There is no contrarian angle here and I refuse to invent one. The air-cooled Porsche 911 — your 964, your 993, the holy 964 RS, the genuinely-deranged-money 993 GT2 — is the asset everybody pointed at, everybody wrote about, everybody warned was "surely peaking now," for fifteen straight years. And it kept going up.
This offends people. It offends the contrarians because there was no secret. It offends the value crowd because nothing about a £35,000-to-£140,000 964 Carrera 2 looks like value on a spreadsheet. And it offends me slightly, because I'd quite like to tell you a clever story and there isn't one. The clever story is: it's the best-resolved everyday driver's car of the 20th century and they stopped making it the way enthusiasts wanted in 1998. That's it. That's the model.
Why it actually works as money
Liquidity. This is the bit people miss when they're busy being smug about how obvious it was. The reason the air-cooled 911 behaves like a financial instrument is that it trades like one. There is a buyer for a clean 993 every single week, in three currencies, on four continents. Try selling a thinly-traded 1970s exotic in a soft market and you'll discover what illiquidity costs you — roughly "all of your gains, and your weekends."
The air-cooled car never makes you wait. That is worth a premium and the market correctly charges one.
The honest risk
The risk isn't that air-cooled 911s "crash." It's that they do nothing for five years while you pay to store, insure and fettle one, and the opportunity cost quietly eats the thesis. Appreciation has flattened from "vertical" to "respectable." Respectable minus carrying costs can be zero.
So the play, if there is one, is not "buy a 911." It's "buy the *right* air-cooled 911" — specification, originality, history, the boring documented stuff — because in a maturing market the spread between the average car and the exceptional car widens, and that spread is now where the actual return lives.
It was always obvious. It was always right. It is now mostly priced. All three of those things are true at once, which is the most Porsche thing imaginable.