Watches Are yet Another Easy Way Rich People Make Their Money into More Money | Hacker News Reader

Watches Are yet Another Easy Way Rich People Make Their Money into More Money

nytimes.com

20 pointsdanso16 comments

This article is trying a little hard to push its agenda.

Collecting watches is a lot like collecting art. A well chosen collection can hold, or even increase in value over time, but most people lose money. Maintenance can be $100 / year or more. Insurance can be a couple percent of the value per year. And trends are anything but "easy" to predict.

Is this a submarine piece for luxury watches? Because it reads so bizarre, and tries so hard to take itself seriously.

Probably? I suppose the basic claim is that watches become rare and collectible where other kinds of jewelry tend to remain worth near what you paid for them (in the sense that the materials and craft involved aren't much different 30yrs from now). In both cases if you wear them regularly they will be worth less than if you sock them away (and the watches will need to be oiled and adjusted).

Much like cars in style of marketing, but a whole lot less useful since they take you nowhere, get lost more easily and everyone carries a mobile, it's basically true to say that watches are for two major categories of people: (1) suckers; and (2) people with cultural references from a bygone era fishing for social credit.

Exhibit A: India is obsessed by watches. It's the way to indicate the class you will never achieve because that world died decades ago but nobody's in India's yet noticed. It seems logic is the last untouchable.

Exhibit B: Loads of luxury watch ads I saw in Hong Kong this week associating time with breaking rules (Central), mountain climbing (Wanchai), and other such nonsense. What to say? Awesome, Anson. Far out, Frederick. Happening, Herbert. Rocking, Raymond. Striking, Samson.

The thing with expensive watches is they recommend to send them in for maintenance every 2-or-so years which isn't cheap, I know sending my watch costs me ~$500 for maintenance which was about 1/4 of the total price. Granted, it comes back looking brand new but I'm skeptical to believe that my watch will be appreciating greater than the costs of owning it. Then again, my watch isn't rare or crazy expensive, I just happen to really like it.

That's a bit too frequent. More like 5 years... or longer if you can get away with it and don't care.

What watch do you own?

For the price of the watch (mid-end) and the price of the maintenance (fairly high end), I'm guessing Omega, but maybe a Breitling ? Doubt it's a Tag because of the maintenance cost

Cartier, Rolex, Patek Phillipe, and those brands don't really have watches in the $2K range.

Rolex recommends every ten years for maintanece, unless you damage it or notice it not keeping time correctly.

Anecdata and not fully fully researched as I have no plans to sell my watch, but very shortly after I bought mine, the manufacturer raised their base prices, to the extent where it appears, even although I don’t have the most desirable model, to have covered the deprication I face from wearing the watch daily. At best it’s held it’s value, at worst it’s not ‘lost’ much either.

Maybe yours is way more expensive, but the $300 brands I buy tend to go down in price as new models come out.

Its a fashion accessory to me, dont even use it for time as we have smart phones nowadays. Just the skeleton looks cool.

I'd say the minimum requirement for a watch to be able to hold it's value is the following: Contain an in-house Swiss automatic movement.

There might be exceptions, but there will be very very few.

My watch is the second most expensive thing I own, and my car is depreciating rapidly.

I don't have any intention of selling my speedmaster though. Maybe if it suddenly shot up to insane prices (it's a limited edition), but I like the watch.

You can replace 'watch' with 'bitcoin' and the article still works.

You think just like a NYT editor apparently; from the bottom of the page:

> A version of this article appears in print on March 20, 2019, on Page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Watches Are the New Bitcoin.

like.. uncanny:

“I convinced her — I think — that it was much more practical to invest regularly in bitcoin that I know about rather than the stock market that I know absolutely nothing about,”

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