SDJB Opens Diamond, Jewelry, & Watch Vault for Christmas Holiday Shoppers

San Diego Jewelry Buyers (SDJB), California’s premier luxury pawnbroker of fine gold jewelry, diamonds, Swiss watches, and other luxury assets, has announced that it is opening up its vault for the holidays to help shoppers seeking extraordinary jewelry and gemstones. Read more

Why Gold Remains Hot

San Diego gold investors and gold sellers take note that Business Week has an excellent interview online with commodities guru Jim Rogers, creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index, wherein he talks about gold’s current popularity.

Here is an excerpt:

MARIA BARTIROMO

Gold, as you know, hit an all-time high today, with the Russian central bank buying bullion. How high can gold go?

JIM ROGERS

Well, I own gold and I have for a while. How high can it go? I fully expect it to be over a couple thousand dollars an ounce sometime in the next decade—I didn’t say the next month, I didn’t say the next year, I said the next decade—because paper money around the world is very suspect. But right now everybody’s bullish on it, so I don’t like to buy things when that’s happening. But I’m not selling under any circumstances.

What’s behind the runup? Has buying by the central banks changed the equation here? Or is this still a demand story?

Certainly a demand story because, as I said, everybody’s printing so much money and people around the world are worried about that. But you also have central banks, which five years ago were selling gold, now buying. So that’s a huge shift in the marketplace. Central banks are like lots of other people—they just follow the crowd. There are probably better commodities to buy than gold, but you can’t tell that to central banks because they’ve got gold on the brain.

To read more, go to: Why Gold is Glittering.

San Diego Luxury Pawnbroker Reaches Out Into New Affluent Markets

San Diego Jewelry Buyers (SDJB), California’s luxury pawnbroker and diamond buyer of choice, is extending its market reach with a new advertising campaign that targets high net-worth professionals in Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach, Carlsbad, Del Mar, La Jolla, and other affluent communities in the region Read more

The Buying & Selling Gold Frenzy

The Associated Press is reporting that gold’s remarkable run has implications far beyond smart investors. In New York’s diamond district, more people started showing up late last year to sell their gold, and the crush hasn’t let up Read more

The Year’s Biggest Watch Auction

Bloomberg is reporting that Christie’s International raised 19 million Swiss francs ($19 million) in the biggest watch auction this year. Included in the lots was a collection of 10 Patek Philippe watches for almost double the low estimate.

Nine of the top 10 lots were Patek Philippe, and one was Rolex, in the auction that took place in Geneva. Christie’s estimates the entire sale to raise 10 million francs to 15 million francs.

The most expensive timepiece was a Patek Philippe 18-carat gold watch with a calendar that adjusts for leap years, sold for 2.4 million francs to a Swiss museum, Christie’s said. The collection of Pateks sold for 5.8 million francs.

Watch auctions have been successful, reports Bloomberg, even as Swiss watchmakers suffer from the worst recession since the Great Depression. Rare pieces continue to attract more demand than newly made watches, as Swiss watch exports have dropped 26 percent in the first nine months of this year in value.

A Sotheby’s auction of timepieces in the same Swiss city on Nov. 15 raised 5.1 million francs, within the auctioneer’s estimated range of 4.15 million francs to 5.71 million francs.

In other watch news, the family that controls Porsche SE, the maker of the 911 sports car, is selling watches from its private collection at a charity auction in London today.
Ferdinand Alexander Porsche and his sons have entered 49 watches into a sale to be held by Bonhams on Dec. 2.

The group includes examples by Eterna, Porsche Design, Rolex, Panerai, Jaeger LeCoultre, Breitling and Omega, is expected to fetch 100,000 pounds. Proceeds will be donated to the oncology research department of the Robert Bosch Hospital, Stuttgart, Germany, said Bonhams.