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Chrono24 Debuts the ‘Dow Jones’ for Luxury Watches
The watch seller’s new index tracks sales data from 14 brands, including Rolex and Patek Philippe.
Chrono24 has introduced “ChronoPulse,” a luxury watch market index.
Karlsruhe, Germany—Watch marketplace Chrono24 has unveiled a luxury watch market index.
Dubbed “ChronoPulse,” the proprietary tool uses the platform’s anonymous first-party real-time sales data.
Chrono24 introduced the index at an event in New York City in late October, when WatchTime New York brought collectors and enthusiasts into town, while also celebrating its 20th anniversary.
CEO Tim Stracke gave a presentation on ChronoPulse, which he called the “Dow Jones for the watch industry," explaining the methodology behind it.
A unique feature of this index, said Stracke, is that it tracks final sale prices rather than list prices.
“In today’s time, where watch prices are very volatile, asking prices are no longer the final truth. We see a lot of prices being negotiated down,” he said.
Another differentiator is the breadth of brands included in the index.
There’s a lot of focus on the “big three,” which includes Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet, but the watch industry is broader than that, noted Stracke.
To create the index, Chrono24’s team of data scientists and industry veterans looked at the top 14 brands by trade volume with the goal of covering 80 percent or more of the watch market.
The top 14 are: Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Breitling, Cartier, IWC, Panerai, TAG Heuer, Tudor, Jaeger LeCoultre, Grand Seiko, Hublot, and Vacheron Constantin.
The index includes the top 10 best-selling and most important models from each manufacturer, so 140 in total currently.
“ChronoPulse incorporates more brands, more models per brand, and more watches in general than any existing competitive service,” said the company in a statement.
“This reduces the number of blind spots possible in a massive data set and makes the ChronoPulse model less vulnerable to bubbles/crashes, and, therefore, most reflective of the actual market.”
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Dubbed “ChronoPulse,” the proprietary tool uses the platform’s anonymous first-party real-time sales data.
Chrono24 introduced the index at an event in New York City in late October, when WatchTime New York brought collectors and enthusiasts into town, while also celebrating its 20th anniversary.
CEO Tim Stracke gave a presentation on ChronoPulse, which he called the “Dow Jones for the watch industry," explaining the methodology behind it.
A unique feature of this index, said Stracke, is that it tracks final sale prices rather than list prices.
“In today’s time, where watch prices are very volatile, asking prices are no longer the final truth. We see a lot of prices being negotiated down,” he said.
Another differentiator is the breadth of brands included in the index.
There’s a lot of focus on the “big three,” which includes Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Audemars Piguet, but the watch industry is broader than that, noted Stracke.
To create the index, Chrono24’s team of data scientists and industry veterans looked at the top 14 brands by trade volume with the goal of covering 80 percent or more of the watch market.
The top 14 are: Rolex, Omega, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, Breitling, Cartier, IWC, Panerai, TAG Heuer, Tudor, Jaeger LeCoultre, Grand Seiko, Hublot, and Vacheron Constantin.
The index includes the top 10 best-selling and most important models from each manufacturer, so 140 in total currently.
“ChronoPulse incorporates more brands, more models per brand, and more watches in general than any existing competitive service,” said the company in a statement.
“This reduces the number of blind spots possible in a massive data set and makes the ChronoPulse model less vulnerable to bubbles/crashes, and, therefore, most reflective of the actual market.”
ChronoPulse utilizes about 4.6 million data points in total, stemming from more than one million sales since Chrono24’s founding, or about 30,000 sales per month.
The company also offers users a “Watch Collection” tool, which tracks the value trajectories of more than 3.7 million owned watches. The tool tracks value using the purchase price, whether or not the user bought the watch from Chrono24.
The value of all watch collections tracked using Chrono24's tool totals more than $49.7 billion, said the company, adding that makes up almost 7 percent of the estimated $748 billion value of all the watches in the world.
While data is a useful tool, watch collectors’ preferences can be subjective, so Chrono24 turned to industry experts for their input, including Denmark-based watch journalist Kristian Haagen, Eric Wind of Florida-based Wind Vintage, Singapore-based watch collector and banker Jack Wong, and Brendan Cunningham, who runs the “Horolonomics” blog and is a professor of economics at Eastern Connecticut State University.
The ChronoPulse index data is updated daily, and the selection and weighting of the manufacturers and watch models are updated and adjusted every six months.
There are also indices available for the 14 top brands, with independent brand-specific indices set to roll out in the coming months, said Chrono24.
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