When Watches Beat the S&P 500 — And When They Didn't

In 2021, a stainless steel Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711/1A was trading for roughly $152,000 on the secondary market — up from about $73,000 just two years earlier. Over the same period, the S&P 500 returned a respectable but comparatively modest 18%. Stories like this fueled a narrative that luxury watches had become the new alternative asset class, outpacing stocks, real estate, and even gold.

Then the correction came. By 2024, that same Nautilus was trading closer to $85,000. The question we wanted to answer at WatchEQ: over a full market cycle that includes both the boom and the correction, did luxury watches actually beat the stock market?

The short answer: sometimes. The longer answer is more interesting, and more useful if you're thinking about watches as part of a broader portfolio.

The data: three steel sports watches vs. the S&P 500, 2019–2024

We tracked three of the most-discussed "investment grade" luxury watches — the Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711/1A, the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona 116500LN (Panda), and the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Jumbo Extra-Thin 15202ST — against the S&P 500 Total Return Index (with dividends reinvested) from January 2019 through December 2024.

Secondary-market price snapshots (USD)

The three takeaways

1. At the peak, watches absolutely crushed stocks

From January 2019 to the late-2021 market top, the Royal Oak 15202ST was up roughly 300% while the S&P 500 was up about 18%. The Nautilus 5711/1A peaked at roughly +108% against the same benchmark. If you bought any of these three watches in early 2019 and sold at the top, you beat almost every equity strategy on Wall Street over the same window. This is the story that made watches briefly feel like a "can't-lose" asset class — and it's the story most collector blogs told at the time.

2. The correction was real, and it was brutal

Between mid-2022 and late 2024, secondary-market prices for hyped references fell hard. The Nautilus 5711/1A gave back roughly 60% of its peak gains. The Royal Oak 15202 is down from about $100,000 to $57,000. The Daytona 116500LN dropped from roughly $40,500 to $33,000. WatchCharts' overall market index fell for seven consecutive quarters. Anyone who bought at the 2022 top is underwater; some are deeply underwater.

3. Across the full cycle, only one of the three clearly beat the S&P

This is the uncomfortable finding most watch coverage skips: over the 2019–2024 full cycle, the S&P 500 returned roughly 14.5% annualized. Only the Nautilus 5711/1A (+16.0% annualized) clearly outperformed. The Daytona (+12.7%) and the Royal Oak (+11.7%) both finished slightly below the index on an annualized basis once you include the correction.

That doesn't make watches a bad investment. It means they're a real asset class with real drawdowns — not a one-way ticket to outperformance. The watches that did best shared a specific profile: iconic design, discontinued or severely supply-constrained production, and a deep secondary market. Hyped references without those fundamentals fell further and recovered less.

Why certain watches hold up better than others

Looking across the data, four factors consistently separate the watches that weather corrections from the ones that don't:

• Scarcity with demand behind it. The Nautilus 5711/1A was discontinued in 2022. The Royal Oak 15202ST was discontinued the same year. Discontinuation converts existing supply into a fixed asset, and when demand holds, price pressure goes one way.
• Design longevity. All three of our subjects were Gérald Genta or Genta-descended designs from the 1970s. Watches with 50-year-old silhouettes that still look contemporary have a durability premium that hype-cycle designs never earn.
• Liquidity. All three trade daily on Chrono24, WatchCharts, and auction. You can exit a position in weeks, not years. Illiquid watches — even "good" ones — show much larger bid-ask spreads during downturns.
• Provenance and condition. Full-set examples with service history consistently trade 15–25% above equivalent bare-watch listings. Documented history isn't a nice-to-have; it's priced in.

The caveats every watch buyer should internalize

Before treating any watch as an investment, a few realities to sit with. Past performance is emphatically not a guarantee — the 2021–22 spike was the largest luxury watch bull market on record, and it may be a long time before anything like it repeats. Transaction costs are real: dealer margins, auction fees, authentication, and insurance can easily consume 10–20% of a round-trip trade. Maintenance matters: servicing a Patek or AP runs several thousand dollars every 5–7 years, and skipping it damages resale. And counterfeit risk is genuine — the top end of the market has professional forgeries that fool casual buyers.

Methodology

We tracked three discontinued or supply-constrained steel sports watches (Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711/1A, Rolex Cosmograph Daytona 116500LN, Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Extra-Thin 15202ST) against the S&P 500 Total Return Index with dividends reinvested, from January 2019 through December 2024. Watch figures are averaged secondary-market values reported by WatchCharts, Chrono24, Grey Market Magazine, The Luxury Playbook, Bob's Watches, and Wristcheck. Figures are for full-set examples in good condition; individual transactions vary by dial variant, provenance, and seller. Annualized returns are compound (CAGR). S&P 500 figures are widely reported total-return index values. Past performance does not guarantee future results.

How WatchEQ can help

If you're considering watches as part of a broader portfolio, WatchEQ publishes brand-by-brand reviews, model-level buying guides, and a free watch evaluation tool that benchmarks your specific reference against current market data. We also track newly discontinued references, which — based on the 2019–2024 cycle — tend to be the highest-probability candidates for long-term appreciation.