The direction of the collection - Some new thoughts

[Bearxj86]

Hi everyone - I hope everyone is safe and doing well during these very difficult times.

I myself have still been doing a fair bit of watch buying/trading these months, but I wanted to share some revelations and thoughts with all of you. Some of it is an admission of guilt, and others are perhaps the process of self discovery for a novice collection such as myself.

For the first few years of watch collecting, I stuck with the basic steel watches, a Panerai, a rolex submariner steel (pre-ceramic), an omega speedmaster. In the beginning of course, my watch philosophy was on steel sports due to relatively low cost and of course versatility.

Pretty much everything changed with the purchase of the Patek Aquanaut in 2017, leading to the frenzy of the past 3 years... with countless sports and dress watches in and out of the collection, establishing relationships with Patek, AP, and Rolex ADs. One thing has remained consistent, I couldn't keep a full gold watch with gold bracelet for long. Several brushes with more "discrete" gold bracelet watches did not go well- two 5711Rs, full yellow gold 16808 (vintage), and recently even a YG birth year 36mm day date; all did not stay for more than 2 months. The difficult economic times recently has made me even more uncomfortable to wear these gold bracelet watches regardless of cost. I've even found myself selling some of my modern APs and most of my modern rolexes and Pateks because they are too "flashy". I'm also starting to much prefer discontinued pieces vs current production pieces.

It's actually quite interesting. This year (2020), I am actually spending MORE time and money on watches but it is vintage/neo-vintage Patek and vintage Rolex - also smaller watches, moving from the 40mm range to the 36mm range. However I feel like I am falling in love with watches all over again (had some Nauti/Aqua fatigue) and perhaps now for the "right" reasons? No one is watching my wrist since I am at home. I am buying books, I am reading, and I am talking to experts and really trying to be a student of the trade.

Anyway, thought I would share this revelation. I am going to probably be going down this vintage/classic track for the foreseeable future. Anyone else doing that today or did that in the past?