Sentimental value? 2.6%

Turns out people don’t just invest in stocks and bonds. In the US alone, the combined value of jewellery, fine art, antique furniture, and classic cars is estimated at more than $5.5 trillion.

While many collectors will describe these objects as investments, they’re obviously not just in it for the money. A recent study uses the term emotional yield to convey the return people forego by holding these assets. In movie terms, they’re putting a number on sentimental value. The researchers use the somewhat more stuffy term non-pecuniary utility – i.e. enjoyment, signalling, and so on.

The study, led by professor Elroy Dimson, compiled returns over 110 years from both academic studies and private organisations for 13 distinct types of collectibles: paintings, prints, photographs, drawings, sculptures, jewellery, stamps, coins, wine, classic cars, violins, furniture, and rugs. It also compiled financial returns from 57 stock and bond return indices across 18 countries. The two datasets could then be compared to compute this emotional yield.

The mean emotional yield turned out to be as high as 2.64% annualised (median: 2.53%), and the researchers surmise that this is probably an underestimation. Collectibles have higher volatility, higher transaction costs, and lower liquidity, all of which require a higher emotional yield for these assets to compare. In addition, repeat-sales data may suggest that the return on collectibles is somewhat overstated.

Ideally, insurance, storage and transaction costs should enter into the equation, driving up the emotional yield necessary for these investments. The researchers don’t try to calculate such costs, citing substantial time variation within and across assets and difficulty in obtaining high-quality estimates. They cite other studies, however, that point to annualised transaction fees of up to 1.1%, including auction fees and commissions – one-time fees where the holding period is critical in calculating annual figures. And then there’s insurance, storage, security … No ballpark estimate is provided, but the total easily shoots up a couple of percentage points.

At this point, I can’t resist the temptation to point out that some things in life are free – like insuring and storing your stocks and bonds. Maybe there’s even a bit of emotional yield in the satisfaction of seeing your wealth grow.

“Emotional Yields of Collectibles”

Elroy Dimson, Kuntara Pukthuanthong, and Blair Vorsatz

Financial Analysts Journal, April 2026