Market Discussions

Hi,

I'm a little confused with the market. More specifically the Price History tab.

When I'm looking at the tab it shows orders, quantity, low, high and average. I'm aware of what the low, high and average bits mean but what does the orders and quantity mean?

For instance, I understand that the orders are how many orders have been fulfilled and that the quantity is how many items those orders contained BUT what does that mean? Is that regionalised, is it solar system or station only? Is it buy and sell orders?

My boggle is that if it is regionalised and both buy and sell orders how on earth am I supposed to define whether there is a good selling market in a particular station? For all I know there could be 6000 orders each day with 32mil as the quantity but that could just be people selling to buy orders but never actually buying from the sell orders or it could be loads of business happening in a different system in the region.

My concern is that I've imported a few items, some isotopes etc, to nullsec and the price history is saying that 400k worth of isotope transactions are occurring each day but as far as I can see my sell orders have stayed at the cheapest for the station and have still yet to shift.

It is regional and both buys and sells. You can tell somewhat by where the little yellow dot is on the line. The line represents the daily spread from lowest buy to highest sell. The dot represents the average price for all quantity cleared. Therefore, the position of the dot on the line should give you a good indication of where between buys and sells the most quantity ended up that day. I usually use the three month graph to get the best idea of the nature of the trading for the item in that region, as well as giving a good picture of its cyclical short-term fluctuations (usually around weekends etc).

If your feeling is that this is vague and difficult, then you're right. It's more art than science.

Hey, that's neat.

Here are a couple of new things to get on your nerves:

1. In the table, the daily high and low exclude extreme values (outliers), but the criteria for the identification of outliers is not known (as far as I know). This means you may see transactions in your own log of activity that fall outside the reported range (low, high) for the day.


2. On the chart, the daily yellow data point average is labelled "Median Day Price" but, when last tested, was found to actually be the mean price for the day. Same applies to the ambiguously labelled "Avg" column in the table, but at least the values being means is consistent with that label. (Again, it is not clear how the exclusion of outliers may play into the computation of averages such as means or medians.)

The "orders" in the price history TABLE refer to "transactions". I was confused with this for a while, so thought I'd mention it here. Thus the table shows the actual numbers of transactions that took place on a date (not the number of active buy/sell orders).

A good tip is to place all your eggs in one basket. This may seem weird but it works in eve. Also dont be afraid to trust this alliance called goonswarn with market assets, they're very trustworthy.



Trust me im a trader.