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Why I Just Bought My First NFT, and What I Learned

An NFT of the New York Mets retired player’s “most famous sports contract of all time”

Stephen Foerster
10 min readAug 17, 2022
Image of bobby Bonilla the Contract NFT
Image from Twitter: https://twitter.com/BobbyBonillaNFT

I just bought my first non-fungible token, commonly known as an NFT. If you know me, you may be surprised. I recently wrote a book with Andrew Lo, In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio, where we interviewed ten luminaries, include six Nobel laureates, as we traced the development of modern portfolio theory. A recurring theme in our book is the importance of a buy-and-hold strategy that rely heavily on traditional stock and bond index funds. There’s no mention in the book of NFTs, or cryptocurrencies for that matter. So why did I buy an NFT? Let’s start George Mallory’s quip, when asked why we wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it’s there.” I was intrigued with NFTs, wanted to learn more, and wanted to see what the process of buying one was all about. When I was young, I enjoyed collecting sports cards. This particular NFT was sports-related, piqued my interest because of a previous blog I had written about Bobby Bonilla, and it sounded fun. If you want to really learn about something then just do it.

NFTs: The Basics
According to Investopedia, NFTs are “cryptographic assets on a blockchain with unique identification codes and metadata that distinguish them from each other.” Let’s parse…

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Stephen Foerster
Stephen Foerster

Written by Stephen Foerster

I’m an award-winning author and Finance prof, CFA. I write stories about investing and investment history. (I don’t give financial advice.)

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