Are Luxury Watches a Good Investment? An Honest Answer

Can a luxury watch make money? Yes — some have, and a few have outrun inflation and even the stock market over specific windows. Will the watch you are about to buy make money? Almost certainly not, unless it is one of a short list of hyped references bought at retail (which is itself the hard part). The honest framing is that watch "investing" is really a collectibles market: driven by brand, scarcity, condition, and fashion, not by cash flows or fundamentals. That makes it closer to art or sneakers than to equities.

If your goal is to grow wealth, conventional assets do it more reliably, more liquidly, and with lower friction. If your goal is to own something you love that might also hold its value, a carefully chosen watch can do that — and that is the realistic best case for the vast majority of buyers.

Value retention in watches is concentrated in a remarkably small number of models. The consistent performers share a profile: high brand prestige, deliberately constrained supply, a steel sports-watch format, and a long waitlist at retail that pushes buyers to the secondary market. The usual names:

• Steel-sport Rolex— the Submariner, GMT-Master II, Daytona, and Explorer have long traded at or above retail pre-owned, with the steel Daytona the classic example of a watch that is hard to buy at list and trades well above it. See our Rolex Submariner review for how that liquidity plays out in practice.
• Patek Philippe Nautilus — the steel 5711, especially after its discontinuation, became one of the most extreme examples of secondary-market premium over retail in the entire category.
• Audemars Piguet Royal Oak— the steel "Jumbo" and 15500-series references have similarly commanded premiums driven by brand cachet and constrained allocation.
• Independents — a few makers (think the most hyped indie brands) have seen outsized secondary demand, but their illiquidity and small production make them speculative rather than dependable.

Notice the pattern: these are not most luxury watches. They are the handful around which scarcity, story, and demand all align. For broader context on which makers sit where, our best luxury watch brands guide maps the landscape, and how much a Rolex costs covers the retail-versus-market gap in detail.

Here is the part the "watches as investment" content tends to skip: the overwhelming majority of new luxury watches depreciate, and many depreciate sharply. Buy most brands at retail and the pre-owned price you could realistically sell for is often well below what you paid — sometimes 20–40% below, depending on the brand, model, and how soft the market is. The boutique markup, the lack of a waitlist, and abundant supply all work against you.

This is true even for excellent watches from respected houses. A watch can be beautifully made, a joy to own, and still a money-loser on resale — those are not contradictions. Plenty of fantastic pieces in our best watches under $10,000 guide are wonderful buys precisely becauseyou are buying them to wear, not to flip. If anyone tells you a given watch is a "sure thing" financially, treat that as a sales tactic, not analysis.

Anyone considering watches as an asset has to understand the recent cycle. Between roughly 2020 and early 2022, secondary-market prices for the most-hyped steel sports watches surged. Low interest rates, pandemic-era savings, crypto wealth spilling into collectibles, and a wave of speculative flipping pushed prices for models like the Nautilus, Royal Oak, and steel Daytona to extraordinary highs — multiples of retail in the most extreme cases.

Then it cooled. From around the spring of 2022, secondary prices for many of those same references corrected downward, and they continued to soften through 2023 as the broader macro picture changed — higher rates, less speculative money, and the simple gravity of prices that had run too far, too fast. Buyers who bought at the peak as an "investment" in many cases sat on paper losses. The market has not behaved like a one-way escalator; it behaved like an asset class with a bubble and a correction.

Even when a watch does appreciate on paper, the path to actually realising a gain is riddled with friction that pure-financial assets don't have:

• Transaction costs. Selling through a dealer or platform means commissions, consignment fees, or a wholesale buy-price well below retail. Selling privately means time, effort, and payment-fraud risk. Either way, the spread between what a buyer pays and what a seller nets is wide.
• Illiquidity. A stock sells in seconds. A watch can take days or weeks to sell at a fair price — and in a soft market, much longer. You cannot count on converting it to cash on demand without taking a discount.
• Authenticity and condition risk. Fakes, frankenwatches, and undisclosed service parts are real hazards; our how to spot a fake Rolex guide exists for a reason. Condition, box, and papers materially affect value.
• Carrying costs and hazards. Insurance, servicing every several years, secure storage, and the simple risk of loss, theft, or damage all eat into any return. A watch you wear also wears.
• No yield. A watch pays no dividend, no interest, no rent. Its entire return, if any, is price appreciation — unlike stocks, bonds, or property.

If you do want to track real market prices rather than aspirational ones, the dealer and marketplace data is where to look — for example, browsing live Rolex listings on Chrono24shows you what watches are actually being offered at, which is more useful than any "projected return." (If you're new to that platform, our is Chrono24 legit explainer is worth a read first.)

If you are determined to weigh the investment angle, these are the factors that tend to separate value-holders from money-losers. None is a guarantee — they are tendencies, as of mid 2026.

Read that table honestly and you'll see why so few watches qualify: a real value-holder has to win on most of these rows at once, and you usually have to buy it at retail — which, for the hottest references, is the part you can't control. For more on choosing a watch on its merits rather than its resale, see best luxury watches for men.

Our actual recommendation is the oldest one in collecting, and we mean it sincerely: buy the watch you love, at a price you are happy to have spent regardless of resale. If it later turns out to hold value, that is a bonus on something you were going to enjoy anyway. If it depreciates — as most will — you still got years of wearing a thing you wanted. That framing protects you from the worst outcome in this market, which is overpaying for a watch you don't even like because someone told you it was an "investment."

For the small minority genuinely chasing value retention, the rules are simple and unglamorous: stick to the proven steel-sport references, buy at retail or not at all, keep the box and papers, insure it, and accept that you are speculating in an illiquid collectibles market that can fall as fast as it rose. For everyone else — which is almost everyone — treat a luxury watch as a passion purchase that happens to age gracefully, and you'll never feel cheated by it.

If you want to go deeper on the asset question specifically, our companion piece on whether watches are a better investment than gold compares the two head to head.