Speedy Tintin information gathering

Really? I see lots of hype on these being posted, presumably by owners but I note that in the past month 2 for sale on forums* have failed to sell at £4700/$6000, both admittedly without boxes/papers. Perhaps there is a big premium for a clean full set, there often is for LE editions, but while they have clearly risen greatly in value, I am not sure it is as far as some would have you believe.

*Here and TZ-UK where there is an active sale for one at present if anyone is interested.

Found this on an eBay sales group. I don't think it was ever an "ugly duckling" do you?

The watch only example at TZ-Uk is now down to £4,500/~$5,750/~€5,000 if anyone is interested. Like I say, there is a fair bit of hype about but if you buy into it then go get it...

G'day everyone, happy new year!

I thought I'd write today to provide a bit of an update and to put forward an idea that @blubarb and I have talked about. According to my notes, we've now seen 198 unique Tintins in this thread. The distribution of new watches over time is shown below in the same ways as I posted a few months ago (on p.79 of the thread).



If we assume that the rumors are roughly accurate and there are between 1500 and 2000 Tintins in existence, the number that we've seen in this thread actually represents a decent proportion of the overall population; specifically, between about 10-13%.

This seems like a lot and it leads to an interesting question: Is it typical to see so many unique watches (or any kind of product) reported in online threads of this general kind?

If we dig a bit deeper into this question, an interesting opportunity arises. Consider that there are some limited edition models where we know the total number of watches in existence. Working backwards, if we were to figure out whether this proportion is roughly the same for those other watches (and adjust for thread length), this could actually be an interesting way to increase our confidence in the Tintin production number estimates getting around. We could even frame this as a kind of hypothesis to be tested. If the number of unique watches appearing in discussion threads related to each specific model is roughly proportional to (1) the length of the thread, and (2) the number of watches that exist, if we calculate the proportion of unique watches appearing in threads dedicated to different numbered editions and adjust for thread length, then those proportions should be fairly stable across models and they should be roughly the same as the estimates for the Tintin.

This could be tested in maybe five main steps:
1. Identify candidate numbered LEs. A few that come to mind are the CK2998, Speedy Tuesday 1 & 2, Apollo XI 45th, Snoopy 1 & 2.
2. Identify threads associated with each numbered LE. At this step, I think we'd be looking for threads that are similar to the Tintin thread, in that (i) they are focused on a specific LE and (ii) folks have been reporting arrivals or new acquisitions for a reasonable period of time. Kind of like this example for the ST1: https://omegaforums.net/threads/omega-speedmaster-speedy-tuesday-limited-edition-arrivals.51317/
3. For each such thread, collect data on (i) the number of unique watches observed in the thread and (ii) the length of the thread in terms of time and pages. The outcome measure would be unique watches reported, per unit of LE volume (which we know for numbered editions), per unit of thread length (say, months, for argument's sake).
4. Aggregate scores for as many numbered LEs as possible
5. Use the obtained range of scores to provide a comparison for the Tintin numbers.

Incidentally, according to this method, the thread-length adjusted values for the Tintin, using month as our length measure would currently be between:

unique observations/total population/thread length in months
198/1500/38 = 0.00261
198/2000/38 = 0.00347

Meaning that around three-tenths of a percent of the total population of watches have been reported in the thread per month, on average.

While this is not a way to prove any particular estimate correct with 100% certainty, it could at least suggest that the popular production numbers that people have talked about are in the right ballpark. On the other hand, if the results from the other LEs come back fairly consistent and then the Tintin numbers are wildly different, that's possibly even more interesting.

A little bit of geeky food for thought. Cheers!

It may not be too surprising that we managed to get 10-13% of the serials # of the Tintin speedy in here as this watch was / is more likely to appeal to collectors... who in turn are more likely to be on this forum. Even more so for the ST1 (and perhaps 2), as these were specifically developed for #SpeedyTuesday e-followers... which would naturally lead to skewed numbers/stats vs. regular production references.

Other than that, thank you for compiling these numbers and for providing your analysis. Great job!!!

On a related note: Joyeux Anniversaire Tintin!!! You sure look youthful for a 90 year old chap.... 👍