“All the parts have to be original,” he said. “So the lumes are intact and are not re-lumed, there haven’t been many polishings or tamperings with the bezel or the face. I would take that over having the box and papers.”

Poon smiles as I mention the legendary Rolex Paul Newman Daytona, one of the world’s most exclusive and sought-after watches. A yellow gold 1969 model, the ‘Paul Newman Lemon’, is set to be sold at Sotheby’s New York, with a guide price of US$700,000 (S$943,743) to US$1,400,000

“You can’t buy everything, right? You gotta choose your battles. Obviously there have been many opportunities where I’m like, I wish I got that. Like the Cartier Crash, I was looking at that on Antiquorum, I think it was like HK$450,000 (S$78,030) at the time and it was already expensive for what it was and then it went to like HK$4 million or something.”

The Cartier Crash in question started life in 1967, an iconic design from Cartier in London which, some assumed, was inspired by Salvador Dali’s Persistence of Memory with its famously melting clock. Others thought that the design came from Cartier’s Baignoire Allongee model, which was melted and deformed in a car crash. Both plausible, but the truth is apparently more prosaic, coming from a collaboration between Jean-Jacques Cartier and artist Rupert Emmerson, who together sought to play with Cartier’s visual identity by stretching it to its limits.