Not saying its not a cool thing to collect, well made watches are a very cool piece of engineering, I'm just curious if there's any "special" appeal outside of "i like this thing and have the money to enjoy it" :)
You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.
> Is it kind of like art collections, where its a decent store of value
Art doesn't store value: It trades whatever number the parties exchanging it want it to have, so those parties can manipulate their total annual revenues, which might be confused with value if you cannot think of why else someone would want to tell other people they made more or less money in a year, but is not valuable to anyone else.
I'd argue that that's the very definition of (economic) value. Someone puts a cost on a good/service, and someone who values and can satisfy the cost gets said good/service.
If you buy a €100k rolex, you probably can't be sure you can sell it for more than €100k anywhere at anytime in the future.
You probably can't even find a bank that would take that €100k rolex you just bought as collateral for €500k on a 30y mortgage.
That's why a €1m watch collection is never going to be worth €1m unless we're talking raw materials.
> You can carry them on your person through airports and other places reasonably unmolested in a way carrying a bunch of cash isn't so easy.
Now I have to ask, why do you need to carry a bunch of cash through airports, and why so often that you need a method of doing so?
I'm of course assuming you're doing this for legal reasons, I understand all the reasoning for less legal ones, but then that's hardly comparable to the original question, so I think this is a fair assumption.
> What's the appeal of collecting high priced watches?
At the $100k range you get a lot of things that appeal to a watch enthusiast: true high-horology hand finishing (like handmade anglage and sharp interior angles), some of the more advanced complications, more interesting escapements, etc.
More this. I love wearing what are basically highly complex, mechanical works of art on my wrist. It appeals to both the engineer/nerd and the romantic inside me.
Some watches hold value, others don't. I have some watches that have halved, others that have doubled. But I don't really intend to sell so it's immaterial.