PROTECTING TIME
AS CAPITAL

 

For serious collectors, a luxury watch is no longer an accessory. It is a mobile asset class. Highly liquid, globally tradable, and often appreciating faster than traditional stores of value, fine timepieces now sit alongside art, wine, and classic cars in sophisticated portfolios. Yet unlike other collectible assets, watches are uniquely vulnerable. They are worn, visible, and easily transported, which makes them both desirable and exposed.

Data from The Watch Register, the world’s largest international database of lost and stolen watches, underscores just how material this risk has become. Thousands of luxury watches are reported stolen each year, many disappearing from one market and resurfacing in another within days. From a financial standpoint, this is not merely a personal security issue. It is a portfolio management concern.

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The scale of watch crime has elevated the need for collectors to think in institutional terms. In recent years, more than ten thousand watches with unique serial numbers have been registered annually as lost or stolen, the equivalent of one luxury watch every hour. This has driven a sharp increase in due diligence activity across the secondary market, with hundreds of thousands of theft checks now conducted each year by dealers, auction houses, and insurers.

What makes watches particularly challenging as assets is their dual nature. They are both wearable and valuable, which means exposure is constant. High-profile brands, especially Rolex, account for a disproportionate share of theft reports, not because they lack security features, but because recognizability fuels demand in illicit resale markets. Visibility creates liquidity, and liquidity creates risk.

For collectors, the financial implications are clear. Insurance alone is no longer sufficient protection. While coverage may reimburse market value, it cannot replace provenance, sentiment, or time spent assembling a collection. Nor does insurance prevent a stolen watch from circulating through the grey market, potentially creating legal and reputational complications years later.

This is where professional-grade collection management becomes essential. Recording serial numbers, ownership documentation, and registering watches with an international database significantly improves the likelihood of recovery. In fact, nearly half of all watches located through The Watch Register are found within a year, many before they are permanently absorbed into the global resale ecosystem.

There is also a growing misconception among buyers that box and papers guarantee legitimacy. In reality, a substantial number of recovered stolen watches surface with convincing documentation, much of it fabricated. From an investment perspective, this reinforces the importance of verification at every transaction point, particularly as pre-owned watches continue to outperform many traditional luxury segments.

For family offices and wealth advisors, watches should now be treated similarly to fine art. That means structured oversight, controlled use, and clear protocols for travel, storage, and resale. Some collectors are even beginning to separate “wearable” pieces from “investment grade” holdings, keeping the latter in secure storage and rotating lower-risk pieces for daily use.

The broader lesson is that as alternative assets grow in prominence, so too must the infrastructure that protects them. Just as collectors rely on climate control for wine or freeports for art, watch investors must adopt systems that reflect the realities of a global, fast-moving secondary market.

Luxury timepieces remain powerful stores of value, but only when ownership is protected with the same discipline used to acquire them. In an era where a watch can cross borders faster than its owner, safeguarding time itself has become a matter of strategy, not sentiment.

www.thewatchregister.com