And the winner of dreamer of the year is...

Cyrus wrote: »

already done :P hulk gone and gmt is off today, im sure i have timed this wrong but i think my money is going to go into watches that are selling at a steep discount (like my JLC PC) rather than a steep premium.

Much better bet in my humble and follows the age old good advice of sell when everyone else is buying, buy when everyone else is selling.

And the current Rolex market looks near letter perfect for a market bubble. The degree of how far it will go and how far the market will soften is in my humble the only variables.

We've got a wider talk about the brand far beyond the norm and beyond the usual watch buyers. We have a boom in prices along with that wider interest and we have media and dealers egging it on and we have more dealers and flippers in the market. We've talk of investment in an area not noted for it before. We've got the fear of missing out as Fitz noted. People being priced out of the original top assets buying anything at the "lower end" that's connected to them. We've had a fairly recent rise in the number of sellers thinking they'll get out when the getting's good, or hoping to. We see some hoarding on the worry that this rising market will keep rising so hang onto assets until they get more valuable at some unspecified point in the future is another sign. The only sign I haven't seen is the getting into debt to get onboard? That and the fact that Rolex are making new watches on an industrial scale, but restricting supply.

It doesn't take much to burst a bubble. The slightest ripple of "eh hang on?" can start it. Stagnation can do it too. They were significantly smaller markets but I've seen similar with early Oysters in the 90's, Panerai for a time, military watches. Outside of watches, movie posters followed the same trajectory, as do classic cars. When the dust settles values fall across the board, the most insulated being the truly rare/sought after examples. The "entry level" goes back to under value in the used market.

Something like a Rolex Comex is always going to hold big value, ditto for say an original King Kong movie poster, or a Mclarern F1. A basic Oyster perpetual or a Jurassic park poster or a Peugeot 205 not so much.

"This is highly collectable and will only go up in price" more BubbleSpeak.

This is more for the older chaps and chappesses around here, but some of you might remember the Buy&Sell weekly classifieds paper. Remember the buzz over the Circle of Hands 50p piece? Lord knows how it kicked off but it someone, somewhere, somehow got it into their heads they were vey rare and worth a few quid and convinced more that this was the case, who in turn convinced more and more until remarkably quickly they were changing hands for 50 quid. Until after warnings in the media seemed to make people cop on and it collapsed overnight. A tiny Ireland based Tulip madness. Now no way in hell is a Rolex a relatively valueless item. They are a very nice watch, but the madness seems very similar.