Lot & Hammer

Research

What the data actually shows.

Findings built from a verified dataset of more than a thousand auction lots across five houses. Every claim carries a number, a sample size, and a way to be proven wrong.

What a thousand auction lots show about how this market prices 30 Jul 2026

Two thirds of everything sells under estimate. A championship is worth 4.55×. Where a lot sits in the catalogue is worth up to 14.6×. And a finding I had to withdraw.

How this is built

Every sale is captured from the auction house's own published results page — the full population, not the lots I happened to call. Lot by lot, into a dataset that currently runs to more than a thousand entries across Sotheby's, Heritage, Goldin, Grey Flannel and SCP.

That sounds obvious. It isn't what I was doing three days ago, and it cost me a published finding. That retraction is here.

If you want the scoring rules and the baseline a no-skill rule achieves, that's the methodology page.