How hard is it to get the rolex you want

893bet wrote: »

I take away the average watch are poor investments when you take inflation into account.

Indeed. Now what follows is only my humble... In my opinion there is most certainly concerning trends in watches at the moment, vintage, new, Rolex or not. This isn't my first rodeo with seeing watches bubble and then deflate. I've been collecting watches off and on since the early 80's, when "old watches" unless they were in a precious metal were just old. So if I sold off my collection, yep I wouldn't lose money and in pretty much all cases double, triple or more my original "investment".

However I got most of them years ago, certainly the bulk before around 2010 when I could sniff the market changing. I saw it first shift in the area of military issued pieces. They were mostly at the cheap to middling end of the market and not so fashionable, but then were cool hunted by a few non watch magazines and "influencers" and went more mainstream and the prices started to climb and climb and then the supply of the most wanted dried up, then lesser stuff got added to the mix so long as it was issued and then their prices started to climb. Within 18 months you had watches that once went for around 200 quid, grow a zero at the end. Today? The supply has all but dried up, prices are stratospheric and collectors are hanging onto what they have. The market is stagnant.

You can observe another concerning factor by comparing BIN prices with low reserve auctions on ebay. When an item is roughly within say 20% BIN/Auction then that's a healthy market, when the market then has auctions ending at say 500 quid, but all the BIN prices are well over double that, that's not such a healthy market. Another thing observed on ebay when things are turning is very few auctions, nearly all BIN stuff. And they're staying for months not sold.

Back in the 90's Rolex Bubblebacks and early Oysters were very fashionable and collected like mad, they went a bit mainstream and prices went crazy and again the dealer prices went nuts and then... overnight the market collapsed. When was the last time you even read an article about them? In 1999 you'd have been hard pressed to avoid reading one and you weren't a collector if you didn't have an example of one.

On the going mainstream front: this was once a very niche hobby. Which while cheap to get into, information was hard if not impossible to come by and buying a pup was more common. EG in the late 80's I was offered a Rolex Milsub for 1500 pounds. Well outa my comfort zone, but even if it hadn't been I wouldn't have been sure it was a good one and I wouldn't have had much of a clue what it even was(I didn't). Then there's a period just before it goes mainstream where collectors get together and info and watches are shared among them. That's about the peak of the hobby in many ways. Then you get outfits like Hodinkee, which start off a welcome new player and resource, but then end up selling overpriced under researched tat on their website to newbies looking for fashion items and "investments" and god does nobody want to call emperors new clothes on that. They're too invested.

If you want to see how a collectors market can go, observe the rise and subsequent fall in values of old film posters and it followed the same narrative as above.

Now yes Rolex have generally always been bloody good as money substitutes(though again I saw steel cased examples go for feck all at one time and vintage Daytonas are rare enough, simply because they didn't sell well in period), but lately they're pulling the DeBeers angle with market restrictions and suggestions of extreme rarity. That's not a good sign and is not sustainable.

Apologies for the rant, but TL;DR? Buy what you like and will wear and enjoy wearing and forget the "market" and god, please forget the hype. Secondly a very good maxim on investments goes; buy when everyone else is selling, sell when everyone else is buying, never buy/sell when everyone else is.

theheavyhitter wrote: »

With regard to vintage military pieces. What do you think of the CWC RN Diver's from the 1980's?
I always wondered why they weren't as collectible as say the 5513 Milsub, and Seamaster 300 Milsub; respectively.

Fashion, marketing and the brand name effect. Simple as that pretty much. You see this in other vintage issued divers. So an issued Italian navy Panerai is mad money, but an issued Italian navy Breil can be had for 5-600 quid and the Breil is arguably the better watch, but it was a Panerai Sly Stallone wore in a flic and then bought more.

Ditto for issued French airforce Type XX. The Breguet makes the huge bucks just because of the name on the dial. It's a bought in movement the cases are so so, but it has that name, even though the company had(and has) as much connection to the original Breguet as I do. The French government noted this when Breguet started raising their prices compared to Dodane and the rest and told them to feck off. Hence there are more Breguet XX's that are "civilian", they had to sell them off.

There was always some hype and marketing in the watch market, but the Swiss really revved it up during the Swiss mechanical revival in the 80's(made possible by the financial war chest built up by selling cheap plastic quartz Swatches and remember the hype over them) and went to town on it since the interwebs grew and watches became more and more a male jewellery item. Some of the marketing howlers that nearly all the big names have come out with could fill a book. Rolex were always fantastically clever at marketing. Their founder Wilsdorf was a true genius at spotting a market and appealing to it. He doesn't get nearly enough credit there.

Take "superlative chronometer" on the dials. That's a trademark. In the actual chronometer trials of the 20th century they were barely in the mix, only making some headway in the mid 60's. Zenith, Longines, Omega, Movado and Nardin(who? exactly) blew the doors off them. They've also been clever in more recent times in avoiding howlers by letting their fans say stuff that they can distance themselves from. They'll even avoid authenticating vintage pieces, preferring collectors and dealers to slug it out.

And it worked and fair play to them and they do make some extremely nice well built tool watches, but always be aware of the hype with any brand, especially when prices have climbed to a scary level over the last few decades. The Omega Speedmaster for example when allowing for inflation, wages etc has gone up in price by over four times since Neil Armstrong wore one. The Rolex Sub, which was once the same price range as similar divers from Omega, Longines etc(because they were independent companies vying for the same buyers and a waiting list would mean buyers would go for something else) has gone through the roof in price.

893bet wrote: »

Very few watches are rare.

Yup and even actually "rare" alone means very little in most cases. I'm sure I could trawl ebay tonight with a budget of a 1000 quid and find examples of vintage watches that are vanishingly rare and often from known marques. Hell I've got watches that there are only a few known, like sub ten examples known, even single examples, that cost me under 300 quid. Up that to say the price of an icon like a new basic Rolex Sub(6-7K? haven't looked recently) and give me a few days and I will find you interestingly even horology changing vintage pieces from well known marques that you'd travel a very long way to find another. 10k? Hold my beer...

Almost by definition commercially available pretty mass produced items aren't rare. If they were we wouldn't have a hobby, or it would be only a few dozen very rich types who could get into it. With any luxury Veblen good perception is a large percentage of the value we and the makers attribute to them. And that's cool by the way. Like I say if wristwatches were actually made from the finest unobtanium, handcrafted by Swiss gnomes in a hidden magical valley at a rate of ten a year we wouldn't have all the cool watches we can lust over and own. I would just suggest be wary of the hype when that starts to take over some areas.

Funk, you had me right up to the (for me obviously) part.