Market Discussions

err. No? If you raise .01 isk on BUY orders, you are STILL cutting your delta, increasing your overhead and thus reducing your profit. The most ridiculous thing is people doing the .01 isk war over a price that will NEVER sell. I looked at Ishtars in my old region. They were selling for 200m. There was a .01 isk war going on in the buy price for 80m. I checked the history and the Ishtar never sold for that little. So the .01 isk war was a complete waste of time!

If you want to have a .01 isk war. Then the price should already be a tempting price for the seller. Bottom fishing .01 isk wars aren't worth the time.

If someone has a 10 isk buy order for Technetium, he's only going to get his order filled from overflow of another order. The joys of getting a profit like that is always great, but you can increase your rate, and increase your likelyhood of having your order filled somewhat timely, if you make a reasonable buy price.

How else do we keep decent spreads? id rather pay 4 isk for 2-3 minutes exposure, than 15 million. you can of course let your orders run for 90 days and hope that the prices will fall/rise so that your order is filled, but that might not happen, and that money is not working for you while you are waiting. so do yourself a favor and 0.1isk, because that 100k increase wont buy you any more time at the top.

I generally expect that the MD crowd aren't idiots, so i wasn't talking about the extreme cases. If your only argument is about edge cases which no one else is talking about, then you're better off not posting.

There is nothing wrong with changing your order to 0.1 isk higher or lower then the next order in line.

When you change it every 5 minutes and babysit the order is when it is annoying. You will never always be in the #1 spot, the idea is to capture it for a few hours of the market. if 1,200 items are traded a day then about 50 an hour, 25 buying 25 selling. So if you are on top one hour you should sell 25 or buy 25. Those are averages so it does vary with time of day etc..

As far as the "shock" changers go, you do nothing except set the price higher or lower. How many times have I seen a massive change, only to be 0.1 isked! lol I love seeing that. I always picture someone who freaked out "I'll show them, 1m isk higher!!" Then bam 2 minutes later 0.1 isked!! lol, however, we also need to remember that sometimes it is not a trader only someone who wants to sell what they have themselves for more then the going buy price. Which brings me to the next point

You DO NOT need to be in the #1 spot when you place your order always. A lot of times I put my order in behind the #1 spot, because I see the volume of the item and the quantity the person is trying to buy or sell, if you are fair it will be filled. I do not wanna worry about being on top. If someone 0.1 isks me with 10 of the items but 2,000 are traded a day, who cares.....

If you are fair with your price it will get filled without 0.1 isking, unless the market is trending away from your pricing, but then is it a short or long term trend?

Look at the chart and learn to read them. If the top and bottom price are consistent then you know every day it goes that high and that low somewhere in that region. At its main hub, look at the average price, etc.... what is the price range of the item you are trading in your hub?

If you wanna be a slave to the market 0.1 isking, by all means do it, if you do not want to then learn to play it another way.

Good luck and have fun.

Iria you know that you don't have to remake the buy or sell order to change the price right?

You made me doubt myself. But I just checked. Earlier today I raised my price/unit from 120k (ish) to 298k. And got hit with a 1131883.71 broker fee. You don't have to kill your order and recreate to get broker fees. They apply when you modify your orders too.

My transaction log doesn't go back far enough to the last time I fought a .01 isk war. But even though I'm pretty sure .01 isk will NOT give a broker fee, each time the price goes up, it usually isn't .01 isk. Someone will raise 10k someone else will raise 1m. So at some point, you will be paying extra fees.

There are times to 0.01 and time for making drastic adjustments. Here is a couple of my thoughts on when big price changes are good. I usually say that 0.01'ing is the only way to go as it's usually to my benifit if other traders do that, even though I never do.

Margin trading as a manufacturer.
It's usually to your benifit to keep price changes small on the sell side if your stock is moving.

As wide buy/sell margins on an item you manufacture can be dangerous, sometimes it is good practice to place buy orders in order to close the gap from the buy side to prevent the sell side from faling. While the sell side falling is usually a temporary thing and will readjust to normal price ranges in time, it can be annoying if your manufacturing basket does not include many items.

Artificially raising the buy side orders as a manufacturer is good for other reasons as well. If you can get the buy side higher than the manufacturing cost of the item you can dump on the buy side for profit, just be carefull not to crash the market too hard that it has a hard time recovering, or even worse causing instability in the margin so that the sell side falls.

You can also slowly raise the buy side in an effort to artifically raise the sell side as the margins try to remain stable. This is somewhat tough, requires active and agressive traders but with some finess can yield good results.

Margin trading:
I usually keep my price changes small but here are a couple exceptions.

Large price changes are benificial if you are fighting many traders in an item that falls well outside the normal price range of an item. As said above, if an item is 20-30% above or below average price there will not be too much action. Making adjustments to the price will bring about more action which will net more volume.

Large price changes against traders who put up large volume orders can lead to good profits as well. If you undercut a large volume order by a large amoung, that other trader has two options: let you go or keep changing their order. If they let you go then you can keep doing having your orders filled. If they change their price, then just go back to your origional price and wait for him to follow. Keep rocking your price back and forth and watch as their tax charges get higher and higher. He will soon realise that the taxes on a 500m order is costing him a fortune trying to follow you back and forth.

Large price changes against an item with a lot of agressive traders. A previous fun pastime of mine was to go into improved implants and go in with crazy price changes, buy up a bunch of implants and relist them (again at crazy price changes) and get away with some good profits while everyone stands by in shock wondering what the hell is going on. It's quite entertaining to see the action going from price changes every few minutes to your order just sitting on top for an hour while everyone waits for your order to clear.

Typically I take things such as the buy trading volume, the sell trading volume, how much inventory I need to move, margin, item price floor and ceiling, how active the item is being traded at the time I need to sell and how I feel at the time when making the decision for large price changes. I really don't think there is one right way of trading, just a bunch of good ways.

Intentionally crashing an over active market, if done right is very good for profits. I'll let you figure that one out