When we last rapped at ya, Jomashop was having a sale and Chrono24 pricing was falling. Since then, the S&P is up five percent, those sweet PPP dollars are flowing and everyone – everyone – is telling us that we’re all fine. So it seems like an opportune time to update our watch prices market index . . .
So what is this chart telling us? Shills, get ready to dance all over me on twitter: Chrono24 is showing watch prices going up on Rolex! TTAW was wrong! Everything is great!
If you believe that, I have a $70k Cayman GT4 to sell you. You know, the one that was never supposed to depreciate?
It’s true that some of the lowest price Rolex models on Chrono24 have been picked off. And that is going to cause this particular index to look like it’s appreciating. However, we need to consider two other pieces of data.
First, I update the index every few days or so. Over the past month, the pattern of the watches showing appreciation has changed. In mid-April or so, there were a couple items on the low end of pricing, then a gap, then the main cluster.
Lately, while low-end prices churn a little, the overall bulk of prices have closed the gap between the cheapest items and what passes as the median. And sure enough, Chrono24s own numbers reflect this; in this case the Rolex GMT-Master BLRO “Pepsi”:
As you can see, the low-end of watch pricing is falling quite a bit over the last 45 days or so. The only reason the median hasn’t fallen as much is because there seems to be more listings at the very high end. But that’s artificial. There is no action at the high end.
The other set of data is eBay prices. In March and early April, nothing was selling. In the past month, there has been some action.
Less than $21k for the Panda Daytona a few weeks ago. Here’s the eBay trend for the high-end Rolexes:
Yup, except for that anomalous $19k Pepsi sale in April (to a bidder with zero feedback. Hmm), prices are going one direction: down.
Listen to you friends at TTAW. Keep waiting.
You could always just make an offer and see what bites. Never hurts to bid low and see what happens, worst they can say is no.
Absolutely. All of these prices are the start of the action, not the end. Given that eBay prices have dipped under 15G for the Pepsi and Chrono24 shows the lowest price at 16 and some change, there is likely a lot of willingness to move downwards.