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Morgan Cardet has exhibited at the Original Miami Beach Antique Show (a.k.a. OMBAS)—the marquee event in the vintage-watch world—for 17 years alongside his business partner, Matthew Bain, who has been a fixture at the show for the better part of three decades. But as Cardet prepared for the latest edition, held March 26–30 at the Miami Beach Convention Center, the state of the global economy, volatility in metals prices, and the show’s shift from its traditional January slot to March introduced a degree of uncertainty.

“We didn’t know what to expect,” Cardet tells Robb Report.

As it turns out, his concerns proved unfounded. “Honestly, it’s been the best year,” Cardet says. “Really record-breaking.”

When it came to what was selling, Cardet had a simple answer: “Everything,” he says. “It used to be Rolex and Cartier, and now it’s a wider mix. People are buying ladies’ watches again in a big way, and dress watches from Vacheron [Constantin] and Breguet from the ’80s and ’90s—which was kind of a dead market for many years.”

Adam Golden, founder of Miami-based Menta Watches, had a similar takeaway. “No hyperbole, this was my best year,” he says, noting that it was his ninth year exhibiting. “And it’s not just me saying that. Ask any of my colleagues—we crushed it. It was a record year, in terms of the amount of people who showed up and the amount of sales we did. We probably sold around 60 watches over the course of the week, which is a lot.”

Like Cardet, Golden noticed demand spanned categories: “Obviously people are still hot on Cartiers and smaller-size Pateks, but we sold modern Nautiluses, vintage Nautiluses, we sold two vintage Daytonas. It was really diverse.”

He attributes the breadth of sales to the growth of the market—“It’s not just Rolex, Patek, and AP anymore”—as well as increasingly sophisticated buyers and the confidence born of stability. “Things haven’t fluctuated so much,” Golden says. “And that might contribute to why everybody did so well. There’s been a nice period of stability in the market, if you put aside the F.P. Journe of it all.”

For Sacha Davidoff, a Miami native who now runs a vintage watch dealership in Geneva with his brother, Roy, “neo-vintage Audemars Piguet was the star of the show, and second was Patek Philippe—classic Calatravas on straps,” he says.

While Davidoff typically uses the show to buy—dealer-to-dealer sales account for the lion’s share of business at OMBAS—he was so slammed this year, that he couldn’t find time to leave the booth, and barely had time to use the restroom. “Such a good problem to have,” he says.

The TikTok-famous dealer Mike Nouveau returned to the antique show for his second year as an exhibitor and spent about a third of his time hunting for pieces to acquire: “The normal stuff,” he says. “Cartier, Patek, cool objects, maybe pocket watches.”

On the sales front, Nouveau echoes Cardet, who joined him in a panel discussion about trends: “I did a panel with Tania Edwards from Collectability and Morgan and we all agreed there were no trends,” he says. “None of us could sense a specific trend. People were seemingly interested in everything from Royal Oaks to dress watches to mini [AP] Cobras.”

OMBAS first-timer Randi Molosky, founder of For Future Reference Vintage, a curated line of unsigned vintage jewelry and timepieces, also reported a strong show on both the buying and selling fronts. Still, she found asking prices for basic Cartier watches rather unsettling.

“Everyone is looking for a small ladies Cartier Tank on a black leather strap,” she says. “The littler the watch, the more people want it. The pricing I found was outrageous.” Molofsky also noted a surprising scarcity of vintage Bulgari Serpenti watches on Tubogas bracelets—a model she knows well, as she wears a 1960s three-wrap gold style herself. “I think I saw two at the show,” she says. “People kept coming up to me making cash offers for mine. Gone are the days when they can be found for anything approaching affordable prices.”