Liv-ex bids and offers reaches new record peak

The total value of bids and offers on the Liv-ex platform has surpassed £70 million, a new high and £20m more than in October last year.

Liv-ex reported last week that bids and offers reached £71m while the number of wines with either a bid or an offer had expanded to 14,000.

The bid:offer ratio, which indicates the strength of the market, was at 1.3, up from 1.09 last October which suggests price stability as anything over 0.5 is considered a good ratio.

The total value of bids and offers on the Exchange has risen rapidly over the last few years.

Last October’s £50m total (also a record) represented a near doubling of the exposure in the previous three years and was a rise of £6m on October 2017.

The enormous £20m bump in rather less than a year was put down to the continuing diversity of the fine wine market – with buyers looking for wines from more wines besides Bordeaux and Burgundy and for ‘new’ or ‘fresh’ names and labels within those two classic French regions – and also Liv-ex’s continuing efforts to fully automate its services making buying and selling wine on the Exchange faster and more efficient.

As well as a new bids and offers value, the Fine Wine 100 showed increasing signs of life in July.

The benchmark index has had a very quiet year in general but ran flat in June and has done so again in July, posting a 0.3% gain – just the second positive performance for the index so far this year.

Burgundian, Champagne and a Rhône label were the month’s best performers in July but three Burgundian labels – Domaine Leroy, Clos de Tart and Domaine Ponsot – saw wines of theirs lead the month’s worst performers too.

The broader Fine Wine 1000 index also rose in July, gaining 0.5%, with some positive signs of life for the first growth tracker, the Fine Wine 50, as well as the Champagne 50 and Rhone 100 which rose 0.42%, 0.79% and 0.80% respectively.