For a brief window between spring 2020 and spring 2022, the most reliable trade in finance was a steel sports watch. A Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711, retail price $34,893, could be flipped within months for $130,000. A Rolex Daytona listed at $13,500 fetched $50,000 on the secondary market. Bloomberg's Subdial Watch Index, which tracks the 50 most-traded luxury references, climbed to roughly $58,000. In December 2021, a Tiffany-blue Nautilus auctioned for $6.5 million. Then it ended. By early 2024 the Subdial index had fallen 42 percent, and that same Tiffany-blue Nautilus now trades quietly for around $1.2 million.
The watch market is a useful laboratory because the wreckage is so neatly documented, but the lesson generalizes. Between March 2020 and March 2022, the US Federal Reserve held its policy rate near zero while Congress passed roughly $5 trillion in fiscal stimulus. Bitcoin rose from $10,000 to $69,000. Money was, for a moment, almost free, and looking for somewhere to be foolish. That is the fuel. The spark was the smartphone. A Nautilus on a celebrity's wrist used to be a discreet status marker visible to perhaps 200 people in a Geneva boutique; on Instagram it was visible to 200 million. Watch supply grew at single-digit percentages annually. The supply of attention paid to watches grew exponentially.
Social media did not just speed the cycle up — it added specific cognitive distortions. Three matter. First, survivorship bias on steroids: the algorithm shows you the 22-year-old who flipped a Royal Oak for a fortune and hides the thousand who bought at the peak and lost half their money. Aggregate that bias across a generation and you produce not informed risk-taking but a systematically miscalibrated population. Second, identity capture: when owning a watch, a meme stock, or a particular cryptocurrency becomes a tribal signifier rather than an asset allocation, selling at a loss becomes psychologically expensive in a way unrelated to the loss itself. Third, compressed feedback loops. Markets normally discipline foolishness, but the discipline takes time — months for a thesis to fail, quarters for earnings to disappoint. Social media compresses the reward loop to seconds while leaving the punishment loop unchanged.
The reckoning came in 2022, when the Fed began raising rates and Luna, Celsius, Three Arrows, and FTX collapsed in sequence. The Subdial index's slide, analysts later observed, perfectly correlated with the rate-hiking path. The watches, the crypto, the SPACs, the meme stocks were all the same trade in different costumes: a bet on cheap money continuing and on someone richer and more foolish arriving next week. The recovery now under way — watch prices up nearly 5 percent in 2025, more than 70 percent of major brands posting positive returns in early 2026 — looks healthier precisely because it is narrower. Buyers are buying because they want to wear the thing, not flip it. Premiums over retail have compressed. This is what a sane market looks like, and it is duller.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude the lesson has been learned. The social-media machinery that amplified the last mania has only become more sophisticated, with AI-generated influencers now hawking what humans once did. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith observed in 1990 that financial memory lasts about 20 years — roughly the time required for a new generation to arrive in markets innocent of the last catastrophe. On current form, for a TikTok-native investor, that interval is closer to 20 months, and shrinking. The next bubble will arrive wrapped in a story about why this time the rules are different, transmitted through a channel optimized to find the people most likely to believe it.
Between 2020 and 2022, a stainless-steel sports watch was the most reliable trade in finance — until it wasn't, and the wreckage tells us something uncomfortable about how modern bubbles actually form.
For two strange years, luxury watches behaved like tech stocks. A Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 with a $34,893 retail price flipped for $130,000. A Tiffany-blue version auctioned for $6.5 million in December 2021. Bloomberg's Subdial Watch Index, which tracks the 50 most-traded models, climbed to roughly $58,000.
Then the Fed started raising rates. By early 2024 that index had crashed 42%. The same Tiffany-blue Nautilus now changes hands for about $1.2 million. The FT columnist argues this wasn't really about watches — it was the same bubble that swept up crypto, NFTs, SPACs and meme stocks, just wearing a different costume.
The columnist's core claim is that bubbles need two ingredients — fuel (cheap money looking for somewhere to go) and a spark (a transmission medium that spreads envy fast). Social media just made the spark vastly more powerful.
You will live through several of these manias. The columnist warns that AI-generated influencers, prediction markets, and private credit are already showing the same narrative-over-fundamentals patterns. Galbraith said financial memory lasts about 20 years — roughly one generation. For a TikTok-native investor, the columnist argues, that memory is closer to 20 months. Whatever you're tempted to buy because everyone on your feed seems to be getting rich on it: that's the moment to slow down.
Every bubble has had a faster transmission medium than the last — pamphlets in 1637 Holland, coffee-houses in 1720, ticker tape in 1929, smartphones today. The next mania won't look like a Patek Nautilus. It will arrive wrapped in a story about why 'this time is different' — maybe AI, maybe demographics, maybe something not yet named — and it will be delivered by an algorithm engineered to find exactly the people most likely to believe it.