How WatchQuant Calculates Prices
Every number on WatchQuant starts with real market data. Here's exactly how each metric is derived.
Market Mid, Low, and High
Every price you see on WatchQuant is calculated from active eBay listings, not asking prices on other platforms and not sold auction data. Each day, our system pulls current Buy It Now listings for every tracked Rolex variant, filters out accessories, replica parts, and listings priced well outside the expected range for that model, then calculates three numbers: the market mid is the 50th percentile, the median price across all qualifying listings. The market low is the 25th percentile and the market high is the 75th percentile, together forming a realistic trading band rather than a single number that could be skewed by one unusually cheap or expensive listing.
Price Change and Averages
For Rolex model families, we calculate both 7-Day and 30-Day percentage change, comparing today's market mid against the mid from 7 or 30 days earlier, shown on the homepage table and family detail pages. For individual watch variants, we calculate 30-Day percentage change the same way, plus 30-Day and 90-Day Average price — the mean market mid over that trailing window rather than a percentage change. All of these use our daily price history archive, with a small tolerance window (a few days either side) when looking up the closest historical data point, since markets don't always have a perfectly aligned record exactly N days back.
Market Spread
Market Spread measures how wide the gap is between the lowest and highest active listings, relative to the mid price: ((market high − market low) / market mid) × 100. A tight spread suggests sellers broadly agree on what the watch is worth right now. A wide spread can mean genuine scarcity, inconsistent condition across listings, or a thin, immature market for that specific reference. This is a Collector-tier metric.
Market Heat Index
Market Heat is a composite score from 0 to 100 that combines three signals: how quickly listings are being absorbed (35%), 30-day price momentum (35%), and how tight the market spread is (30%). A high score suggests an active market where supply is shrinking and prices are climbing; a cold score suggests the opposite. This is a sentiment indicator, not a price prediction, and it's an Analyst-tier metric since it depends on Listing Velocity data.
Listing Velocity
Listing Velocity tracks the raw change in the number of active listings for a specific watch over the past 7 and 30 days. A negative number means listings are disappearing — sold or withdrawn faster than new ones are appearing — which typically signals strong demand. A positive number means supply is building up. This is an Analyst-tier metric.
Liquidity Index
Liquidity classifies how actively traded a watch is right now, relative to every other watch we track. We rank current listing counts across the entire catalog and place each watch into High, Moderate, or Low liquidity based on where it falls — the top third, middle third, or bottom third. Because this is a relative ranking, the exact thresholds shift slightly as the overall catalog and market activity change.
Value Rating
Value Rating scores an individual listing against what we'd expect it to cost given its specific condition and packaging. When enough listings exist for the exact same condition and packaging combination (3 or more), we use the median price of those comparable listings directly as the fair value benchmark — a like-for-like comparison rather than an estimate. When there aren't enough comparable listings, we fall back to adjusting the overall market mid using condition multipliers (ranging from 0.57× for poor condition up to 1.20× for unworn) and packaging multipliers (up to 1.10× for a full box and papers set). Either way, the listing's actual price is compared against this fair value, and the deviation determines its rating — from Excellent Deal at more than 10% under fair value, down to Bad Deal at more than 10% over.
Questions about the data?
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Methodology is updated as new metrics are added to the platform.
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