Go to a farmer, say, "Let me rent your Alpaca for 100 dollars per year", then sell it on the open market for (whatever) 1000 dollars. Then, wait for the prices to crash, buy them back for 50 dollars. Profit. That's what short selling is. Warning: One Alpaca could just as easily bankrupt you.
1. Short selling works for commodities because both sides of the deal agree on the equivalence of entities (a stock, gold brick, whatever). However, what are the specs that make another alpaca equivalent? Some negotiation would be involved.
2. Trust. The seller has to trust me to return an alpaca. To them, someone approaching with such a deal might as well be Bernie Madoff. Ironic given that they themselves have already opted into a bubble of equal proportion.
Anybody have any ideas? The effective value of these animals will approach zero. It's just a matter of when.
Googling a bit I found an article http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/national/28alpaca.html?pag... implying that the "people are realizing this is a bubble" stage of the bubble stretches as far back as 2004. And one guy quoted in the article says:
When I started, I would tell people I thought the market would be good for another five years. Well, I've been saying that for 15 years
Still, alpacas wouldn't be the first bubble in a useless commodity to stretch on for several generations. (That honour belongs, I suppose, to gold -- a bubble at least five thousand years old and still going strong.)
http://www.agecon.ucdavis.edu/extension/update/articles/v9n3...
It's too bad I didn't read this comment earlier today or I would have quizzed her about her childhood obsessions.