, literary manuscripts, and historic autographs.
Afterward, the showcase turned the space into a mini-museum, where attendees drifted from table to table, trading notes on sneaker provenance, rare book valuations, trading cards, and totally new ideas.
Mothership Games is an interesting company at the intersection of trading cards and board games. They’re creating collectible trading card games (TCGs) tied to existing IP.
This world is close to what our friend Omar Khokar has been pontificating about lately; there is growing demand for trading cards in alternative areas ranging from cricket to K-Pop.
But Mothership’s goal is to bridge these physical collectibles with storytelling, world-building, and other core elements from board games — developing new cultural franchises that span decades.
The showcase floor is where people’s passion and “nerdiness” really came through. But it’s not just fun & games — there are some very innovative and potentially lucrative businesses being built in this space.
One you should know about is AlwaysLegit, a sneaker-focused investment platform turning rare, high-end kicks into managed alternative assets.
Unlike marketplaces like StockX or GOAT that focus on peer-to-peer resale, AlwaysLegit is built for investors. The company sources investment-grade sneakers, authenticates them in-house using proprietary AI/computer vision, stores them in secured custody, and manages them until liquidation.
Run by father-son duo Jason and Howie Schwartz, it’s one of the first platforms treating passion assets with institutional rigor.
As the event winded down, attendees continued to mingle. The cleaning staff was hovering but no one was ready to leave!
Then came the spontaneous happy hour. Presenters and guests kept the night going over drinks.
One member noted:
“This is better than speed dating with founders and investors. People aren’t just taking three minutes to pitch you.”
NYC probably has more opportunity per square foot than anywhere else on earth. We always welcome new event ideas!
If you live in New York (or nearby), join the New York Group to keep an eye out for upcoming events.
Hong Kong Dinner 🥢
Meanwhile, 8,000 miles away, I was co-hosting Altea’s very first meetup in Hong Kong, where six of us gathered for a lovely Cantonese dinner, some Chinese wine and a glorious bottle of Scottish whisky.
This was my very first time visiting Hong Kong and/or China, but City Captain Adrian Fu has lived in Hong Kong his whole life, and suggested a terrific seafood spot in Kowloon.
Interestingly, one of the guests who joined us is doing great things in the collectibles space himself. Joe Munns (far left below) is a co-founder at CollectorCrypt — a digital bridge for real-world collectibles (beginning with Pokémon & sports cards).
They’ve found particular success with their Digital Gacha Machine, emulating the same ’blind box’ mechanic which has long been a cornerstone of Asian collecting culture (and has recently driven global demand for Labubu Dolls through the roof.)
Elaine Lau from wine trade financing firm Carnation Capital also joined us. She shared how she got started, and all the interesting investing opportunities she now sees.
(You may remember Elaine from the Maison Lineti deal — the luxury French Whisky Distillery we bid on.)
We all swapped ideas across asset classes. Lots of discussion on bitcoin (Hong Kong residents have no capital gains tax, unless you’re a pro day trader), LLM wars between China and America (ChatGPT is blocked in China, and OpenAI just banned suspected China-linked accounts) and our new K-Pop deal. (K-Pop is huge throughout SE Asia).
But the real star of the night might have been the rare bottle of whisky that Adrian brought. The Johnnie Walker “Swing Bottle” was created in 1932 by Sir Alexander Walker II (the grandson of Johnnie Walker).
It was designed specifically for rail travel and ocean liners, with a unique convex base that allows the bottle to stay upright and rock back and forth instead of spilling over.
If you live in Hong Kong or are visiting soon, join the Hong Kong Group. We’ll be doing one or two Altea events per year.
(Oh, and check out Adrian’s music, he’s super talented!)
L.A. Classic Car Meetup 🏎️
We wrapped the October series in true California style.
Earlier this week, sixteen of us gathered at Hollywood Classic Cars, a private high-end collection in Koreatown, where rows of rare Ferraris and Porsches set the tone for an afternoon of car investing talk.
It happened to be “Tech Week” in LA, but unlike in New York, where we intentionally tacked our event onto Comic Con, this had nothing to do with Tech Week. No panels, pitches or hype.
We were joined by our good friend David Spickett, founder of The Car Crowd, a UK platform bringing fractional classic car investing to life.
Now, the thesis behind The Car Crowd’s business model is fairly simple: They buy left-hand drive luxury vehicles in the UK (lots of Ferraris & Lamborghinis), wait three years to realize adequate appreciation, and ship them over to the US, where they’re sold a premium.
But a few months ago, Wyatt (being the genius that he is) approached David with another unique idea.
Wyatt told me, “Look David, this is great, but why do you have to wait three years? Is there not an arbitrage opportunity for some of these cars right now? Are there not markets that are undervalued in some countries, say because the currency is weaker, and better in others? Could we not buy them there and ship them and flip them?” And my answer was, shit, I hadn’t thought of that!
That’s exactly what we’re doing now.
Thanks to emissions and import laws, many high-end cars have never been sold in the US (or were only available in heavily watered-down versions.) But once these vehicles turn 25, the import restrictions vanish, thus creating a repeatable transatlantic arbitrage opportunity for iconic models.
This is the vision behind Auto I: Altea’s first-ever classic car SPV.
And just last week, we acquired the first vehicle for Auto I: a 1995 Ferrari 512M which we picked up for ~£300k, and already have a US market lined up in the £500k–£600k range.
Finished in Rosso Corsa with black leather, this beauty is one of just 501 ever made. It has just 7,400 miles, all original documentation, and a clean provenance stretching from the Netherlands to Japan to Australia.
Auto I is already moving fast. The next car in our acquisition queue? A delicious Lamborghini. More to come soon.
For those of you who missed out on Auto I, don’t worry — Auto II fund is definitely on the horizon.
And so are more meetups! If you live out west, be sure to join the California Group.
Closing thoughts
Right before I was about to hit publish, Wyatt posted this in the community:
It’s definitely food for thought. While Altea meetups aren’t exactly designed to cure the loneliness epidemic, they’re certainly a powerful reminder that real community-building happens in person.
AI is everywhere now, filters, faces, and entire feeds of videos are fake.
You know what’s real? This right here. 👇
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That’s it for today! A huge thanks to everyone who joined and helped make these events shine.
And a special thanks to Matthew Wang for providing a space for us to gather in NYC, to David Spickett who traveled all the way from NY to join us in LA, and to all our speakers who shared their passion and experience, and to our awesome City Captains who organized everything (Kaylock Yam, Valerie Fristachi, Adrian Fu, James Creech, and Morgan Keim).
If you’ve never attended an Altea meetup, let’s change that soon.
Altea members can join meetups for free, can invest in our SPVs, and get a slew of perks. Join Altea here.
See you next time, Stefan
Disclosures
This issue was written and edited by Stefan von Imhof
This issue was sponsored by Worthy Wealth
