Stop The Watch Buying Mental Gymnastics...Part 2: Investment/Resale

    

    I'm not sure there's a great order to go in to explore these rationalizations, so I'll just start with what I think is probably one of the weakest reasons to buy a watch: investment value and/or resale value. And I don't mean buying a watch to give to someone as a gift but also as an emergency "life preserver", as people often do with Rolex watches. I'm talking about flipping. Hearing people base their decision making either partially or totally on the invest/resale value of watches drives me absolutely bonkers, and I know I'm not alone with this sentiment. Honestly I think this is a new trend that only emerged in the last five, maybe ten years and largely thanks to social media and more specifically those watch flipper influencers...and maybe to an extent those influencers always trying to sell entrepreneurial courses. 

    I only recently became aware of this investment/reselling while chatting with someone about watches. I mentioned my interest in an IWC reference, to which their response was "the resale values on IWC watches are shitty". The response really threw me off because I've never bought a watch thinking of it's resale value, and it was strange to hear that being expressed as a potential con of buying a given brand and/or reference. After spending some time perusing content from various watch-centric content creators, and subsequently having the algorithm feed me more watch-centric content, this invest/resale value focused perspective kind of started making sense; there's a lot of people out there now making content flipping watches and making some decent money while doing it. In fact, I'd go as far as saying a lot of that content fills the same space as crypto trading, ForEx, day trading, drop shipping, and all the other "be your own boss", hustle culture nonsense...complete with cheesy watch nicknames that sound like shitty weed like "Smurf" and "Batman" as well as subscription based course on watch-flipping.

    It doesn't help much that several references from Rolex, Patek Phillipe, and Audemars Piguet have actually been selling on the grey market for 50-100% above retail, though I do think that some of that grey market price surge is really a chicken-or-egg type of question*. This "broification" of watches and the shift to many taking an invest/resale value centric take on watches does beg the question, why are we spending money on watches that we ultimately lose money on? The answer to that, at least for me, goes back to simply buying watches because you like them. I don't particularly care that people still wet behind the ears when it comes to this hobby-as-a-hustle think Tudor is "a poor man's Rolex", that Omega doesn't hold it's value, or whatever other lukewarm take they may have...because for all the requirements and wants I look for in a watch, one thing that has never been on that list is it's resale value. For most of us, and I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here, we go into buying a watch with the same expectations as when buying a car; I'm paying retail up front knowing that it loses a significant amount of value as soon as I walk out the door. There's always the option to buy secondhand, where someone else has already taken that hit, but that's a topic for another post. The reality is that the few references we're seeing trade significantly above retail right now are isolated exceptions, and frankly pretty extreme exceptions. Some of these watches, like the Rolex Daytona, only gained traction recently; they weren't very popular when they came out. I've heard and read rumors that at one point they were such slow moving watches that ADs were giving them away with the purchase of just about any other Rolex.

    The vast majority of the watch market has always and likely will always adhere more to "new car" rules, so trying to justify your next watch purchase as an investment or flipping opportunity is quite silly unless it's just a ridiculously good deal. Even the watches that are extremely hot in the market now will eventually cool off as tastes and trends change, so it would be somewhat risky to even purchase any of those with the plan of flipping or treating them as an investment. I say this as someone who ended up with a handful of watches a couple times in life that I thought I could make some money on and ended up getting stuck with them; if the  only reason you're looking at a watch is because you think it has investment/resale potential, maybe that's a good indicator to pass on that watch and instead seek out something that you wouldn't mind being stuck with if you end up underwater in your watch-flipping journey. Thankfully my "investment" was quite low and I didn't feel much of a sting financially when I ended up just throwing them away, but had I taken my own advice I probably wouldn't have bought them to begin with. 

    This of course is all just my perspective on it. You might have a completely different take and if so, I'd love to hear it. Feel free to leave some feedback in the comments; this blog was started to be just as much a forum as a an outlet for me to talk about watches.

Take care,

Dillon

*I'm not sure really sure what influenced what, or if it's been somewhat cyclical; did social media push consumer demand, did consumer demand drive the creation of content creation around certain watches, are both things true and it's just compounded by product scarcity (whether real or artificial)? I don't know, nor does it really matter.

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Investment/Resale | Part 3: Pseudo-Intellect