Singapore is a big watch market because it has a very tight knit and wealthy collector community.
Margins on most watches in this range are around 10% on the low end. I wouldn't call that razor thin.
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.
> 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.
I say "almost" no dealer because some domestic dealers have a 24-48h return policy but they are pretty strict about these things and care way more about their business than any money laundering attempt. They will be very suspicious of you buying in one country and asking for a return label from another.
Similar to fine art. For every purchase of a painting by a collector who's actually going to display it, there are 10-100 being purchased by people who're going to keep them in freeport awaiting resale.
Basically like commodities futures. You don't buy onion futures because you have anything you would personally do with multiple tonnes of onions.
But I think the point is that if I want to transport money from one country to another, I can buy a watch for 30k, take it to the other country, and sell it to a collector relatively easy for probably the same amount of money.
Same if I wanna give a bribe to somebody, I can give them a watch for worth 30K and they can easily sell it for cash to a collector for 30K.
So that person would not be a collector. They would just use it to transfer the value.
It's off topic for this thread, but I'd totally read a blog post about that hobby :)