Market Discussions

There are 3 reasons for this post. First, I've been using this table more and more in recent times and feel that it has useful information that should be brought to the notice of players not familiar with the market. Second, the terminology used in this table is confusing, and could do with some clarification. Third, my interpretation may not be correct, and if so, I look forward to correctional therapy.

To get to the Price History Table for an item:
1. Select View Details or View Market Details to open the Market window.
2. Click on the Price History tab. The default view of the Price History is a graph showing the price history over the past year.
3. Click the Show Table button, bottom-left of window.

You should now see the Price History Table, which has the following headings:
Date, Orders, Quantity, Low, High, Avg.

The clarification needed is that Orders refers to Transactions; the total number of transactions in one day, for both the buy and sell orders. When trading, one would generally be more interested in items that have higher number of transactions per day.

The second interesting information is the Quantity, which refers to the total number of units that changed hands in one day, from both the buy and sell orders. Again, the significance to trade is obvious.

The rest of the information is self explanatory. Low refers to the lowest transaction, High to the highest. The avg. that CCP use here is the median, which is the middle transaction when all the transactions are put in order of value.

I think the table is especially useful in trying to decide which items to trade in.

Unfortunately the table shows regional data, and I know of no easy way to get this information for individual stations.
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The following example does not add to the understanding of the table in any obvious or significant manner, but I decided to put it in anyway.

The image of the table has information for ECCM Projector II, Forge Market, for the last few days. The info for the last 3 days:

Date....................Orders.Quantity.........Low..................High................Avg.
2013.03.27 00:00:00 _5 15 2,997,000.00 ISK 2,997,999.98 ISK 2,997,399.99 ISK
2013.03.26 00:00:00 14 25 1,038,010.08 ISK 2,998,895.00 ISK 2,528,208.36 ISK
2013.03.25 00:00:00 17 42 1,037,447.40 ISK 2,998,998.99 ISK 2,952,295.23 ISK

Note that there were only 5 transaction on the 27th, and all from sell orders, resulting in the very high median (avg.). On the 25th there were 17 transactions, mostly from sell orders resulting in the relatively high median.

Much of what I know about this, is what I've learned from your posts, and I now recall your discussion related to the average, and the outliers. In fact, this is one of the older discussions in MD, and you, Thoraemond, have the distinction of being part of them all :)

I, of course, have no clue about the outliers. Possibly the info is handled similar to box plots, with the low and the high values indicating the range, excluding outliers.

Maybe you can petition this, or we can convince a CSM candidate to put it on their agenda. Maybe this information can be CCP's tenth anniversary present to MD.