What Are Rolex Anchor Charms Worth Collecting?

A Rolex anchor is a small metal fob that hung from the bracelet of Submariners and Sea-Dwellers from the 1950s until around 2000. It's decorative, it commemorates the watch's depth guarantee, and the one on your watch is very probably not the one that left the factory with it.

What is the Rolex anchor for?

Nothing functional. It's a keepsake, in the same spirit as the wax-seal hang tags that commemorate COSC certification.

Most anchors are silver-coloured and came with steel and two-tone Submariners. The shaft carries "Rolex Oyster." Many have a small circle at the base stamped with a depth rating, with "Garantie" to one side and "Meters" to the other, so an anchor reading 200 belonged with a watch guaranteed to 200 metres. A rarer gold-plated version went out with the solid gold Submariner reference 16618. That gold one is the anchor actually worth chasing, and the one most likely to be faked, since the silver ones turn up by the handful and the gold one doesn't.

Why doesn't the depth rating match my watch?

Because Rolex improved the watches faster than it reprinted the anchors, and its fix has not aged well.

When the depth guarantee went up, rather than tool new anchors Rolex covered the old stamped rating with a small green plexiglass dot printed with the new figure. That's how a 200 metre, 660 foot anchor became a 300 metre, 1,000 foot anchor. The dots were glued on and they fell off constantly. So an anchor sitting in somebody's drawer today can quite legitimately be an original Rolex anchor showing a depth rating that was already out of date when it was issued, because the sticker that corrected it is long gone. Almost every anchor you'll encounter is either the plain silver one or a silver one with a green dot, present or missing.

Does an anchor make a set complete?

This is where anchors behave differently from every other Rolex accessory, and it's worth understanding before you pay for one.

With boxes, papers and hang tags, collectors want the specific item matched to the specific watch, and mismatches get punished. Anchors get a pass. They were swapped between watches constantly and sold separately on the secondary market for decades, so the great majority of anchors in circulation have no documented connection to the watch they're currently attached to. Everyone knows this. Rather than treat every anchor as suspect, the collecting world has largely settled on treating any period-correct anchor as counting toward a complete set.

The practical consequence is that an anchor adds a little to a set and shouldn't add much. If a seller is charging a serious premium because a Sub "comes with its anchor," they're pricing a level of provenance that anchors almost never actually carry.

So what do you think? Is a Sub or a Sea-Dweller that shipped with an anchor incomplete without it? Let me know your thoughts.