Market Discussions

Fair enough.

To answer the question of why someone who's smart enough would still ask for a loan/bond/IPO - Besides the points already given I'd also put in that while a smart person would definitely be able to earn the capital he needs for his investment venture, he may:

1) Not have the time to grind up his own starting capital slowly from more conventional means. If he only has time to play for a few hours per week, for instance. In that case logging in for a few moments daily to update his buy/sell orders offers a good income stream for minimal work, so he can enjoy using the ISK remaining after paying the interest for other things during the weekend, for instance.
2) Not have the inclination to grind up his own ISK slowly from conventional means. If you find the process of building up your own investment capital boring and just want to get straight to the point (Them ISKies), then leverage offers a good way of getting the max amount of returns for least pain (For people for whom it's the results rather than the process that's fun)
3) Have a rare opportunity they want to go all in ASAP. You'd usually be advised to take this claim with a good heaping of salt though.

Most of the time I'd rather enjoy the process of earning ISK myself. Bootstrapping is challenging. Ergo, more fun playing the game. Some people find that the stuff they can do with the ISKies is where the real entertainment for them is, and find the process itself boring, something to get over with in the shortest time possible by making full use of leverage. All cool.

Well, being a person requesting a loan myself, I might give you a possible answer here.

I put up a (small) loan request to be able to trade more, with which I should be able to turn a higher profit faster.
And if it gets another person more money, then why not?
I call it helping each other out, but also being a lazy git .

Yes, there are scams out there with these things, as there are scams with practically every other thing in Eve Online, it's just a part of the game.

Another point here, and that has already been raised, is the RPG aspect of it.
Some people have fun with this, be it loaning the money, or be it lending it out.
Myself, I enjoy the challenge of meeting expectations, and I appreciate the trust that is put in me.

As a last point, I think Bonds/Loans are an integral part of the market side of Eve Online, and can somehow help to define the MD community as a whole.

Anyone falling for that illusion deserves to lose everything. Why must we cater for the lowest common denominator? Why should this be the one area of eve where people are not held responsible for their own mistakes but the system is blamed instead?

I agree it would be easier to just call everything a loan (esp. now that IPOs have died out). But is using the language of bonds an actual problem. Nah.


Why? Loans given via MD have very few of the characteristics of private loans I would give in RL and differ entirely in motivation.


This simply assumes that investing for financial profit isn't viable and that loans should not be motivated by a desire for personal gain. I see no reason to accept that underlying assumption and while no one has been willing to expend the effort required to come to a definitive answer, my personal experience, as well as my intuition, run counter to your assumption.


If we are treating 'risk assessment', 'interest rate' and 'business plan' as fancy words are we assuming that the basic level of intellect we're dealing with is that of some subterranean mole-people. I would certainly agree that anyone impressed by these 'high finance' terms should steer well clear of investing but anyone who has ever read a newspaper or so much as thought about a business in RL should be ok. I would agree that 'credit scores' are to be avoided though.

Btw, is 'risk assessment' a financial term? In the UK it's more associated with the nefarious Health and Safety Executive who make you go round the workplace to identify things like: 'heavy door - could cause crushing or death if someone fell asleep in doorway and had door repeatedly slammed on them'.


Martha! Fetch my shotgun!

In answer to the OP, some of us realise that MMORPG actually means massively multiplayer online ROLE-PLAYING game!

I enjoy role-playing and had a lot of fun when I was raising investments, putting audits together and tinkering with the mechanics of internet-spaceships trading. The main reason to do this is that it's fun. If you don't think it's fun, no-one will hold a gun to your head and make you do it [unless you're a Chinese prison inmate].

Also, I'm now much more alert to how many people there are who might scam me in real life - and that's thanks to MD I must say

Ah. Ok, that was my initial interpretation of your post, to which I was going to respond by saying that what you are talking about is just risk assessment by any other name, so I see no need to dumb down the language of risk assessment when it captures accurately what I base my decisions on (along with 'business plans' and 'interest rates'). In the end I plumped for the second interpretation because I thought that was more charitable





Sure, to an extent. But allowing that I acknowledge the fallibility of my subjective character judgement from the start, I don't treat this as a two phase process as you appear to imply. I do form a subjective character judgement first but this is not what determines whether I invest (which is why I might invest in an individual in one bond but not in another). The interest rate, the size of the bond and the character's borrowing history all have a direct impact on the decision to invest or not and are not just tacked onto the end. Now, you can bundle this up into the subjective character judgement if you like under the heading of ongoing 'behaviour'. But then the character judgement is just identical to a risk assessment.

It seems that your problem with the language is that it implies a degree of objectivity that is not valid because it is not statistically grounded. But it seems plain to me that it is not 'merely' subjective either, otherwise I wouldn't expect it to have any correspondence with actual behaviour. Now, again, if anyone does mistake the language of 'risk assessment' for some kind of objective and statistically grounded gauge of risk then, well, they are idiots. As far as I am aware no one has ever made such a claim on MD and no one who talks about them talks about them in such a way. 'Risk assessment' just doesn't seem to me to have the technical overtones that you suggest, it just is what it says, as assessment of the risks involved. Credit ratings, on the other hand, do imply a greater degree of formalism and parallelism to RL finance but, generally, no one who has advanced a 'credit rating' system on MD has really got anywhere with it precisely because people are aware of the differences between what you can do in eve and the situation in real life.


I should note that I have kind of abandoned all my risk assessment principles in the last month or so and have invested 115bil unsecured in ventures that don't match up to my earlier more demanding standards. But this is because I have largely lost interest in securing and growing my pool of isk. I still think that a medium sized pool of investment cash can bring in decent returns through public investing with minimum effort if investors do not act like fools.

If anyone chooses to read my comments as implying that anyone can hop straight in, then more fool them. Given the venue I am obviously not addressing people in Jita local, nor trying to drag anyone into MD. I am only talking to people who already follow MD and thus have the resources they need in order to make reasonable decisions at hand if they put in a bit of work. I keep banging on about the importance of risk assessments and it just seems obvious to me that you can't carry out a reasonable assessment without doing adequate research, so as far as I'm concerned the idea that you can't hop straight in is implicit in most of what I say.

As to a 'false image of orderliness', well, I suppose that some such might arise from any ongoing conversation but only for such people as don't have eyes to look outside the window. In general, the people who have lost billions in the past are those who ignore the available tools so, if they are sucked into investing by mistaking talk about the importance of those tools for an ordered system then they are just fools twice over (or perhaps squared - in any case, they are VERY foolish), who manage to ignore the very things that they thought made the investment market attractive in the first place.

Perhaps the rhetoric that investing is bad full stop (period for the yanks) may save some of these people from themselves, since it is unlikely they will be able to reason to more accurate conclusions and, if they can't, they shouldn't be investing (or using metal cutlery) in any case. I'm just not as kind hearted as you and would rather have a discussion that has as much relation to reality as we can manage rather than ditching the possibility of useful (to me) human interaction in order to save the wallets of people who will just find other ways of throwing their isk down the drain.

Actually, I think I can answer that questions:
Internet Spaceships is Serious Business

I agree with a lot of what you post but not this. All kara/RAW has shown is that the system can be worked ethically and profitably by those intelligent enough to do so, which is a good thing. Now, does that make him responsible for the mistakes and imperfections of others? Absolutely not - why should he shoulder an unearned guilt?

Edit: @Kara - lol, I told you that's only on Friday nights

More than this, I don't want to join Darth in his club of intellectual elites who think it is their role to manipulate and control the masses by spreading misinformation because the public can't handle truth in a responsible and reasonable way. I much prefer to live in an open yet dangerous society than a closed and controlled state where public discourse has to be deliberately misinformed in the name of security.