Welcome to Cultural Assets Insider – FREE Version. We use Moneyball tactics to discover undervalued, mispriced, and hidden gems in Fractional Investing.
Today, we’re covering investment opportunities for Meteorites:
- A Lunar Meteorite IPO’ing on Rally
- Opportunities to buy tiny slices of this same meteorite. Like actual fractions of it that you can have in your house.
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Table of Contents
Lunar Meteorite
About the asset
NWA 13964 was found in 2021 (Rally’s write up says 2020, but the Meteoritical Society says 2021) in Mali, in Northwest Africa. The whole item weighs 6.5kg and is broken into two pieces. The chunk IPOing with Rally is the bigger one, weighing in at 4.63kg (10.2lbs).
The 6.5kg worth of moon rock made its way from Mali to an unnamed Algerian meteorite dealer, who sold it to Craig Zlimen and Mark Lyon in March 2021. Zlimen is a part-time meteorites dealer in Minnesota with an unfinished Shopify store called Minnesota Meteorites. Lyon is a full-time meteorites dealer and college admissions counsellor in Arizona. You can visit his eBay store if you’d like.
The pair of parttime / fulltime meteorite dealers sold NWA 13964 to Alan Ginsberg (not the famous but dead poet, unfortunately). I couldn’t find anything about Alan.
In April 2021, Alan decided to split up the pair of meteorites. He sold the larger chunk to Rally for $185k, keeping a 25% stake in the asset.
I couldn’t establish a confirmed chain of custody for the smaller chunk, but it’s been sliced up into smaller components and is making its way around online marketplaces.
Matt992011 is auctioning it off piece by piece on eBay, and he’s sold 14 pieces so far. The going price looks to be around $50 to $100 per gram.
Someone named Christopher is selling pieces off on Etsy.
I won’t go into the chemistry of the rock, because I don’t know what any of the words mean, but you can have a look at the Meteoritical Society analysis if you’d like to dig into the details.
About the drop
This asset will drop on Rally 20th August at noon EST. The market cap is $350k with 25% retained equity.
Add IPO to calendar
About Meteorites
Ready to get your science on?
A meteorite is a solid object that originates in outer space and survives the descent to earth.
Let’s be clear on what a meteorite isn’t. It’s not a meteoroid, a meteor, or an asteroid.
- A meteoroid is an object in space ranging in size from a dust grain to a meter in diameter. A space rock.
- A meteor is a meteoroid that enters Earth’s atmosphere (or another planet) and burns up. A shooting star.
- An asteroid is a large object (>1m) orbiting the sun. Smaller than a planet but larger than a meteoroid.
So a meteorite started as a meteoroid, survived the descent to earth as a meteor and became a meteorite.
Here’s an image I grabbed from a really terrible YouTube video (click the image to watch).
Clear?
So our meteorite is more special than a normal meteorite, because it’s come from the surface of the moon.
We don’t know for sure where on the moon’s surface the meteorite came from, but we do know it was probably launched from the moon by an asteroid or comet impact within the last 100,000 years. It was likely in earth’s orbit for quite some time before it succumbed to gravity and entered the atmosphere.As a quick side note, it’s very likely that there are earth meteorites on the surface of the moon from billions of years ago during our planet’s formation. There could even be stones there that no longer exist on earth, because they’ve been destroyed by various geological forces over the last 3.9 billion years.
Around one in every thousand meteorites found on earth comes from the moon; the vast majority originate in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Lunar meteorite finds are found in just a few places on earth – dry deserts where geologic mechanisms concentrate the meteorites, where terrestrial rocks are rare, and where they won’t weather away due to exposure to water:
- Northern Africa (74.7%)
- Oman (15.5%)
- Antarctica (9%)
- Other (0.84%)
Presumably lunar meteorites have fallen with even distribution all over the world, but none have been found in temperate climates. Further, all lunar meteorites have be found – not observed – which means no one has ever seen a lunar meteor fall to the ground (that we know of). Lots of martian meteorites have been observed hitting the earth for some reason.
Recent sales history and Valuation
[Detailed valuation for Insiders]
Inferred value is $230k to $350k
