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[Elenio Guardado]

First, the good news. After years of hand-wringing about the apparently imminent extinction of mechanical timepieces, which would surely be replaced by smartwatches and/or microchips in the backs of our skulls, good old analog watches continue to thrive.

It's become nearly impossible to keep up with all the new brands and new watchmakers. The enthusiast clubs. The websites and podcasts and Instagram feeds. Not only is the world of watches itself more diverse and larger than ever, but the points of entry have become more accessible than ever before.

As those prices plummeted earthward over the past eight months, we decided to take a detailed look at the trio of watches that have served as the three horsemen of this hype-watch era: the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, the Patek Philippe Nautilus, and the Rolex Daytona. We'll explain where they're at in the market now, and give some hints as to where they might be headed.

The watch models that count as hype-y are now so famous that they're known and coveted by even casual enthusiasts, a fact that longtime watch nerds tend to resent. Hype watches are the ones that are bought and sold by entertainers, influencers, fashion folk, and other eager new collectors who are treated like philistines because they haven't paid their dues and aren't into watches for "the right reasons."

"My first thought when I hear the term 'hype watch' is of a steel-sport watch that's been hyped up by social media and rocket-fueled by crypto," says John Reardon, the former International Head of Watches at Christie's, who has witnessed the "hype" craze evolve in real time over the past few years in his current role as founder of the Patek Philippe-dedicated platform, Collectability.

"In my mind, those are the ingredients: a steel sport watch, social media, and seemingly endless piles of cash," Reardon continues. "Hype also has to have pop culture. You combine celebrity, money, and a seemingly low supply of something on a social media platform, and all of a sudden you have the perfect ingredients for hype. It's self-reinforcing."

Eric Ku, consummate collector, occasional Hodinkee contributor, and founder of online watch auction platform Loupe This, has a fairly straightforward definition of the term that I think does the job well. "You don't have to be a watch person to want one of these watches anymore," he says. "It could be anybody's watch."

"People pay so much for whatever they perceive has great demand and is in low scarcity," Reardon says. "I think we're all learning how markets move when global communication is involved in a way we've never seen before. As a civilization, we're all learning how to place value into hype when information is instant and global. It's all very philosophical, in a way."

It wasn't very long ago (less than a decade) that both a Royal Oak 15202 and a Nautilus 5711 could be easily purchased from the secondary market for their original retail price. So what caused such an unprecedented surge in value over such a short period of time? After all, COVID-19 stimulus packages can account for only so much unanticipated cash entering the market.

"It was a confluence of events," says Eric Wind, our old friend and the proprietor of Wind Vintage. "A lot of these buyers were quote-unquote new wealth, trying to show their wealth off in certain ways. It's part of a whole class of, if not cryptocurrency wealth, then cryptocurrency-inspired wealth. People were buying stuff because it was what they were 'supposed' to have, what they were 'supposed' to wear, what they were 'supposed' to drive. That's partially what has led us to what we're seeing now with the collapse of FTX. I feel like it was part of the whole ecosystem of that culture."

Of course, once you hit the peak, there's nowhere to go but down. In December 2022, nine months after reaching the top, those same WatchCharts figures reveal decreases from the peak secondary market valuation of the Royal Oak 15202 at 33.3 percent, the Nautilus 5711/1A at 31.95 percent, and the Rolex Daytona 116500 at 35.8 percent. So how did we go from peak "hype" to this point?

That same Morgan Stanley report identifies the "fundamental drivers behind the overall secondary watch market downturn are 1/ tightening monetary policy, 2/ disruption of consumer sentiment globally and 3/ related to these factors, wealth effect impacted by the fall in value of stock markets and other asset classes."

As the elevated prices we witnessed in late 2021 and early 2022 started to decline on the key references, online collectors rejoiced. Many longtime watch enthusiasts viewed this type of market correction as necessary in order to squeeze out the speculators and to get those in-demand watches back into the hands of "real" collectors.

This is all still a very recent phenomenon in the watch world, and it doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon, even if we continue to see the current gradual decline seep into 2023 and beyond. It's also worth noting that the current downturn isn't exclusive to watches. High-value collectibles of all types and other related asset classes have all been hit this year, and the secondary watch market actually appears to be holding stronger than many others.

Peak Hype: Oh boy, there are a whole lot of moments to choose from. It could be the moment in January 2021 when Patek HQ in Geneva confirmed the 5711 would be discontinued. Or when the green-dial 5711 was released in April 2021 for what CEO Thierry Stern described as a "victory lap." But I think the only real answer is the unanticipated drop of the limited-edition Tiffany-blue Nautilus 5711, exactly one year ago this week.

Created by Patek Philippe to celebrate the acquisition of its longtime New York-based retail partner, Tiffany & Co., by LVMH, the Tiffany-blue 5711 was limited to a 170-piece run, a number that commemorates the 170-year anniversary of the relationship between the Swiss watchmaker and American jeweler.

"For me, if you were to encapsulate the hype watch, it is the Nautilus 5711," Wind says. "That's kind of the best-known example, where you can track a massive increase in value and then a decrease. At the beginning of the pandemic, they cost around $60,000 full-set, and then they went up to near $200,000 at the beginning of this year, and now they're at maybe the $90,000 range. And everyone's aware of it. And of course there was the whole thing with the Tiffany-blue example."

That data lines up quite neatly with Morgan Stanley's research on the current state of the secondary watch market: "While prices on steel Patek sports models tracked to a similar 12 month trajectory there are signs of a more stable trend across some models. Despite prices falling considerably from peak, both the Nautilus 5711/1A and 5711/1R models end the period significantly up vs. the end of 2021, with signs that they may be back into a more sustained growth profile."

Auction results for the Nautilus have been a touch more varied. I mentioned in my recap of the spring season sales in Geneva that a 5711/1A failed to sell at Antiquorum. We've seen that happen a few more times during the ongoing fall/winter season, including at Antiquorum again. If you open up the scope to include ancillary 5711 models, there was also a 5712 (lot 51) and a 5711/1P (lot 58) at Sotheby's Geneva that passed, as well as a 5726A and a 5711/110P that failed to sell during a Christie's Dubai online sale. The issue with those auction results has largely been due to overly ambitious estimates that don't reflect the current downward trajectory of the market.

"Our model is a little faster than a normal auction house," Ku says, referring to Loupe This. "I think we see trends faster than they do. So basically, we've been selling these things for cheaper prices, or they've been achieving lower prices, however you wanna call it. They've just been cheaper. We sold a 5980 Nautilus several weeks ago. It ended up bringing, all-in, something around 80 grand, which is quite low. The consigner was fine with it. He understood that the market is what it is, but it was interesting because I had a lot of dealers that I'm friendly with messaging me afterward, saying like, 'Oh man, that went so cheap. Why did you sell it so cheap?' I told them, 'This is the market price.' Because I don't think it was cheap. It was the market price."

As for the green and Tiffany-blue dial versions of the 5711? The most recent results for the green-dial 5711/1A-014 came at Antiquorum last month in Geneva, where it sold for CHF 362,500, and then at yesterday's Christie's Important Watches sale in New York, where it went for $352,800, all-in. Both results are a bit under the figure (approx. CHF 400,000) the reference has generally traded at since it was announced. And then, at last month's Christie's Rare Watches sale in Geneva, the first Tiffany-blue 5711 to appear at auction (since the infamous first example) sold for more than CHF 3 million, a total that is right in line with what I've been hearing for its market value this year.

"There was a period recently where it was very hard to sell a 5711 at almost any price," Wind says. "Whenever markets are falling so drastically, no one wants to catch a falling sword, so everyone just sits and waits. I feel like prices have now stabilized and people are buying again over the course of the last month. There's less uncertainty with the U.S. political system given that elections are over, and the stock market has been pretty stable and above 30,000 recently. When the stock market was below 30,000 in September, it was deathly quiet for the watch market, just like at the beginning of COVID. So I feel like the prices have stabilized, obviously at levels that are significantly above where they were at the beginning of the pandemic."

Sotheby's hosted a series of three online auctions, starting in February of this year, that were dedicated solely to the collective works of Royal Oak designer Grald Genta, while Phillips and Ineichen each held thematic sales exclusively focused on the Royal Oak in May 2022. It arguably all came to a head on May 10, 2022, when Sotheby's auctioned off the only Royal Oak ever personally owned by Grald Genta. It sold for more than two million Swiss francs as part of the Sotheby's Geneva "Important Watches" live auction.

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