ANTIESTABLISHMENTARIAN

The funeral procession continues for recreational boating. National Liquidators reaches a new high of 444 boats at auction this week. And the average size keeps on growing. Meanwhile, Brunswick and Marine Max flirt with insolvency with stocks now down in the $2 range.

I just saw that Brunswick “declared a dividend.” Oh, that is funny, very funny, just like the bankrupt Wall Street banks declaring dividends. They do this, of course, to keep up the stock price and maintain the fiction of solvency. Ummmhummm.

It is very difficult to glean much relevant information about the state of the industry from the Internet. Like everything else, its all “Yea, rah, go team, sunshine and happiness.” I had to abandon my efforts at evaluating used boat prices as it is simply too time consuming. Moreover, I think the spread between ask and offer has probably expanded hugely. It used to be a very consistent 10%, but I doubt that is the case now. However, I was able to do a quick search on how many Sea Ray boats are listed for sale on the ‘net, an incredible 36,100 boats on six different listing services with a total of 583,582 used boat listed for sale. This accounts for nearly half of all inboard power boats in existence.[1]

One other point of interest, but its a biggie. Of 125,000 listings on Yachtworld, on last Friday there were only six listed as “pending.” That little item tells me everything I need to know. Moreover, the total listings has now exceeded the previous high following the dotcom and tech mess bust, 124,000. But, at that time all these other listing sites did not exist, so the current number is very substantially diluted, as they say in the stuck market business.

[1] Due to the inconsistent nature of state registration data, the number of inboard powerboat data can range from around 600,000 to 1.4 million, depending on whether they count stern drive boats as inboards. Therefore I picked the median as an estimate. The number of powerboats over 30′ is about 650,000. The matter gets further confused by the proliferation of very large outboard boats which I include in my powerboat category of midsize and up.