The WatchCharts Overall Market Index was up 0.6% in February, which sounds like nothing until you read the tape from the twelve months before it. Patek Philippe has now been in positive territory for a full year on the platform's data. Rolex and Audemars Piguet both flipped green in late 2025 and have stayed there. Three days before Watches and Wonders opens, that is the first time the Big Three have all been trending up at once since early 2022.
The numbers, rounded to the nearest tenth: Patek +16.2% over the trailing twelve months, Rolex +7.9%, Audemars Piguet +3.4%. The overall market index is up 8.2% over the same period. WatchCharts published the February update earlier this spring and an interim March read last month that kept the direction but slowed the slope.
What's actually moving
Most of Patek's twelve-month gain is concentrated in two collections: Nautilus and Aquanaut. That is not a surprise in a year when the Nautilus is turning fifty and everyone who has ever written about the collection is writing about it again, but the Aquanaut move is more interesting. Prices on the steel 5167A have been inching up since October and appear to be absorbing the Nautilus halo rather than being dragged down by it. Patek Philippe released the Aquanaut at a moment when the brand expected it to be a second-tier sports watch behind the Nautilus, and the market is finally paying for it as a first-tier one.
Rolex's gains are more evenly spread. The Land-Dweller introduced at last year's fair settled into a stable premium by late autumn, the Pepsi GMT is now drawing reseller attention after dealers started pulling the waitlist last week, and the Daytona in precious metal has been firmer than it was in 2024. Audemars Piguet is the slowest of the three to recover, partly because the Royal Oak 15500 overhang from the hype years is still working its way through dealer inventories and partly because the Code 11.59 is a smaller share of the trade volume than AP would like it to be.
Why the turn
Three things are doing most of the work. The first is the US tariff reset at the end of 2025, which dropped the effective duty on Swiss watches from 39% to 15% and reopened ordering for American retailers. The second is the slow drain of speculative stock from trading desks, which took longer than most commentators predicted and is now visibly close to done. The third is simply that retail prices from Geneva have kept rising at a healthy clip, and a rising list price drags the secondary market with it more often than it collapses it.
The Robb Report piece on the shift described the market as "finally turning a corner", which is the right framing for a slow, grinding move. There is no hype cycle here. Nobody is calling it a new bull run. A 0.6% month is a 0.6% month.
The pre-fair read
What the numbers mean for the week ahead depends on which part of the market a buyer is watching. If the interest is in new retail, the tightening of secondary-market spreads is a signal that dealers will be unwilling to discount the major novelties, and that waitlist pressure is likely to reappear quickly for the most-rumoured references, chief among them any Nautilus anniversary piece and whatever Rolex does with the Land-Dweller.
If the interest is in buying pre-owned, the window where the best references were available below their 2022 peaks is closing slowly rather than slamming shut. Documented provenance matters more in that environment than it did during the hype years, because buyers negotiating down from a rising market are more cautious about what they're actually purchasing. That is less of an Aikakone sales pitch than an observation: the slower the market moves, the more the paperwork matters.
Sources: WatchCharts March 2026 Update, Robb Report, Chrono24 Magazine, The Rare Corner.
