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You’ve made it as a finance bro. Correction: you’ve made it through the revolving doors of the Canary Wharf tower that’ll be your home for the foreseeable future. You’ve joined an investment bank at the very bottom; you’re spending 80 to 100 hours a week making minor formatting adjustments to PowerPoint decks. But it pays well – well enough, once you get your year-end bonus, to buy that watch you’ve been pining after. You trawl the second-hand marketplaces, and then you find it: a Rolex Submariner in your budget. It’s yours; you click it joyously onto your wrist. Then you go to work the next day and see that every colleague in your intake has done the same.
As anyone who’s watching Industry could tell you, finance has a thriving watch culture. Even allowing for London rents, a young banker will have enough disposable income to afford the kind of models that are 50th-birthday or retirement presents for us mortals. And yes – as per the finance meme pages, the Submariner is still ground zero. It’s “the absolute staple workhorse”, says Harry*, a finance worker in London, though he personally owns an Explorer II, Grand Seiko Snowflake and Tudor Black Bay.
Some think bigger. James*, another London finance bro, spent his first years of banking in Asia, and remembers having to accompany a colleague “because he was drawing out [the equivalent of] £20,000 in cash to get a specific [Audemars Piguet] Royal Oak model. He had a massive duffel bag.” But for juniors, relative discretion is usually wise. “Generally, it’s not encouraged to outdress your boss,” says James. “If my boss wears a five grand Rolex, I’m not gonna rock up with a 40 grand Patek Phillipe and blow him out the water.” If you end up flexing on your direct line manager by default, because they’re an Apple Watch guy, no biggie – the real “cardinal sin”, says Harry, “is wearing a watch you can’t afford, however recklessly, from your total comp”. Don’t reveal you’ve got family money behind you – because in finance, which likes to consider itself a bastion of meritocracy, no-one likes a nepo baby.
The other implication with wearing an ultra-high-end watch – or a rotation of them – as a junior is that “you are too well paid”, says Max*, a banker based in Europe. Save it for a few years into your career, when you’ve proved your worth to your firm. Even then, you’re likely to still go for bread-and-butter steel Rolexes: Submariners, Datejusts and Explorers; or, as in Max’s case, a Daytona. The bulletproof appeal of the brand means that it’s what the non-aficionados gravitate towards – if you have a “very successful year”, says Federico*, a European banker who rocks a GMT-Master, “a Rolex is that thing many people will think about”.
