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Rights, claims & intangibles
Permission, entitlement and ownership of things you cannot touch.
Some of the most valuable tradeable assets are purely legal constructs: the right to emit a tonne of carbon, the right to land a plane at Heathrow at 8am, the right to collect royalties whenever a song is streamed.
These markets are usually created deliberately by a government or a registry that decides how many units exist. That makes them fascinating and dangerous in equal measure — the supply of the asset can be changed by a policy decision you do not control.
Carbon credits & allowances
The right to emit a tonne of CO₂ — a commodity created entirely by policy, in two markets that are frequently confused and b…
No. 018Domain names
Rented strings of text with no intrinsic value and occasionally seven-figure prices, transferred in minutes rather than mont…
No. 003Airport slots
Permission to use a runway at a given time on a given day — worth tens of millions of pounds at Heathrow, and not, technical…
No. 021Event tickets
A time-stamped licence to occupy a seat, resold in a market where the UK has taken an unusually interventionist turn.
No. 026Fishing quota
The right to catch a tonne of a named species in a named area — created by law, concentrated in remarkably few hands, and wo…
No. 040Music royalties
A share of the income a song earns whenever it is streamed, played or licensed — a genuine annuity, priced as a multiple of …
No. 043Non-fungible tokens
A blockchain record pointing at something, sold as ownership of it — a market that peaked at billions and lost most of its v…
No. 046Patents & intellectual property
Time-limited legal monopolies that can be sold, licensed or enforced — and which are worth nothing at all unless someone is …
No. 048Personalised registrations
A string of characters on a car, sold by the state, held on a retention certificate — Britain’s purest market in pure status.
No. 051Radio spectrum
Licences to transmit on particular frequencies — a finite natural resource, auctioned by the state for billions, and the rea…
No. 064Water abstraction rights
Permission to take water from a river or aquifer — a licence, not a possession, and increasingly the binding constraint on b…