Is this the most overpriced vintage watch?

blue5000

We have a thread for 'Today's bargain watch that I'm not buying'. But I discovered this seller on ebay, perhaps he's a little........I dunno, over optimistic, dream on

http://www.ebay.com/itm/1957-Longines-Conquest-with-Longines-Bracelet-Longines-Box-Make-Your-Offer-/262798904099?hash=item3d30090b23:g:emUAAOSwFqJWpNwP

Ok it has the original crown, the bracelet and a box. But all the enamel is gone off the logo. On the plus side it does make me feel a bit better about some (not all:o) of the Longines watches I bought. Needless to say I haven't got excited enough (yet) to work myself up to making an offer.

I'm sure there are more examples out there.

Wibbs

Ha! Your man must be hitting the bong at that price. Still, many dealers will take a chance hoping the ill informed might bite. This can work pretty well in a growing fashionable market, but IMHO the vintage watch market is stagnating and fast and soon to be really stagnant.

Basically vintage prices on anything with a recognisable name(or not in many cases. QV Enicar) have gone too expensive for newbies entering the market, so fewer and fewer are. Because of the high prices long term collectors are tending to hang onto their stuff, especially the signature pieces, so fewer and fewer good pieces are hitting the open market and when they do they're mad money with lots of buyer competition, further putting off all but the more flush. This is noticeable even on eBay. The ratio of open auctions to But It Now has gone much more towards the Buy It Now on anything but the really niche and not so contested stuff. The market is jittery and not so sure about the real values of pieces and so many go unsold for an age, if they sell at all.

EG in a niche area; Military issued watches. 20 years ago you could pick up all sorts for affordable money and had lots and lots of choice. That was still pretty much the case even five years ago. One of the issued "Dirty Dozen" could be had for a couple of hundred quid, now try nearly a grand for most and for some a few multiples of that. Longines DH's were 5-800 quid, now…

Even in the once "ohmigod it's a battery" *horrified face* niche the examples are getting far thinner even in the last year. Two years ago you could get say a GP 300 quartz in auction for about 100-200 quid tops and there was a page of them at any one time. Now they're nearly all dealers wanting 5, 600 and beyond. When auctions do come up they still go for maybe 200 quid. Again the market is stagnant and sellers jittery.

Hodinkee's success drove the market, especially among man bag hipsters, but even that's dying off and will die off completely pretty soon IMH. Sure you will always have the daft million dollar auction hyped nonsense where the same watches change hands in unseemly short time intervals, that the tax man should be interested in, but that's an extremely rarified market of fund managers having a willy measuring contest.