In 2026, so-called investment-grade watches sit uneasily between asset and art. Surging gold prices and selective market recovery expose how little metal alone matters. True value lies in originality, complications, narrative and serviceability. Collectors, especially in India, are shifting from logo-driven status to knowledge-driven literacy, treating watches as wearable biographies rather than mere financial instruments.
The strangest thing about an investment-grade watch is that nobody serious seems entirely comfortable calling it one.
It is not a bond, not a fund, not a financial instrument. It carries service costs, condition risks, authentication questions and the inconvenience of being scratched by a door handle. At the upper reaches of collecting, price is memory, scholarship, access, condition, authorship and mythology, all compressed into 40 millimetres or less.
In 2026, gold has made the question unavoidable.
In June, Rolex raised global prices on gold watches by an average of five per cent, according to Reuters, its second increase of the year in major markets. Gold itself supplied the harsher test. At around $4,200 an ounce, almost double its 2024 average, the metal had risen so far that some vintage watches were worth more in the crucible than on the resale market.
The secondary market has become equally unsentimental. As of June 28, 2026, the WatchCharts Overall Market Index was up 9.1 per cent over one year, but still down 2.6 per cent over five.
For Pranav Saboo, Managing Director and CEO of Ethos, the furnace is a category error. A serious timepiece, he says, “has never been about the metal it is made from.” Its worth lies in complications, uniqueness, story, skilled assembly and “a creative vision that cannot be replicated at scale.” Value is created by “irreplaceable human intelligence and irreplaceable narrative,” he says. “Both are destroyed the moment the piece goes into a crucible.”
Aakash Anand, founder of Rotoris, starts with the object itself. “Originality. Always originality,” he says. Under a loupe, “the dial tells you the truth.” Then comes the movement: calibre match, period-correct components, service history. Box and papers matter, but only after the object has passed inspection. “They support the timepiece. The timepiece itself carries the value.”
A watch can be correct from across the room and wrong under magnification. The costliest problems are often the ones a photograph conceals: mismatched lume, cannibalised movements, redials, softened chamfers, lost bevels. Some pieces are not preserved so much as composed.
“Everything else assumes the watch is what it claims to be,” Anand says. “Skip that step and the rest is just decoration.”
The problem is not age. Honest wear can carry more dignity than aggressive restoration. The problem is confidence. Once trust leaves the watch, value follows it. “Restoration should preserve originality, not recreate it,” Anand says.
Anand’s hierarchy is blunt: originality first, condition second, rarity third. After-sales confidence is the variable that has shifted most in 2026, because serviceability is what allows a watch to survive long enough to matter. A rare reference in poor condition, with replaced parts and no credible service path, has no real floor. “A timepiece that can be kept running for fifty years is a timepiece worth owning,” he says.
Beauty is not a service network.
In India, Saboo says, watches have long marked business success, weddings, generational gifting and legacy building. Deloitte’s India-focused Swiss watch industry insight gives that behaviour a broader frame: wedding-season demand, watches as part of luxury spending, and a resale market in which more than 50 per cent of surveyed consumers expressed interest. The shift is not away from emotion. It is towards informed emotion.
Saboo sees buyers moving from “logo-driven luxury to knowledge-driven luxury.” They now ask about movements, hand-finishing, forged carbon, ceramic, meteorite and open-worked architecture. “Luxury retail is no longer about display; it is about discovery,” he says.
Pre-owned has sharpened that literacy. It has taught buyers to look for mechanical integrity, traceable provenance, genuine parts and maisons that can service a watch decades later. Buyers are also learning to ask whether a watch has the internal coherence of conviction, or whether it was merely engineered to sell.
Atul Kasbekar, the celebrated photographer and a serious watch collector, approaches the same question through pleasure and doubt. “If it’s an investment, don’t ever put it on your wrist,” he says. “But what’s the point of living your life if you just look at it in your cupboard?” The market rewards untouched objects. Life rewards used ones.
In his own collection, Kasbekar says, the watches that brought the greatest joy were not necessarily the ones most appreciated. A meaningful percentage, he adds, has migrated permanently to his wife and children’s wrists. Perhaps, then, the real return is redistribution. Enduring value, in his phrase, is “desirability surviving fashion cycles.”
Kasbekar traces his way of looking back to M.F. Husain, who believed artists should not look only to other painters for inspiration. “A great chef is an artist. A great architect, a furniture designer, graphic designer, clothing manufacturer, whatever… we are all artists,” Kasbekar says.
That is where the image sharpens. “How ridiculous it is for somebody to sit in that horrible Swiss winter and machine all these parts together so that they mesh and tell time accurately to five seconds a day?” His conclusion is simple: “I see the watchmaker as an artist.”
His Greubel Forsey story shows what happens when literacy collides with hype. Kasbekar recalls a group where someone wanted the green-dial solid-gold Daytona at a premium of around Rs. 1 crore. If the spend was already in that territory, he suggested Greubel Forsey instead: a serious independent maker producing watches in vanishingly small numbers. “What’s a Greubel Forsey?” came the reply. The answer that followed said everything: “But nobody will know what I’m wearing.”
Kasbekar’s question still hangs in the air: “You wore it for people to see, or you wore it because you knew what you were wearing?”
Recognition is easy. Literacy is harder.
Kairav Engineer pushes from the other side. “I am an end user rather than a collector,” he says. He bought his Rolex GMT-Master II “Pepsi” in 2018, the year the modern steel version launched, and has worn it for eight years. For him, a watch is not an abstraction on a chart. It is weight, habit, second skin; the small absence on the wrist that makes him feel oddly undressed.
So when the conversation turns to the Pepsi’s reported 2026 discontinuation, he does not react like a trader watching a ticker. References vanish, return and change.
The longer view has made him wary of certainty. Daytonas, he points out, were not always sacred. Franck Muller once occupied a very different place in the hierarchy of desire. Markets rewrite their own legends.
His rule is simple: buy what you like, understand it, and never buy for social validation.
Inheritance, for him, is not storage. He does not want to pass down a fully stickered safe-queen. “There should be nicks and scratches and dings,” he says. A safe-kept object may keep condition intact. A worn one preserves a life.
Saboo makes the same point differently. “A watch you wear for thirty years becomes part of your biography,” he says. “You cannot buy those years back at a higher price on the secondary market.”
The new investment watch is not necessarily the rarest, loudest or hardest to obtain. It is the one that can pass from loupe to wrist to memory without losing its claim. The old grammar of buying the rumour and selling the premium has given way to something more exacting: a culture of proof.
Because time, unlike hype, has excellent eyesight