It has become common knowledge that certain classes of consumer goods such as electronics and cars depreciate in price exponentially over time because of a larger supply of newer, upgraded, models being in the market.
Are there financial instruments which simply track the retail value of something like a brand new car over time, or allows you to speculate on the future values of these items? Could this be used by companies which hold large inventories to hedge some of the depreciation risk?
While an index could be defined for the price of a depreciating consumer good, no market-traded instrument could directly track such an index, because there would be only sellers and no buyers. The closest thing to people who "buy" the index are actual consumers who get some use from the product in exchange for the depreciation.
Shorting requires a lender who is happy to provide the product now and receive the same product back later, which in reality would only be agreed to with a large fee that would compensate the depreciation and wipe out the short trader's profit.
What can exist is a futures contract for a depreciating good, which is priced to account for the expected depreciation. The market would always be in backwardation, and shorting a future would effectively incur the "fee" mentioned above. This would strictly accomplish what you asked, "hedge some of the depreciation risk", which is only the unexpected part of the depreciation (fluctuation from the mean). The expected (mean) depreciation is not a pure risk and cannot be hedged away.
The only real solution for the companies you mention is to minimize inventory.
See this answer for similar cases where an index can only be traded as a futures contract, not directly, because it has predictable trends.
You can find people that own those assets, ask to borrow them, immediatelly selling them on ebay, waiting, buying the same product at a lower price, giving it back to the person you borrowed from, but pocketing the cash remaining for yourself.
