Horolonomics

This will be one of my more brief posts on the state of the watch market. The punchline is that, when you review charts anywhere, always make sure to check if the publisher has included the origin in the chart. The origin is the point where both variables presented in the chart take on the value zero (the really important thing is that the origin for the vertical value is included). Let me illustrate why this is important. In the first image presented below, I present data from a watch pricing analytics company. The data represents an "index" of Rolex asking prices on the preowned market. I think "index" is probably not a great way to describe this data, it really represents an average of some sort. In fact, I'm not really fond of this type of index for other reasons. A stock price index, for example, represents averaging of homogenous assets. It's true that stocks come from heterogeneous industries, but they are all subject to largely identical reporting ...

There is an insightful piece of advice I've heard from longtime watch collectors. It is this: you only have two wrists and they are extremely valuable property. Think carefully about what you buy and ask yourself if a watch brand has earned the right to reside on your wrist. Saraswati, the Indian goddess of wisdom, music, art and speech. It recently occured to me that wrist real estate has doubled for many people these days. No, I'm not referring to some kind of surgical grafting of additional limbs. I'm talking about the "metaverse." Before the advent of this buzzword, I generally refered to this space as virtual reality, so I'm going to stick with that for the purposes of this post. A bit of background: back in December I bought my family an Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook (now Meta). This is a wireless VR headset with accessible pricing. One of my kids had tried out a game call "Job Simulator" in the past and loved it. I thought I'd bri...

This post started as an investigation into whether the crypto "winter" does actually explain recent changes in luxury watch prices. I was motivated by a Bloomberg article containing this claim (as well as subsequent discussions of that article). As I started working on this post, though, I realized that the data referenced in the Bloomberg article is so bad, my plans had to change. Fam: we have a problem. People publishing numbers relating to the watch industry do not seem to understand some very fundamental concepts when it comes to markets (I'm going with this possibility rather than a rather more troubling conclusion: they understand and they're actively misleading people). Those same people are making statements and drawing conclusions based upon some very shaky foundations. So, this post is going to explore why a lot of the numbers we see when it comes to the watch market do not actually measure prices. Many claim to report prices, but that is not what t...