Quote:
Originally Posted by monkeybingo
Not sure what you do for living.. but in my industry, I meet with a lot of high end clients and CEO/CFOs. I would be scared to pull a fake watch in front of them and lose my credentials. To be honest, buying watch is a great investment.
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I have yet to find a watch, other than a vintage watch that has already shown itself to appreciate in value, that even comes close to a passbook savings account in terms of investment quality and value appreciation. A watch is a great thing to buy, but good investment, not at all. I also haven't come across an investment advisor or financial planner who's even so much as hinted that a watch, no matter what one spends on it, is anything other than a discretionary expenditure. Not one I've ever spoken with has thought of watches as appreciating investments.
Can one buy a contemporary watch that will appreciate in price? Yes, one can. The watches that will do that aren't the watches I ever see folks in places like Bimmerpost discussing. Moreover, I can't imagine many folks building a portfolio of watches with the intent of using them as a part of their long term wealth building strategy.
Are there individual watches that offer a bit of promise? Yes, there are. Are they going to appreciate before they depreciate? In most cases, no. Are there rarefied exceptions? Yes. I'm suspect the buyer of the PP Super Complication, were he to put it on the market next year would realize a gain on the sale. Folks who bought a Piaget Year of the Dragon and today offer it for sale would probably see a gain on the sale.
As a personal example, I bought a PP Calatrava 3520 in the early 1990s. I paid ~$10K for it. Only in the past year have the resale prices for that watch risen to $10K or so, and occasionally I see them being listed at ~$12K.
That may seem like the value of my watch has finally recovered. It has not. Even using the most optimistic price point, one sees that adjusted for inflation, $12K today corresponds to ~$7K in early 1990s money. Had I instead taken my $10K and purchased an investment instrument that appreciated in accordance with inflation, I'd have ~$16K today. Of course few of us have investment instruments that don't outperform inflation.
The short is that there are watches that hold on to more of their MSRP than others, but the overwhelming majority of them are pure crap as investments, no matter how nice they are. That's not to say that the odd fellow here and there didn't "get lucky" buying a watch at a good discount and later selling it for a bit of a profit, but even there, I would bet that I can count on my fingers and toes the number of people who can do that consistently, year over year, and best the rate of return on something so simple as an index mutual fund or certificate of deposit. To be an investment, that's what one needs to be able to do.
All the best.