John:

A couple of reactions, below (in bold).

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Jeff

Thanks for posting the info. This is indeed very interesting and also in its broad range pretty predictable to someone who knows the watch business. I have an observation as the son of a statistics professor who had this kind of thing drummed into his brain from an early age. This study is about watches not brands. The watches they picked from each brand may or may not reflect the general trend for that brand. As a guy who sells a lot of pre-owned Rolex watches I would say the Explorer is perhaps the sport watch from that brand with the poorest resale value. The Submariner may, on the other hand retain the most value.

-- It seems that Crown & Caliber wanted to launch their "study" by covering several comparable watches -- stainless steel, three-hand watches, with silver / white dials. Seems to me that it will be possible for them to do additional studies on other groups of watches or even add individual watches to the study, on a watch-by-watch basis. So, at some point, they may cover three or four of the most popular Rolexes and three or four of the most popular Ebels. Seems that the presentation will be useful, even if every watch is not in a group with comparable watches from other brands.

When a retail business does a "study" like this my old man....the statistics professor....would always turn up his nose and ask me to look for the underlying reasons for doing the study and how they may have prejudiced the data for some kind of gain. For instance, is the motivation of this store to sell more Pateks?

-- Crown & Caliber buys and sells pre-owned and vintage watches from all the brands. They publish a lot of information about watches, just for the sake of publishing the information. Your father, the statistics professor, was correct to be skeptical. Today's answer is that search engines like original content, and so we have a firm that buys and sells watches publishing information, for its own sake (and for the sake of the search engines). I don't think they have any motive to skew the data toward any particular brand or type of brand.

I agree with what you say (above), first, that data like this is important and second, about including more watches from each brand. Using eBay post sale prices it would not be difficult to come up with a broader statistical analysis.

-- We can hope that Crown & Caliber will maintain this database and expand the coverage, over time. I believe that it's a strong first (or second) effort that will be of interest to watch buyers.

John Cote