How to use watch command with a piped chain of commands/programs

I usually use watch Linux utility to watch the output of a command repeatedly every n seconds, like in watch df -h /some_volume/.

But I seem not to be able to use watch with a piped series of command like:

$ watch ls -ltr|tail -n 1

If I do that, watch is really watching ls -ltr and the output is being passed to tail -n 1 which doesn’t output anything.

If I try this:

$ watch (ls -ltr|tail -n 1)

I get

$ watch: syntax error near unexpected token `ls'

And any of the following fails some reason or another:

$ watch <(ls -ltr|tail -n 1)

$ watch < <(ls -ltr|tail -n 1)

$ watch $(ls -ltr|tail -n 1)

$ watch `ls -ltr|tail -n 1)`

And finally if do this:

$ watch echo $(ls -ltr|tail -n 1)

I see no change in the output at the given interval because the command inside $() is run just once and the resulting output string is always printed ("watched") as a literal.

So, how do I make the watch command work with a piped chain of commands [other that putting them inside a script]?

watch 'command | othertool | yet-another-tool'

watch -n 5 -x tail -4 output.log.  
watch -n 2 -x ls

watch -n 1 "links -dump 127.0.0.1/server-status | grep -e 'S' -Fe 'www.'"

watch -n30 'find . -name "*.log" -print -exec tail -n10 {} ; '

watch -n 1 "ls -lrt | tail -n20; date"