Market Discussions

One of the items more suitable for DUST would be planetary vehicles. The name speaks for itself.

Regarding GS I've never been sure about it, to be frank. It grants great profits WHEN prices will adapt to its real value, but it will take ages. So I've switched over to PV the last weeks and dumped the last 1 million of GS to the market as I'm writing this post.

Thanks for the price bump guys. Good luck!

If they are only used in t2 drones the stockpiles could last years.

Because how much it costs to make new ones is of little relevance at the time being.


Quite the opposite, it is extremely self-consistent.
My position is that while the price of them on the market might at times almost match their "fresh manufacture" obvious costs (even including the occasional "stuff I make is free therefore worthless" silly line of thinking), as long as massive stockpiles exist the manufacture costs (whichever section of them you want to consider) are only a vague set of guidelines instead of a hardcore rule.
As for the so-called "joke numbers", it's called doing a realistic worst case scenario back-of-envelope assessment. It's SUPPOSED to sound outrageous to almost everybody. If it doesn't, you're not doing it right.


The numbers WERE easily noticeable in the regions in which I looked (very few), and whoever would have bothered to actually fly to every region where NPCs were selling them to calculate the actual total would have certain numbers (which I didn't). Some people claimed to have been to all those regions and summed up the NPC sales numbers, and those totals became the rumours, which might or might not have been amplified.
Do YOU have a hard number ? I already admitted that I don't. You haven't even begun to present a likely number, let alone back it up with anything, not even rumours.


There is absolutely no contradiction whatsoever between NOT needing to have exhausted stockpiles for prices to spike (all you need is enough speculator confidence) and needing to wait years upon years for the price to be determined by actual supply and demand as opposed to speculative pressures on both sides larger than the actual producer-consumer forces (which will only happen after most of the stockpiles are gone and then some).


And credit default swaps were also a good idea, because price of homes could only ever go up... amirite ?

GS have NOT been profitable to make (unless you go the "MIMAFTW" route) since the day their manufacture was possible. Virtually all of the actual consumption happened from pre-NPC-order-removal stockpiles slightly topped off by the occasional PIdiot. That could remain the case even after DUST bites the proverbial dust. Or it could already start not being the case anymore. I don't know for sure, and you don't know either, or know and don't want to tell because it would damage your case.

Yes, you could make double or triple your ISK in a few months or a year, maybe even more... or you could make next to nothing, or you could lose a good portion of it if you wait too long or too little.
That's the whole point about the price of a good that's STILL MAINLY determined by stockpiles and speculators instead of producers and consumers - it can go either way really fast based on CONFIDENCE rather than anything else.

Remember this though : the more speculators hold the same amount of stockpiles, the more unpredictable things become.
If almost all of the stockpiles were in the hands of a single extremely patient and non-malicious person, he could dictate prices almost perfectly, maximizing his own gain while not ripping anybody else off by keeping a steady sales stream at a price where nobody else would be silly enough to bother selling at, prices so steady nobody would even think of speculation.
But put the exact same total stockpile in the hands of a few thousands of people each with a different-sized pile and various patience levels, and there's no telling WHAT will happen. Well, you could, but only in hindsight. Prediction would be ludicrously inaccurate.

Want to participate in a somewhat but not very risky speculation with decent enough return chances on reasonable amounts ? Fine, participate in the GS craze then.
Just enter in it with your eyes open, KNOWING that it's NOT a "sure thing". It might still be better than investing in bonds, but again, it's not a sure thing.
As long as you're fully aware of that, be my guest, buy up all the stockpiles you want HOPING that you can sell them before everybody else holding some does at the peak of the prices, or hoping that the prices will remain up for an indeterminate amount of time.

At least with tulips you had no ceiling (at least not at the timespans involved in the craze).
With GS you have a pretty low ceiling, the value at which they start to be profitable to make via PI, a price at which all climbing would literally stop overnight.
This is basically a reverse tulip craze combined with a game of musical chairs (or "tossing the hot potato")

To reiterate that I don't know ENOUGH about the GS market to tell you anything about how long until prices are almost guaranteed to go up and stay up.
There's money to be made in any unstable or fluctuating market, if you manage to ride the waves in the right direction.

There's no uncertainty or doubt about it - it is absolutely CERTAIN and without a doubt that the current market needs are completely fulfilled by people selling NPC-purchased stocks for a profit, that any serious purchase orders are made by people betting that the price will keep going up.
The market price is almost exclusively driven by speculating people's guts not by the sweat of the producers (there's next to none of those) nor the needs of the consumers (which make up a small portion of the current-day purchasers).
As for the fear... the SHRED of fear is not unreasonable... the fear that the current price increase is only a temporary spike, and that people that buy near the peak will either have to take a loss or wait for quite a long while to recover their investment or make a profit.


There was nothing to disprove. I am simply presenting the situation from a different perspective.
We haven't really disagreed all that much yet, only about just how much of a "sure and good thing" mass-purchasing GS right now might be.


P.S. Unless you equate "urging caution" with "spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt", in which case, yeah, I totally am.
IF you have 20 bil ISK you care not what might happen to it, sure, go right ahead, turn them into anything between 10 bil and 60 bil after a 3 to 15 month wait and a bit of work.
I have far more free-floating ISK than that which I would not care all that much about if they vanished, but this GS thing still does not look like a "sure enough" thing TO ME, or at least too much of a hassle to bother with, again, as far as I am concerned.

I'm not in the Forge at the moment but I assume Lonetrek is broadly similar to the Jita price trends. Here in Lonetrek, looking at the graph of the 20d Moving Average for the last year it starts under 5k, spikes to about 17k, then declines to about 11k, stays there for a few months, then in September starts moving up again.

In other words it's been behaving as Akita T predicts (fluctuating) rather than behaving as PMchem seems to be predicting (surefire price rise).

You were, still are and will most likely keep on LOSING money by making GS from scratch ever since they were introduced and up to an unknowable point into the future.

Depends on how much you value your P1. If you value P1 at lowest sell prices then the total opportunity cost + taxes would be close to 60,000.

You could make them cheaper by using buy orders for P1, and a lot cheaper by buying P2, although you'd still be making a loss.

I'll buy their GS at 16k if their time is free. No worries.

Oh, there are lots of them out there, and the rest of us just buy their goods and either sell them for a profit or reprocess them down into base minerals and make something else (or sell the minerals).

Making GS from P2s today costs about 52k ISK (there's some sagging going on in P1/P2 prices).