Market Discussions

In Dodixie the sell price of Internal Force Field Array I dropped from around 9 mil on Saturday to around 7.1mil today (and all of yesterday - it started happening on the Sunday). According to the graph they've been pretty stable for the year up to this point, with several similar dips (sorry I can't give specifics, server's down - I seem to remember one very similar (almost identical) dip around (possibly) 7-8 months ago).

My main question then is: is someone manipulating this or is this simply an increase in supply? Secondly, and more importantly really, is there any good "way" to differentiate between when the price is simply falling, and someone is forcing them down? I thought before hand I'd be able to identify one based on a spike in volume but as I watched the price fall on these I realised that a lot of the spike could be attributed to old buy orders filling up as people try to get out quickly as the price drops (thus, both manipulations and price adjustments(?) will be marked by increased volume).

It should be pretty obvious from this post I'm pretty far from a big time trader (or even a small time trader for that matter - I've played a total of about 2 months); even the idea that someone would try to manipulate these in the first place might seem ludicrous to you. I also have no idea about the production of these things (nor the production of pretty much anything else, for that matter); there may be a blatantly obvious reason as to why this happened. To add to this, I'm also unaware of the prices in other hubs. I asked in local chat and aside from all the griefing I got a link to some future patch notes that supposedly affected the item (I think - I can't find the link any more) though given my naivety it read about as well as hieroglyphics.

The rapid way in which they declined though struck me as unusual and I wondered (read: hoped) if anyone could confirm my suspicion. I doubt it myself as I haven't seen any large buy orders go in at the new low, and no one particular trader was both buying and selling to my orders in any great quantity.

In the interest of full disclosure: obviously I took a big old punt and bought loads of stock as the price dropped and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere soon so I'm sitting on a great big pile of these things now - by all means feel free to pump the price on these if you can and take this liability of my hands.

In all seriousness, any information on manipulation would be very interesting. I googled around but didn't find much other than what I already suspected, so I wondered if anyone with extensive dealings with the market could give me some info on the subject.

TL;DR Was this an instance of manipulation, and how do you identify manipulations?

That makes sense - had a look but any evidence in this instance would be gone by now, I suppose you have to catch it while its happening before any changes can be made to the orders - I'll keep my eyes open next time though, thanks.

Had another look (this is what I was directed to in local chat) and I get it a bit more now - they're nerfing them so they're no longer "must have" modules? What does this mean for the price then? Permanently wrecked?

Absolutely. I bought around 1500 Slicers when they were 9 mil each.

Sold them when the price hit 12m. Wish my nerve had held a bit longer

What % of your NAV do you usually use to speculate? Do you have a maximum percentage that you'll go to?

When I want to manipulate a price down, I do something different.

Day 1 I place a very competitive regionwide buy order. Just a little below the top hub buy order, sometimes even 0.01 ISKing it.

Day 3-4 I check stock. If I have stock in 20 or more different stations, I cancel my regionwide order, then set up a buy order in the hub at my target price, and then list every single one of my items as separate orders where they are 0.01 ISK above my new buy order.



You'll see me do this from time to time on decryptors in particular. If ever you see 30 different sell orders in the Sinq Laison region for a specific decryptor at the same price but in different stations, it's me doing it.

OP made no mistakes, he/she/it made a low risk investment. Low risk is not zero risk, and this is an important lesson to learn.

I've watched meta 4 modules like a hawk since Tiericide started, and dropped out of the web and scram markets but kept in the damage control one because it was so damn lucrative. (Also dropped out of the light neutron blaster market but that was increased competition not Tiericide concerns).

I had my exit plan for this day.

OP can probably extract with only a 15% loss. (I took a 1% loss on my stock).

OP you can check other markets with this, quite handy if you don''t have alts in different regions
https://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/market/link/10000002/5839

Thanks for the tip.



My thinking was roughly, they'd want to force the price down to then buy more at a low price, allow the market to return to normal, and then sell the stock they acquired at the low buy price, making a profit. So yes they'd sell a lot of a commodity by putting up low priced sell orders to force the price down to then equivalently lower the buy price, but they'd end up selling less of the commodity at at the lower sell price than they'd buy at the lower buy price.

Thus, the sell orders appear because they had them stashed away, bought at the normal price on buy orders most likely, to be used to do this.

Sorry to necro this but prices nearly fully recovered - probably could have fed them in slow and got away with a profit (though I'm not sure how many you had). What do you think after the fact?