Long time no see, if you followed my last two posts you should see roughly 600% ROI from Loser Club and 300% ROI on 3landers, assuming you bought at a low entry point post mint. This article, however, will give you the worst risk-to-return ratio, so be cautious and DYOR as always.

We are now several weeks into the bear market, many people lost interest grinding for WLs, as most won’t even sell out, and few will sustain the floor above the mint price. Trading volumes have no plan of coming back just yet, so even with liquidity in hand, it’s still risky to buy into any secondary market items with a premium. So what to do with the time and tiny liquidity if your hands feel itchy?

My choice is to buy small artistic collections (SAC). NFT is a relatively illiquid market and SAC is an even more illiquid category within it. Since we are now in NFT’s booming phase, with exponential growth comes the extraordinary bubble or overvaluation. A 10K collection can easily tell the story of getting rich quick and attract more bagholders instantly with the high trading volumes. SAC is a different story, its value is built entirely upon the art, which is subjective, and thus harder to get market recognition in a short period of time. Large NFT collection’s high price is backed by its large community, SAC doesn’t have the luxury to attract enough base and create a culture of its own. However, the crack is where the light comes in.

SAC’s illiquidity tends to scare off flippers and has the advantage of attracting true appreciators. Buying SAC is more like consumption rather than investment, thus its buyer profile is either like someone who sits on bluechip NFTs and has a handful of ETHs to spend, or buyers like me, who haven’t made it yet, but would rather eat ramen noodles for a week to collect talented artists’ early work. Both buyers have true faith and are preset to be diamond hands because they are emotionally attached to the piece. If the value of money comes from the compounding effect of time, then which one would you rather choose? A 10K computer randomized collection with basic art elements? OR a hand-drawn piece that took years of art practice and years of waiting till the buyer decided to take profit?

From a community management perspective, SAC also has its unique advantage. There is a dilemma in community building, you want to scale the community, but with scaling comes the lower user quality, which eventually leaves the OGs disappointed and left. SACs don’t have to go through such dilemma, its rarity naturally creates a close-knit community from the beginning with meaningful conversation going on in Discord daily and members knowing each other as family, e.g. Ghxsts. Buyers come with minimum expectation to make a financial return, so there is no “Wen” sentiment” and in case the floor increases over time, it’s a positive feeding loop to earn steady growth with new members joining and minimum disruption to the OGs. Such a loyal community base means little downsides and huge potential upsides, e.g. Good Morning Cafe with 300 owners and a floor price of 2.29, no undercutting each other, and no panic selling in bear market.

When it comes to SAC project selection, I typically look for 3 patterns:

• Does the art have a visual impact, meaning you cannot take eyes away from it and it lures you to own it no matter what, trust your instinct if you have good tastes.

• Do the artists have their own signature style and are fueled to create for the rest of their lives? This is what keeps the project alive. Ideally, the artists should also be NFT collectors themselves so they know how the market works and can design some sort of mechanism to increase their influence, such as airdrop/reward system/collab.

• Has the work already attracted some kind of whales or bluechip holders? This may sound utilitarian, but they are key to the success of SAC.

  There is a lot more on this topic I could share, and this is a deep water area. I may write another post as I continue on this journey. Thank you for reading.