"I never smile if I can help it. Showing one's teeth is a submission signal in primates.
When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life.
seeing this story's headline, my first thoughts were "Lack of liquidity, wide bid/ask spreads".
It's all in how you look at the world.
From City AM:
Last year two anonymous phone bidders made history when their feverish nine minutes of bidding ended with a Patek Philippe 5016A selling for $7.3m – 10 times its estimate. The crowd at the La Reserve Hotel in Geneva burst into spontaneous applause, delighted to have witnessed the sale of the most expensive wrist-watch ever.
Stories like this clearly don't come along every day, but ones in which watches end up selling for six or even seven figures are increasingly common. In May a Rolex Daytona “Paul Newman” Ref. 6263, one of only two known to exist with a brown “tropical” dial, sold for a shade over $2m.
These tales are music to the ears of watch collectors – the idea that one day their endeavours will end not only with a box full of wonderful timepieces, but a big-money payday. It's the ultimate example of having your cake and eating it: you get to own some of the most technically accomplished items on the planet – wearable status-symbols that are more practical than a yacht, more sophisticated than a Ferrari, more enduring than a fine wine – and you can make a profit, too.Rolex reignited the debate at this year’s Baselworld with its double-whammy announcement that it is both releasing a new Oyster Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona, and discontinuing the previous model, leading to a frantic gold-rush to get hold of what's being dubbed the most collectible watch ever made.
...MORE“I've been working in the industry a long time and I don't think there's been a single watch launch that's had the same reaction,” says Nick Tolfree, Boutique Manager at Rolex, One Hyde Park. “We had about 70 cold calls about it the day it was announced. Based on our past allocation, that would fill us up for six years. We did an event in May and two guys – one wearing a Vacheron, the other an AP – slammed down their black Amexs and said 'I'll pay higher than the other guy'. We had to politely decline them both.”...
