What the Numbers Actually Tell You About a Collection

Nobody else was looking at the Tudor 7016 in the pre-owned case at Shreve. The acrylic was spidered. Easy to walk past. Then I dug into the caseback engraving and found out what I was holding: a LAGOVEN dive watch from the Venezuelan oil operations at Lake Maracaibo, an early-1970s piece with real history.

It doesn’t see much wrist time. It probably never will. And it’s one of the last watches I’d ever sell.

That gap is what a question from the video AMA a month ago kept circling. How do you actually know what’s going on with your own collection? Not what you feel is happening. What’s real.

Quick state of things first. If you’ve followed along, you know I got to well over 150 watches before I started working my way back down. The 140 to 40 series covers that stretch. I got to 40, crept back up, and I’m around 50 now. It’s usually a few out, one in, so the number drifts down even when I’m buying. No target, no magic number. What I do know is that the core of the collection gets worn constantly, and that was the whole point of cutting it down.

So wrist time. I track it daily; I went deep on it in “The Chase, the Cull, and What’s Left,” and I still think it’s the collection's most honest signal. But honest isn’t the same as complete...

The Tudor proves it. So does my Grand Seiko SBGH503 Golden Snow, a Ginza boutique exclusive I picked up on my first trip to Tokyo. I don’t wear it often. I’m not going anywhere near parting with it either.

Wrist time measures convenience and context as much as it measures love. A watch can sit in the box most of the year and still mean more to me than half of what I wear daily, if it carries a story and isn't just a purchase.

I’m not dismissing the data, though. What I reach for most tells me something real about my taste, just not everything. The 60-day rule I’ve written about before still applies to any watch without a defined job. A reminder that my 60-day rule is that a watch must be worn at least once every 60 days or it's considered for sale. But a watch with a placed story, a milestone, or a found history gets a pass. The Tudor and the Golden Snow are exactly why that exemption exists.