How to Diversify Your Portfolio: Prints as an Alternative Investment

At London Art Fair, our Guide to the Prints Market panel cut through the familiar headlines and focused on what actually forms value in prints: the intersection of narrative and numbers, and the practical factors that make two works that look identical behave very differently in the market.

Alternative investments are assets that sit outside traditional categories such as equities and bonds. Depending on the investor, that can include property, commodities, and collectables like watches, wine, and fine art.

Prints occupy a distinctive position within that landscape. They are tangible, culturally significant assets, but they also leave a more visible behavioural trail than many other art categories because they trade more frequently and in structured formats. That trading frequency makes the market easier to observe, but not automatically easier to understand.

The point of diversification is not to chase certainty. It is to build resilience by spreading exposure across assets that behave differently. In prints, that “different behaviour” is often visible in repeat sales, relative pricing across an artist’s output, and the way demand moves between series and formats.

One of the panel’s central themes was that the prints market is often misunderstood precisely because it looks transparent.

Prints are commonly described as liquid, democratic and data-rich. Those statements can be true, but they are frequently taken to mean that the market is safe, simple, or predictable. Jean described the art market as an “inefficient” market, and prints are a clear example of why. In an efficient market, identical assets would trade at similar prices under similar conditions. In prints, identical-looking works can trade at different prices at the same time.

That pricing divergence is not a flaw. It is a feature of how value forms in this segment. Condition, edition type, proof status, provenance, timing, and sale context can materially shift pricing and liquidity. The more repeatable the asset, the more those differentiators matter.

As our Market Editor, Sheena Carrington, put it: confidence is often assumed where it should be assessed. Visibility does not equal certainty. The market rewards literacy.

The ‘easy entry point’ myth and the real cost of misplaced confidence

Prints are routinely framed as accessible because they are widely traded and easier to encounter than unique works. But in the secondary market, accessibility is often confused with simplicity.

A single misleading comparable can circulate, be repeated, and quickly harden into a reference price, even when it does not reflect fair market value. In a category where buyers rely heavily on comparables, transparency without interpretation can expose collectors to overconfidence.

The cost of the “easy access” myth is not that collectors enter the market. It is that they enter with the wrong assumptions.

If you are using prints as part of a broader strategy, the key is to treat data as a starting point, not a conclusion. The job is not to find a number. It is to understand why that number exists.

Prints have shown notable strength since 2020, even as other segments of the market have softened at different points. However, it’s rarely useful to describe prints as uniformly “booming”.

Resilience in prints does not necessarily show up as prices moving in one direction. It shows up in behaviour.

Because prints come back to market more often, value is tested repeatedly. That repeated testing creates pressure, but it is also revealing. It shows where demand is durable and where attention was situational.

One of the clearest behaviours discussed was repositioning. When a specific work becomes scarce, overheated, or simply unavailable, collectors do not always step away from the artist. They move laterally, into adjacent series, formats, proofs, or other works within a body of output that still make structural sense. Prints provide optionality, which helps collectors stay active without relying on a single binary opportunity.

Our Print Collector Survey found that 84% of buyers are comfortable describing their collections as an investment. However, this does not have to imply a promise of return.

In prints, passion-led collecting and value-led thinking tend to coexist. What matters is how the term is used.

A healthy investment mindset in prints is grounded in fair market value, liquidity and durability over time. It is not rooted in sales tactics that frame prints as a route to “beating the S&P”. In fact, highly financialised language, particularly when paired with selective comparables, has historically undermined trust.

A more disciplined way to think about investment in prints is behavioural:

1. Repeat sales: does demand return beyond one moment of attention?
2. Price durability: does pricing still make sense when headlines move on?
3. Exit visibility: can you reasonably understand how and where the work is likely to resell?

This framing brings prints closer to other “passion assets”, where the strongest decisions tend to combine personal conviction with clear-eyed market orientation.

If you are thinking about prints as part of a diversified collection, the panel’s takeaways point to a few practical habits.

1. Stop treating visibility as safety. A price label is not a valuation. Interrogate the comparable.
2. Buy within edition structure. Series with internal hierarchy, clear format distinctions, or set logic often provide better orientation.
3. Prioritise condition, provenance and edition detail. These are the real fault lines in repeatable markets.
4. Expect non-uniform movement. An artist’s market can contain multiple lanes. Signed and unsigned editions can behave like parallel markets. Sets and proofs can trade differently to standard editions.

Stay alert to hype loops. Headline results can validate demand, but they can also distort expectations if treated as a new baseline.