Horolonomics

I recently realized that my curiosity about watches is similar to the way a T-Rex' vision works, at least according to the 1993 film Jurassic Park . For those who don't remember the film, Dr. Alan Grant (a paleontologist played by the actor Sam Neil) tells the other characters that if they don't move, the T-Rex won't see them. Similarly, I realized that the rotating bezel is such a permanent (but adjustable) fixture of dive watch designs that I've never actually seen much of its history. Subsequent to attending Jeffrey Kingston's Horological Society of New York lecture on the advent of the first dive watch by Blancpain (required WIS viewing, really), I think I'd naturally assumed that the brand's former CEO, Jean-Jacque Fiechter, invented the rotating bezel sometime around 1953. Drawings of rotating bezel from Fiechter's Fifty Fathoms patent. There certainly were many innovations he patented while dreaming up the Fifty Fathoms, so I subcon

Last week, I finished user onboarding with a service called CrowdTangle , a startup that launched in 2012. In 2016, Facebook acquired CrowdTangle. In 2019, it opened a service for academic researchers. I recently applied to participate and I was accepted. CrowdTangle provides a wide array of analytic data for activity on Facebook and Instagram. I'm only beginning to familiarize myself with it. Out of curiosity, I decided to get my bearings by looking through the platform's data on watch media. The insights I'm posting here are the result. CrowdTangle's engine reports a wide range of information on public posts and accounts, including followers, reactions (likes, etc), shares and commenting. I began by building a list of the major watch media outlets which have been operating for a fair number of years. I requested feedback on Instagram for my initial list and updated it accordingly (thank you to everyone who commented, acknowledgements below). I ended up with a list

Today, I happened to notice that Jomashop is selling a large number of Rolex references, many at a discount relative to the official price. My subjective impression is that this does not happen very frequently, so I wanted to more formally tease out some implications of this development. I assembled a spreadsheet of the listings and ran some numbers. For this discussion, I will focus on the references which Jomashop identifies as "Men's" (due to the fact that I am unfamiliar with the other references which are listed). Jomashop lists 197 references for sale at a discount relative to list. This is a remarkable variety of watches on the grey market, expecially considering that Rolex contracts likely penalize ADs who resell through third party dealers. The average discount across these references is 10% with a minimum discount of 1% (mostly 36mm Datejusts in precious metals with unique dials) and a maximum discount of 31% (Cellini Pink Dial Automatic Men's 18kt