Unexpected favorites = unpredictable results.

From time to time, models unexpectedly resurface at auctions that are unexpectedly met with a huge amount of excitement. They fetch a few million US dollars or a few millions in auction's currency of choice, and leave uninitiated collectors and investors dumbfounded.

People are quietly going about their business, selling each other Patek Philippe's sporty steel Nautilus watches, Ref. 1518 and 2499 perpetual calendars, "Paul Newman" Rolex Daytonas… And then poof! A Rolex Oyster Perpetual Ref. 6062 from 1952 with a "Stelline" dial (Italian for "little stars") appears out of nowhere.

And suddenly, there's only one word on everyone's lips. The pre-owned watch market repeats it for the next few months like an incantation: "Stelline, Stelline, Stelline!" Then a few months later, when the public had started to forget about their "little star", One of eight known Rolex Daytona Ref. 6270 watches suddenly resurfaced.

It also sold a few million record-breaking US dollars, and the mantra changed to "the End Game, the End Game, the End Game!". Those were the words Phillips used to describe one of the scarce versions of the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona made in the mid-1980s for an order placed by one of the most important clients in Rolex history — Sultan of Oman Qaboos Bin Said Al Said.

What set the Sultan of Oman's Ref. 6269 and Ref. 6270 apart from regular reference numbers was that their bezels and dials were encrusted with pavé-, brilliant- and baguette-cut diamonds. And that's what earned this watch its symbolic nickname, "the End Game". Why so dramatic? These watches made a jaw-dropping impression on people who were there at the time they were made, just forty years ago.

From a traditionalist austere Calvinist Swiss perspective, such ostentatious shows of opulent luxury on a lady's wrist, not to mention a man's, were seen as gaudy, the height of bad taste! And like the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, the wearers should all but feel the apocalyptic wrath of God for committing such a mortal sin.

But then another mysterious star unexpectedly rises anew, completely out of the blue, and then another, plunging those uninitiated into the world of collectors and investors into depression. Outsiders realize that they know precious little about haute horlogerie.

For instance, "sleeping beauties" by the British watchmaker George Daniels and his apprentice Roger Smith were awoken from their slumber last summer.

Daniels was best known among his contemporaries as the author of co-axial escapement that Omega used in their watches. The result Smith's Pocket Watch No. 2 achieved was almost USD 5 million. Well, who would have predicted that at the beginning of 2023? No one!

How to Predict a Craze?

Last year's example with a number of Rolex Oyster Perpetual Ref. 6062 "Stelline" models may be extraordinary, yet it's still fairly logical. It could have been predicted — all Rolex collectors knew that this model was made in the early 1950s, and owners didn't take good care of their watches back then. They were treated as practical instruments for everyday wear, so few actually survived.

In order to anticipate these kinds of surprises, you need to study the product line of each brand that has been implementing a wise auction policy for many years. Simple as that. It's not hard to get hold of a book on the history of any famous watchmaker, you can order almost anything online now.

Moreover, many watchmakers have already digitized their archives or are almost finished going digital. All you need to do is gain access to those primary sources. Fact-checking is generally the first thing an aspiring collector needs to do.

Watches of Famous Provenance

Another top source of auction sensations are watches once worn on the wrists of sports stars, politicians, musicians, or models that were custom-made by major manufacturers for not-so-famous but still high-profile clients. Almost all watchmakers do personalized watches.

Take Patek Philippe as an example, who have been doing this since day one, as the vast majority of their watches are commissioned private orders. Now is a good time to mention a recent piece of auction dynamite: the very first automatic Patek Philippe Ref. 2526, sold at the beginning of April by Sotheby's in Hong Kong.

The watch was made in 1952 and sold in the United States on 27.06.1953. This is confirmed by an extract from the watchmaker's archives, as well as a letter written by the then-president of the American Henri Stern Watch Agency Werner Sonn, which handled distribution for Patek Phillippe in the United States.

It was sold to J.B. Champion, who was a well-known American lawyer and one of the biggest collectors of Patek Philippe's watches at the time. The fact that the model belonged to him was immortalized in an inscription engraved on the caseback: "The First Self Winding Patek Philippe Made Especially for J.B. Champion".

One of the most time-honored watchmakers, Vacheron Constantin, has actually turned bespoke orders into a rather profitable business. Its Les Cabinotiers department of elite masters has been working within the manufacture's walls for over fifteen years now, who create extremely complicated watches for clients' bespoke orders.

And we're not talking about a portrait of someone's wife on a dial or a few stones set on a bezel, but complications that are at times totally unique. The world's most complicated watch made in 2015 was one of them — the Vacheron Constantin Ref. 57260 pocket watch.

The model was given 57 complications, several of which were world premiers: a Hebrew perpetual calendar based on the 19-year Metonic cycle, a business calendar compliant with the calendar-and-clock format standard ISO 8601, an integrally connected alarm system with a separate power-reserve indication, an automatic "night silence" mode" (from 10.00 p.m. to 8.00 a.m.), a double retrograde rattrapante chronograph, and even an Armillary tourbillon.

And at the beginning of this year, the watch community was hit with another bombshell: Bloomberg published the name of the client, who commissioned another watch that took the grand maison eleven years of hard work to develop.

It's now the most complicated portable timepiece in the world, clocking up 63 complications already, including the first Chinese perpetual calendar. The client who commissioned both watches was an American billionaire worth USD 4.4 billion on the Forbes 400 list in 2023: the founder and current chairman of the W. R. Berkley Corporation and chairman of the New York University Board of Trustees, 78-year-old William R. Berkley.

The second watch has essentially been named after him (The Berkley Grand Complication Ref. 9901C/000G-B472). And so Berkley joins the ranks of important patrons of haute horlogerie, alongside James Ward Packard and Henry Graves Jr.

Credits taken from: www.christies.com, www.phillips.com, www.sothebys.com and official websites of manufacturers