Short newsletter this morning. I’m writing from a lounge at the Geneva Airport, where the croissant is a pleasant surprise. I’ve been in Geneva since Friday, running around auction previews, live sales, the GPHG awards, Vacheron Concurs (still to come), and more.
Keep your eyes on the podcast feed (Apple / Spotify), as I’ll publish a short rapid-reaction episode with Mike Nouveau in the next 24 hours or so.
We talk about the best watch we saw all weekend, and mine might’ve been this pink-on-pink Urban Jurgensen perpetual calendar Ref. 2. I believe Sotheby’s told me that Dr. Crott (who used to own UJ) confirmed this as a unique execution. There was a lot of Urbie Jurgie around Geneva this weekend—five Ref 2s alone. I’m going to have a full debrief comparing all the Ref. 2s, along with a pair of Milgauss 6541s, “Patek” school watches, and brass-movement Tourbillon Souverains, later this week. In general, auction catalogs seem to look more similar every season, and more like whatever’s popular on Instagram.
Here’s that pink-on-pink Ref. 2:
Thanks also for all the feedback on last week’s reminder that no, you don’t need spend $100k on an independent watch. As this weekend’s auctions results indicate, it had zero impact on the results, but I enjoyed the back-and-forth across comments, DMs, and emails nonetheless:
Speaking of the podcast, Eric Wind and Charlie Dunne are the guests on the latest episode.
We talk about Eric’s passion-to-value scale and how it’s changed as the market’s has, speculation in Lange, Journe, and indies, why Eric sold about half his collection and what a two-watch collection looks like for a dealer, the math to make a real return on a $10 million Patek Philippe 2499, the dealers making (or trying to make) neo-vintage markets, why vintage Vacheron got hot, whether Heuer is a boomer watch, and the fake Paul Newman Eric spotted in one of my GQ photo reports (more on that below).
📚 Eric and Charlie’s book, Vintage Watches: The Modern Guide, lands November 17. You can buy it now on Amazon for a special pre-order price of $50. I already have my copy and love it!
Podcast episodes are published on Fridays. Find “Unpolished Watches” in your podcast app, and subscribe to get future episodes in your feed: Spotify / Apple / RSS.
Or watch on YouTube:
How to spot a fake vintage Rolex ‘Paul Newman Daytona’ with Eric Wind
A few weeks ago, Eric Wind texted me after seeing this vintage Rolex Daytona in a photo report of mine:
“Fake Newmie!!” his text read, simple and certain.
On the podcast, I asked him to walk us through how he knew it was a fake.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire,” Eric said. “When you start seeing one fake part, 99.9% of the time, then you see it’s fake.”
His examination started with the pushers:
There are four variations of screw-down pushers (read my guide here). The pushers on this fake Newman were designed to look like the latest Mark 3 or “service pushers,” but they’re not quite right. A Paul Newman wouldn’t have been originally paired with these later service pushers (exotic Newman dials came earlier in production).
But worse than a service part, these pushers look downright fake.
On to the dial.
