About Unusual Assets

This is a newsletter about strange assets and the strange prices attached to them. Some sell openly; others are never bought or sold, yet still move money, status, and lives behind the scenes. The way something is priced — or deliberately left unpriced — is almost never random, and it usually says more about us than about the asset.

Thanks for joining, I hope you have as much fun reading it as I do writing these. Feel free to comment or email me directly if you’d like to talk!

-Alex

About the author:

Alexander Webb is a journalist and recent finance PhD graduate with expertise on trust, value exchange, and innovation in financial markets. He has written for many of the world’s top publications, including New York Times, National Geographic, Investopedia, Business Insider, WIRED, and more. You can also read him at The Studies Show, which he founded in early 2023. In his spare time he makes music as Lonely Singles.

Alexander also created Dating Net Worth, a calculator informed and inspired by academic research on heterosexual dating preferences. Take its results with a large grain of salt, as love and dating is highly personal.