Rolex has spent a century pretending the secondary market doesn’t exist, so it was bloody strange watching Aurel Bacs hammer down four one-off Daytonas at Phillips in London on Monday night for a combined US$49.4 million.
The Four Seasons collection was Rolex’s first ever charity auction, with every dollar going to the Federer Foundation and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Re:wild. Each watch pairs a precious metal case with a natural stone dial and a serious amount of gem-setting, and Rolex has confirmed every one is unique, something it almost never puts in writing.
| Watch | Result |
|---|---|
| Summer (Everose gold, turquoise dial, ruby counters) | US$13.65M |
| Autumn (yellow gold, mookaite dial, chrysoprase counters) | US$13.5M |
| Winter (platinum, blue opal dial, lapis lazuli counters) | US$13.2M |
| Spring (white gold, chrysoprase dial, lepidolite counters) | US$9M |
Hodinkee reported earlier this month that the quartet was originally meant to go to a single buyer for around CHF 4 million, which puts Monday’s result at roughly ten times what Rolex first had in mind.
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If you’ve got a Daytona at home, the group chats have probably already told you it’s worth double this morning. It isn’t.
These prices don’t value the Daytona as a reference, and they’re no reason to list your 126500 on Chrono24 at triple market. Four unrepeatable objects went to bidders who could buy a Gulfstream without calling the accountant, with a philanthropy premium baked into every bid.
Paul Newman’s own Daytona made US$17.75 million in 2017 on provenance nobody could fake. This time Rolex built the provenance from scratch, and the market paid up anyway.
What owners should watch is who’s pocketing the money. For years the flippers, the grey dealers and the auction houses have kept the margin between Rolex’s retail price and what people will really pay. Monday was Rolex proving it can collect that margin itself, in a packed saleroom.
Stack that on top of a Certified Pre-Owned program that’s now a serious business, the off-season Perpetual Padellone launch in Milan two weeks ago and the Oyster centenary at Watches & Wonders. I was in Geneva for that one, and Rolex wasn’t exactly being humble.
For owners, that’s broadly good news, since a brand that guards desirability tends to guard resale values with it. For anyone still on the list at their AD, it probably means more patience and another price rise in January, charity or not.
The strangest result wasn’t the top one. The platinum Winter watch, which on paper should have been the flagship, finished third behind Everose and yellow gold.
Nobody at that level was bidding on metal hierarchy. They bid on the dial that looked best on the wrist, and the turquoise and ruby Summer piece won by a nose.
It lines up with what we’ve seen locally, where a Rainbow Daytona set a new Australian auction record at First State Auctions in July. Gem-set, colourful, slightly ridiculous Rolex has gone from guilty pleasure to the main event, and if you own a factory gem-set Daytona or a hard stone dial from the off-catalogue era, expect your phone to ring a bit more.
The timing’s almost too neat. Phillips set the record for the highest-grossing watch auction ever in Geneva this May, and the autumn Geneva sales kick off November 7, with Phillips, Antiquorum, Sotheby’s and Christie’s running back to back before Hong Kong and New York close out the year.
Every auctioneer on those rostrums will be quoting Monday’s number, and every consignor with a vintage Daytona now has a fresh story to sell. At the top end, mood moves prices more than fundamentals do, and Rolex just handed the market a very good mood.
None of which means you should do anything drastic. Don’t panic-buy a Daytona at peak hype, and don’t dump the steel sports model you love because a mookaite dial went for more than a Bondi penthouse.
Rolex now curates how badly people want its watches as carefully as it makes them. If you already own one, that’s a nice place to sit. If you’re still chasing one, it got a little harder on Monday.
For the record, I’d have been the bloke up the back of the saleroom nursing a free Phillips water with my hands firmly in my lap.
