Rolex Vintage Single Red Sea-Dweller Sold for Half Million Dollars

[profzhu]

Some of these crazy prices are money laundering exercise, lets just say Mr. Black wants 1m dollars from Mr.White. Due to tax or conflict of interest etc Mr. White cannot transfer funds direct to Mr. Black accounts. So instead Mr. Black buys a watch/artwork for $1m he then places it in auction and Mr. Whites with accomplices bids on it so it reaches $2m, and he now pays the auction house who then pays Mr. Black....

For money laundering casino is a much better option. The fees that you pay at a auction house is around 25% for sub $100,000 and an average of 20% for around $1mil and around 12% for above $2mil. While it is still less than what you pay for taxes, there are much better ways to launder money. There is a reason why casinos in Singapore and Macau are the highest earning casinos in the world.

One way of explaining ever increasing prices of vintage watches is simple supply and demand. Vintage watches are only going to get rarer as the supply is fixed. And demand is not going anywhere anytime soon other than up.