How much gold is in a gold watch? Like in this popular model, the Rolex Day-Date
40, reference number 228238, which is going for around 39,000 dollars right now
in the market. Can you guess what portion of that price is
actually due to the value of gold?…Take a wild guess… Would you say 50%, maybe 60? Hold that thought for a moment and by the
end of the video, comment how close you really were! In the meantime, let's talk a bit about gold… You know, that shiny metal worth about $1900
an ounce when this video was recorded? Gold is actually a pretty popular investment,
outperforming the US stock market in the last 20 years. From 2000 to 2020, you would have multiplied
your investment in gold by 7 times.
That's more than double the return of the
S&P 500 during the same period, and that's assuming all dividends were reinvested, which
doesn't always happen. Excluding dividends, it’s 4 times more! A huge difference!!! But back to our little Rolex experiment. To find out how much gold the watch really
contains, we need to weigh all the parts made out of actual gold… To do that, we first had our preferred watchmaker
Chrono Sky take the watch apart for us. [music] Even though the hands of a Rolex watch are
also made out of gold, they weigh less than a 10th of a gram. That's at most a few dollars in today's market. As a result, we excluded them from our actual
calculation. It is also important to note that a gold watch
is not made out of pure gold.
It is made out of 18K gold, which is around
75% gold by weight. Notice the approximate 75% figure on our precious
metals analyzer. We then weigh each gold piece one by one to
come up with the final weight… [music] 178.3 grams. 178.3 grams of 18K gold x 0.75 gives us a
total of around 133.7 grams of pure gold, times $61 a gram we get $8,156, which is around
20% of the actual price of the watch. Surprised? Think back to the chunk of pure gold you saw
on the thumbnail of this video…Let's see how it compares to the 133.7 grams of pure
gold in our Rolex watch. 340.5 grams of 24K gold are worth about 20,770
dollars, more than two and a half times the gold value of our watch. So, as far as our experiment goes, only about
a fifth of the value of this Rolex watch actually comes from gold. This varies somewhat from watch to watch,
but not by a lot, and it shows that most of the value of a gold luxury watch doesn't have
anything to do with its precious metal content.
Now it’s time to see how well you did. Was your guess close to the 20% figure or
way off? Let me know in a comment below. And make sure to subscribe to our channel
and click the notification bell to find out when we upload more videos like these! Thanks for watching!.