Market Discussions

I observed something on the market recently and im not sure if its an advanced trading tactic or just people being stupid.

Dodixie saw a price spike for nanite paste, the price went up to 39000 and i started selling everything i had. At first the competition was reasonable and everyone was modifying the price by 0,1 isk to be on top and there isnt that many orders so everything was civilized. Then at some point people started lowering the price drastically from 39000 to 35000 to 27000 and now 24 hours later its down to 20000 with about 10 people competing.

My question is why would you do this? why cant you just wait your turn like everyone else? Why ruin the price for yourself and all the other competitors, you wont sell any faster cos the price is still ok for me and im gonna lower it by 0.1, all you did was ruin the price.

I do this to troll all the 0.01 iskers. I don't care about the money I lose, I like the feeling that knowing that others are whining in private (and some take it public).

It's perfectly reasonable there can be many reasons. eg. one possible scenario: (amounts are inaccurate but you get the picture)
- some guy with 100 paste thinks that if he lowers the price by X then for sure those big guys with 10000 to be sold will not follow and he can sell his paste quickly, he also does this knowing that he has to log soon
- now a random guy with 500 thinks that well, for sure they will not follow him either
- at this point one of the guys with 10000 panics and sees that the price is going down and updates his price to follow, now rest of the 10k + guys follow also panicking
- another person with 57 sees the prices and thinks similarly to a and says to himself, ok, they dropped a bit but if I know drop even more then they must be mad if they follow...and the cycle continues
- one of the 10k+ guys now starts to think that maybe the high price has lured in people from jita, damn, if they are here it will take forever to sell the stuff, thus he decreases the price quite a bit just to block people from jita coming. Whether they are actually coming is irrellevant, this is just how he thinks.
- then market manipulator X starts to think that if he's able to dip the price low enough, it should bounce back soon enough making him a profit, thus he starts knowningly dropping the price.

Ie. there can be dozens of valid reasons..it's just how the market behaves.

Markets working as intended.

The one lowering the price was probably not hoping for that result. In some cases you can shed some competitors. Maybe it did not work for him in this particular situation, but in others it might.

It is like a poker game. You make some moves, like betting with a draw, that in some outcomes leads to your own ruin, but if it is the profitable thing to do in enough outcomes, then it is what you should do.

Other recent thread.

If an item is trading well above fundamentals and I'm a net consumer of the item, I will often post my own personal supplies on the market at above equilibrium price, but well below current sell price.

That may be the motive of one or more of the people involved.

I think PI price may change, but I don't know what the new citadel will need.

I just put a Victorieux Luxury Yacht BPC on contract at 80 million and hope to cash in when I get back...



I don't know how long the previous structure will remain or if they will be impossible to buy.
I heard it will be possible to tether them (perhaps to transfer assets) to the citadel but I don't know for how long.


(I have about 129 orders and never posted more than 25 or 35 at the same time so far.
It shouldn't take long however.)

If it's something I manufactured I will sometimes price it at the profit margin I want instead of the higher price. Partly for babysitting reasons and partly because I don't care for price gouging IRL (i.e. military, education, medical, etc).

I didn't do the item in question, nor do I really operate out of Dodixie but like many others I'm sure, I've resorted to that tactic for a number of reasons, and have thought of many other reasons to do such a thing. A few examples could include

1: I'm a buyer of that item and I don't like paying exceedingly large prices, so if I see active order refresh competition going on like is normally the case, I will attempt to speed it up to get closer to the price I want to pay. It may take me an extra 20-30 mins but I easily save millions, and with you dropping your price below mine by only .01 isk it means my losses from selling personal stock are non-existent since I can buy all my "Sales" back from you for less.

2: I'm attempting to shed the competition, I often don't have time to sit and play the .01 isk game for hours on end, but you'd be surprised how quickly competition disappears after you take large chunks off a few times in a row. Show the other "Investors" its a loosing battle and they'll loose interest in competing. I may loose millions I could've otherwise made by .01 isk modifications but I do loose millions in lost time from not being able to sit there and update orders. My time is often more valuable and profitable if I can scare my competition into giving up the order modification battle for a few hours and then I can head off and go do other profitable activities other than baby sitting my orders.

3: I just simply hate nickle and dimeing everything. To me modifying an order by .01 isk is like saying "yea what he said +1". most times that .01 isk is a grand savings of 10 or less isk to the buyer. Its such a drag to think that 10 isks on orders of billions of isk is literally the difference between the person buying from me or you. 10 isk is insignificant and it really bothers me that we automatically default to the cheapest sale order just to save it. So ultimately, I try not to play that game. I do on occasion when it makes sense, like on tritanium since the price literally is so low .01 isk makes sense, but when I'm talking anything above a 1k price point, I usually just round my numbers off to the nearest 100th of the posting price (except I try to end my bids in the numbers 95 because I like that for some odd reason). That way the reason people are buying from me isn't just saving 10 isk or less so I feel somewhat better about it. (I also on occasion buy from more expensive orders for the same reason if I can tell they aren't actively competing by .01 isk, I mean they end up costing less than a million more and that's insignificant)

4: I just want to crash the price (Never actually done this one before but I've thought about it). The game often boils down to costing others money just as much as its about making it for yourself. So if I know a particular individual that I dislike is invested heavily into a specific item with good profitability, I totally would not be above working to crash that market. I've never done this yet and I'm sure it will cost money/profit to enact, but done effectively you could crash a price and force them to spend time selling the large stock they built up at low or no profit prices (or better yet force them to hold onto it for market recovery so they have significant assets tied up) while putting in a ton of extra time assessing the markets to find the next item to push into production and get moving. Its not going to cripple or kill anyone's wallet but it could very effectively trip them up in wealth development and force them to devote more time making up for lost ground caused by the crash.

What? I was posting in this thread before you and I just happened to recall your daft posts. You poo-pooed the idea of profit maximization, but then you write this, "Everybody always seeks to do the most profitable for themselves in the long run."

And where does trying to earn maximum profits mean you have to do the 0.01 thing every 5 minutes? If it is costly to do so...then don't.