Good Investment

Watch collectors are clearly quite mad. I have a Rolex myself. Years ago, I ran into people in business who wore expensive watches and who checked out your wrist as a form of credentialing. If you didn’t wear a status watch, they figured you never made enough real money to blow some on a watch. I also got tired of lesser watches breaking and batteries wearing out, so I said: “By gosh, I’ll buy a Rolex, a permanent watch!” What I didn’t know is that every 5-6 years, you’ve got to send that Rolex somewhere to be cleaned and serviced. If you send it to Rolex proper, they’ll nail you about a thousand. I use other watch services.

Younger people often don’t even wear watches. If they need the time, they just look on their phone.

Personally, I kind of enjoy reading about ridiculously expensive watches. I do collect lots of stuff, and here’s an area of recherché expensive collecting that I can read up on, completely immune to any temptation to participate and collect.

And that Paul Newman Oyster Cosmograph, $500,000-$700,000 and it isn’t even self-winding!