Market Discussions

Quick question on the Margin Trading skill - say I have MT IV, and put up a speculative buy order for 10 units of X, and unexpectedly someone sells 10 of X to me as a job lot, however I'm short on liquid for the full 10, but can afford 9:

What will happen? Will

a) the sale of 9 of the 10 go through and I'm at 1/10 outstanding on my order,

or

b) the sale will fail entirely, leaving me with a cancelled buy order?

Thankyou Elizabeth, for the prompt reply.

As a followup then, in making use of that skill, do others that trade tend to keep the reserve in liquid, or do they tend to make buy orders that are exceptionally unlikely to be filled suddenly?

If you kept it all in reserve then it would make the skill pointless.

The skill allows you to support a number of buy orders with an 'amount to cover' in excess of the actual ISK reserve you have. The challenge is to manage this ISK reserve, and that will depend on the type of purchasing you are doing.

If you are buying 1 billion of minerals to build a batch of stuff, then you need the total 1 billion to hand between escrow and your wallet otherwise some orders will fail somewhere along the line. If you are trading and trying to catch a selection of items at buy order price to flip back onto sell orders, then as long as you are generating a cash injection from selling along the way, you only need to keep your wallet ISK balance to a sufficient level to fund an element of the remaining purchases. How much that is will depend on a number of factors and vary from trader to trader (eg how fast moving the market is, how big your orders are etc).

I play it a lot like fractional reserve banking. Once you get an idea of how the markets move day to day you'll know what you need to hold + a small buffer for the guy who dumps 20 million isotopes.