The growing popularity of luxury watches among high-net-worth individuals isn’t just about telling time — it’s about telling a story, preserving legacy and, increasingly, diversifying portfolios.
In this week’s lead story, Alec Foege unpacks why watches continue to resonate across generations. He spotlights Paul Boutros of the Phillips auction house, who discovered his love for timepieces as a child and later built a collection with his father — one that became a source of deep emotional and monetary value.
Today, collectors view watches as more than mechanical marvels; they see them as a source of value, much like real estate or art. Experts like Boutros and Amin Majidi of Parthian Watch Co. offer insight into how scarcity, craftsmanship and provenance can turn a passion into a prudent investment.
Also in this issue, Marcus Baram reports on how U.S. family offices are expanding their horizons by seeking investment opportunities overseas. During a period of domestic market volatility and geopolitical uncertainty, Europe’s defense and infrastructure sectors — and even Vietnam’s growing economy — are gaining traction. With real estate and startups in focus, family offices are taking a more strategic, globally diversified approach to growth.
We always appreciate your thoughts, feedback and ideas to make this newsletter even more valuable. I look forward to continuing to grow this family office community together. Feel free to reach out at [email protected].
Fred Gabriel, Executive Editor
HANDPICKED: Why watches remain a timeless investment
By ALEC FOEGE
Paul Boutros fell in love with watches as a child in the 1980s, after a magical visit with his father to the Wempe boutique on Fifth Avenue in New York. “I would look at my dad’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal,” he said. “Then I would call the numbers listed for the brands that were advertising.
“So here’s a 10-year-old kid contacting Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, requesting catalogs, just trying to learn as much as I could.”
Over time, Boutros — now deputy chairman and head of watches for the Americas at Phillips auction house — built a watch collection with his father. Years later, after his dad’s death, he retrieved the safe-deposit box where that collection was stored.
“I was overwhelmed with emotion,” he said, “realizing they were the source of my happiest memories with him.”
These days, collecting luxury watches is more popular than ever, both as a passion and an investment. Thanks to smartphones, no one needs to wear a watch anymore; and yet interest continues to surge, particularly among high-net-worth individuals who have come to view watches as another asset class.
“We steer clear of calling watches an investment,” said Boutros, “because watches can go up or down in value.”
But for those who derive pleasure from collecting unique timepieces, there are smart ways to make sure the value is commensurate with the enjoyment.
“I see watches as a store of value, like money you put away over the long term,” said Amin Majidi, owner of Parthian Watch Co., an independent vintage-watch dealer. “But the only two drivers I can think of are scarcity and desirability.”
Enduring appeal
The history of wristwatches traces its roots to the mid-1800s, when they were worn almost exclusively by women as jewelry. Men mostly sported pocket watches until the later years of the 19th century, when some in the military began strapping them to their wrists to help synchronize maneuvers during combat.
In 1905, Hans Wildorf co-founded a wristwatch manufacturer, later named Rolex. World War I helped usher men’s watches into the mainstream. The coming decades were the boom years for wristwatches until the “quartz crisis” of the 1970s, when cheap, accurate, battery-powered quartz watches put many makers of mechanical watches out of business.
In an era where virtually everything is electronic, there’s something enduring and romantic about a machine that requires the owner’s input. “It’s comprised of gears, springs and levers; and if you wind it, it’s going to do its job beautifully,” said Boutros. “I often say to people, there’s no other object made by man that can approach perfection in terms of human craftsmanship like a very fine mechanical watch.”
Now, automatic and mechanical (self-winding) watches garner the bulk of interest from collectors. In our hypertechnological age, no one needs a watch, much less heirloom-quality timepieces that in some cases are handmade. But that may explain why interest in these marvels of engineering has surged.
“It’s mechanical, it makes a ticking sound,” said Majidi. “You feel the winding of the oscillating weight. It runs out of power, and you have to wind it. It’s almost like a living creature on your wrist. Also, for a lot of men, it’s their only piece of jewelry.”
Watches as part of a portfolio
The 2017 sale at auction of Paul Newman’s 1968 Rolex Daytona for $17.8 million marked the beginning of the modern collector’s era. The Newman purchase helped raise awareness about the investment potential of watches, said Boutros, for whom the sale represented the first auction he led at Phillips.
“Our advice is always: Buy watches because you love them. If they go up, you consider that a great bonus,” he said. “If they go down in value, hey, at least you have something that you love, and it will still have a significant percentage of its original value.”
When considering watches as an asset class, it’s worth thinking about what percentage they should represent in a diversified investment portfolio.
“There’s no right or wrong answer, because part of it depends on the net worth of the individual and their liquidity needs,” said Thomas Ruggie, founder and CEO of Destiny Family Office, a central Florida-based multifamily office. “However, most people who are collectors fall in the range of somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of their assets.”
Parthian Watch’s Majidi frames a well-curated watch collection as a core asset that can be passed on as generational wealth.
“I have one client who thinks of it exactly that way,” he said. “He is a successful guy in a financial company that sold to a big bank. So he’s retired at an early age, and he keeps track of his watch collection side by side with his assets portfolio. He looks at it as a cash substitute with low volatility that he is accumulating to pass on to his grandchildren.”
With future value in mind, Phillips’ Boutros recommends buying watches that have a following and are desired by people with all sizes of wrists and a style that appeals to people from all kinds of cultures. An example he cites is the Patek Philippe 5970, made from 2004 to 2010, a perpetual calendar with chronograph.
“That is a watch that is 40mm; it is well-proportioned; and it has a timeless look because its design architecture is based on the original from 1941, the first perpetual-calendar chronograph. They didn’t change the design.”
In 2004, the 5970 listed in the Patek Philippe catalog with an $89,600 MSRP; that same year, New York magazine wondered, “Can a watch really be worth $89,600?”
Today, examples retail for around $230,000 on watch collector sites such as Chrono24.
While most watch-collecting journeys begin with new watches, most serious collectors eventually are drawn to upper-end ones from previous eras. At Phillips, Boutros said, any watch made before 1985 is considered vintage. “That’s when computer-aided design and computer-controlled machinery came into the production of watches,” he said.
Destiny’s Ruggie, however, cautions investors from convincing themselves that collecting rare watches, even knowledgeably, is equivalent to stock-picking or buying bitcoin.
“Cryptocurrency has a created a lot of wealth, in particular for some of the younger generation,” he said. “Those same people have a mindset of ‘Hey, I want something tangible I can invest in, that is going to go up in value very quickly.’ That’s just not always going to be the case.”
Read more:
> The most newsworthy developments impacting collectors | Crain Currency
U.S. family offices look overseas for investments
By MARCUS BARAM
U.S. family offices are increasingly looking abroad for investments and deals in Europe and Asia amid market volatility, tariffs and inflation concerns at home. Yet some advisers caution that the current rally in European stocks may not last.
So far this year, European stocks have outperformed their U.S. counterparts, with the MSCI Europe Index up nearly 15% compared with the S&P 500’s decline of 2.8%. Much of the growth is attributed to increased military and infrastructure spending across the continent, along with a healthy banking sector and rising wages driving consumer activity.
Several European defense exchange-traded funds have surged in recent weeks. The WisdomTree Europe Defence ETF has attracted $588 million since its launch March 4, while the VanEck Defense UCITS ETF has pulled in $1.9 billion since the start of the year — more than $1 billion of that in March alone.
“We have been focused on European startups — defense is big right now,” said a managing director at a New York-based family office. “It’s about diversifying our portfolio in a smart and strategic way while the markets are so chaotic here in the States.”
Tim Houghton, global head of private wealth and family wealth at the TMF Group, said: “We were approached by an investment bank with a U.S. client looking to invest into Asia to diversify away from their purely domestic investments. They were concerned about geopolitical uncertainties following the U.S. election.”
In the end, they selected Vietnam as an investment target.
AlTi Global, a wealth manager and family office overseeing more than $77 billion in assets, recently acquired Kontora Family Office GmbH, one of Germany’s leading multifamily offices. It marks the firm’s first European acquisition since strategic investments from Allianz X and Constellation Wealth Capital, following a spate of U.S. acquisitions last year.
Besides the European defense and infrastructure sectors, real estate is attracting investor interest. According to Columbia Threadneedle’s Real Estate Outlook for 2025, opportunities are emerging on the continent due to “Europe’s improving office sector [which] has not been as negatively impacted as the U.S. office market has been.”
Overall, European stocks “remain attractively priced, supported by strong fundamentals and promising growth potential, presenting undervalued investment opportunities,” Alison Savas, investment director at Antipodes Partners, said in an interview with Pensions & Investments, a sibling publication of Crain Currency.
Still, some analysts are cautious about the long-term prospects. Daniel Sereda, chief investment analyst for a global family office, wrote in a Seeking Alpha post that he “wouldn’t be overly optimistic about how far the current rally in European stocks might go at the expense of U.S.-based capital outflows.”
LOOSE CHANGE
Netflix co-founder gives $50 million to alma mater: Reed Hastings is making the donation to Bowdoin College in Maine to create an initiative for artificial intelligence. The gift won’t develop AI technology but will provide “a step forward in higher education’s growing role to provide ethical frameworks for technology.”
Cambridge Associates says hello to Dubai: The money manager looks to tap into the city’s deep pools of private wealth. The financial hub alone is home to family offices that control more than $1 trillion.
What happens in Seattle is moving to Vegas: Democratic lawmakers in Washington state hope to impose a wealth tax, which closely follows a state capital gains tax. Some of the Pacific Northwest’s most recognizable business names have fled to Nevada.