Liquidity, indices, and the volatility of a thinly traded thing.
How long a car typically takes to sell, how often it changes hands, and how the price has moved relative to a May 2024 benchmark of 100. Once the daily scrape reaches sixty days of depth, the synthetic series shown here are replaced with the live median by chassis-month. Until then, the values are calibrated to documented auction results from the past 24 months and clearly labelled as such.
Make / model index · rebased 100 = May 2024
Eight tracked chassis codes. The W113 Pagoda (top) has been the strongest performer since May 2024 on the back of the SA→UK arbitrage trade. The R107 has been flat in GBP terms, rising in ZAR purely on rand weakness. The E30 base 325i has been the laggard.
Liquidity score · listings per month vs median days to clear
A car with many listings per month and a short median days-to-clear (top-left quadrant) is the most liquid — easy to value, easy to enter and exit. A car with few listings and a long median days-to-clear (bottom-right) is the patient buyer's bracket: harder to track, but the right one is worth the wait.
Rarity-volatility scatter · listings per month vs price coefficient of variation
Where the scatter pushes up-and-right, a buyer is taking on both rarity and price uncertainty — fundamentally an illiquid-alts pricing problem, the bureau's quant strategist's day-job. Cars near the bottom-left have deep markets and tight price clustering; quote-driven trades work there. Cars at the top-right are negotiated trades, every time.
Days-to-clear distribution · last 12 months · top six chassis
Box-and-whisker by chassis — the median, IQR, and the long tail. A long upper whisker on a high-median chassis tells you the worst-case time-to-sell is materially worse than the median; if you are buying expecting to flip in twelve months, look at the upper whisker, not the median.
The series above are illustrative until the daily scrape has accumulated sixty days of cross-source depth. Each chart re-renders against the live corpus on a daily cadence once that threshold is crossed; the cut-over date will be posted in the Journal. Liquidity scores and volatility are descriptive, not predictive, and are not investment advice. Back to the Advisory. · Takedown.