Between 9 and 12 May this year, the three major auction houses cleared roughly US$155 million of wristwatches in Geneva. Phillips, in association with Bacs & Russo, took CHF 74.8 million (US$96.3 million) across 225 lots, the highest-grossing watch auction ever held, anywhere, by any house. Christie’s posted the strongest various-owner result in its history at US$42.3 million. Sotheby’s hammered the most expensive A. Lange & Söhne ever sold at public auction, a 1916 Grande Complication that had not surfaced in nearly ninety years. Between them, more than fifty world records fell.
In the same days, the broad market indices that track standard high-grade references moved by a fraction of a percentage point. Both of those things are true, and holding them together is the single most useful thing a collector can do this autumn. The watch market has not recovered its 2021 trajectory. It has split in two.
What the records were actually for
Read the top lots and a pattern emerges immediately. The pieces that broke records did not do so because they were expensive watches. They did so because they were specific ones. Six F. P. Journe pieces set world records in a single sale. Independent watchmaking — Journe, Dufour, Daniels, De Bethune, Voutilainen — has moved from a connoisseur’s footnote to the centre of the saleroom, and last year an independent wristwatch crossed the ten-million-dollar threshold at auction for the first time.
What the room rewarded was documentation, provenance, unusual case material, low serials within genuinely small production runs, and makers with thin auction records. Generic excellence did not set records. Watches with a story did.
The corollary is uncomfortable and worth stating plainly: a well-kept, entirely correct example of a widely produced reference is not participating in this market. It is a good watch and it is holding its value approximately where it was. That is not failure. It is simply a different asset from the one making headlines, and we have written at length about which pieces appreciate, which hold, and which do neither.
The autumn calendar
The cycle now moves east and then west. Hong Kong takes the autumn sales in October and November, Geneva follows in early November, and New York closes the year in early December. Phillips, Christie’s and Sotheby’s headline all three, with Antiquorum also in Geneva and Monaco Legend Group running its own calendar.
For anyone consigning, the timing question is not really a question. If a piece carries documented single-owner provenance, original papers, or an independent maker’s signature, the room is demonstrably willing. If it is standard high-grade material, selling into a flat index is a decision made against oneself.
What to actually watch
Three things will tell you where the market stands by December. The first is the sell-through rate in the middle of each catalogue — not the trophy lots, which will clear regardless, but the lots between them. The second is whether the independents hold their spring levels or whether May represented a peak of enthusiasm. The third is Rolex and Patek Philippe’s share of the top ten in each sale; last autumn, both were overshadowed by independents in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
All five major houses recorded their strongest watch revenue in history in 2025. That is the headline, and it is real. But a market can set records at the top while going nowhere underneath, and the collector who understands which half of that market he is standing in will make considerably better decisions this autumn than the one reading only the results.
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Featured photo: © Phillips Auctioneers