The Crown Index · October 2026
The watch press spent 2026 covering the Pepsi's discontinuation pop, and fair enough: +38 percent in a year is a story. But rank all 129 references in our index by one-year performance and the Pepsi doesn't win. It gets beaten by a 31-millimeter Datejust from the 1970s that most collectors have never discussed at dinner.
| Reference | What it is | Mid price | 1Y |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6827 | Datejust 31, 1970s | $6,500 | +68% |
| 6917 | Lady-Datejust 26, 1970s | $5,150 | +39% |
| 126710BLRO | GMT-Master II Pepsi | $27,500 | +38% |
| 179174 | Lady-Datejust 26, final gen | $8,550 | +32% |
| 68273 | Datejust 31 two-tone | $6,350 | +30% |
| 69173 | Lady-Datejust 26 two-tone | $6,450 | +27% |
One steel sports grail in a leaderboard otherwise owned entirely by watches under 32 millimeters. That is not a coincidence; it is a changing of the guard in who is buying.
Three currents feeding one wave. First, taste: a decade of 40-plus-millimeter maximalism gave way to vintage proportions, and the people who set style online wear small gold watches with everything now. Second, access: secondhand platforms put a generation of first-time buyers one tap from a $5,000 Rolex, and the small Datejusts are the best-made watches at that price by a comfortable margin. Third, arithmetic: these were produced as "ladies' watches" in an era when that meant smaller production and lower survival rates in good condition, so crisp examples are scarcer than the market assumed while it ignored them.
Rallies move through a family in order: the famous configuration first, then its siblings. The steel-and-white-gold 179174 led; the identical-looking earlier 69174 and 79174 still trade thousands cheaper and are closing the gap quarter by quarter, which you can watch happening in the recorded-sales tables on their pages. Full gold models like the 69178 have lagged the steel versions entirely, with melt value underneath them as a floor. And the small sports models, the ladies' Yacht-Masters with their platinum bezels, haven't been invited to the party at all yet.
A 68 percent year is a repricing, not a law of nature; thin supply gaps prices up and can gap them down. Condition is everything on watches this age: worn cases and aftermarket dials are common, and the spread between a rough example and a crisp one is widening fast. Our grades, recorded sales and per-reference risk notes are on every page linked above. Buy the watch, not the chart.