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Good evening.

Anyone have hands-on experience with the Breitling Top TIme B01? The corvette sting ray model (red dial) has caught my eye, however, I'm torn between the leather strap & bracelet.

Anyone own one?

Thanks.

Scott

I am looking at selling some watches from my collection that I don’t wear (and don’t love) to make room for some new ones. Top of the list is an AP Code chronograph that I bought for access to a Royal Oak. What are the best ways to sell a watch, should I do it privately on Chronos, one of the smaller sites like Bevel or Grailzee or should I sell to a large dealer (like 1916) as I am willing to trade for a watch I like better?

I have an oris Propilot x (the skeletonized one) that i purchased about 4-5 years ago. (maybe 18 mos after they came out). I bought it pre-owned off of ebay and this was before they had the verification process they do now. I got a good deal but not a crazy good deal.. Like similar to what the lowest prices were for the same on Chrono 24.

So around a year and a half ago now it stopped working. some problem with the keyless works and you cant set it. Its not that big of a problem, i mean the watch runs otherwise, but it needs a part. I took it to several watchmakers and they said they cant get the parts, that only Oris has the parts and i guess they dont make it possible for watchmakers to order.

SO i sent it to the oris US service center (which I think is just a watchmaker, not really part of oris) and they said they cant work on the watch because its on the stolen watches list. Yikes. I had no idea, obviously.

Miraculously i managed to get ahold of the original seller who is no longer selling on ebay He was apologetic, claimed he had bought it from someone else and had no idea it was stolen. But basically he wasnt willing to do much to help nor was ebay since the transaction had occurred years earlier. I had basically no leverage.

The US service center offered to send the watch to oris but i was fearful of what would happen if they did that so i told them to send it back to me, which they did.

But now I have this watch, doesnt work, and i dont know what I can do to get it repaired.

Any ideas/suggestions as to how to proceed?

thx!

Now that we're somewhat in recession territory for many new watches at the retail level (excluding Rolex, of course), I'm curious about the discount levels that can be found from multi-brand boutiques. If we don't count highly desirable models from large brands, what kind of discount off MSRP can be achieved with a little discussion? A brand like Moser, or Armin Strom, makes high quality, cool watches that are priced pretty steeply at retail compared to their devaluation on the secondary market. Even a brand like Omega -- still able to get discounts on anything but the most popular limited releases? Curious to hear everyone's thoughts, including Fed's.

Fed

I am sure you have what I imagine you call "the watch charts discussion" like 5 x/d. I imagine someone says "But watch charts says it is 10K" and you say "well, go buy it from watch charts then" or something like that.

Question: where do you land on watch charts data?

FWIW: I find it directionally accurate for heavily traded pieces meaning if things are trending up or down you get a sense of that. For really heavily traded pieces (an average sub maybe) you can get pretty close on price. On the other hand, it is oftentimes nonsensical for anything rare, old, not heavily traded, etc. My gripes are that they never account for service history anywhere (e.g. service is given zero value) which skews the entire market for what peple should be caring about.

I have other thoughts about how easy it would be to game the numbers on something not heavily traded (I am positive I can throw up some random Reddit posts and ebay listings that nobody would buy but it would get incorporated into the data), why the numbers are extra silly because they include random forum posts that you will never have access to in the future, only really focus on asking price and on and on. I imagine they have some algorithm built in to account for this stuff but without knowing the math I am unable to replicate their data for anything that isnt a hype piece or something like a modern sub.

Interested in your thoughts about the value of WC, how you manage watch charts number, and how you would advise collectors to use the information.

Anything better method out there for a starting point?