Market Discussions

That is deliberate.

Closing the gap between buy and sell so that only people with very high standings can profitably trade an item is a tried and tested method.

This works well on items with high price and high traded volume, as you can make a non-trivial amount from each trade and multiply that by a large volume of trades.

Watching plex drop 40 mil in less than an hour after they hit 1 bil was good fun.

And then we are going to have no more than 15000 poeple online at same time, just same as Chinese Server.

Depends on your capital :) If you can generate enough capital through other means and withhold say 10% of plex per day off the market you will drive the price up.

This is what banks did with US real estate and thats why there's going to be another bubble :)

This is very, very, very wrong on pretty much every point.

When I am casually trading the plex margin as a side thing to my main basket of goods or doing it on a second screen while in fleet I normally flip 20 or so plex an hour by myself. On the rare occasions I focus on it it can be 30-40. I am competing with a lot of people and I am never a major player in the PLEX market, keeping my buy orders small. If I spend a day trading on the weekends then 300 billion isk of trades in plex might pass through my hands in an 8 hour period. Margins are tiny but they add up so it's something to do with excess isk that stacks up beyond what I need for my regular trading.

Bear in mind that most people who buy plexes with real money do not put up a sell order to dispose of them - they sell them to the margin traders who have buy orders up. Why? because if you don't have skills and standings you pay a 1% broker fee on top of your sales tax and that wipes out almost all the extra isk you would have earned from selling on a sell order over a buy. Also, most people who buy plexes with rl cash want instant gratification and don't want to nurse sell orders. So, the majority of what you see on sells are recycled from buys.

You can check this by looking at the highest, lowest and average prices on the chart from days when the price was relatively stable - average in normally roughly in the middle of lowest and highest, suggesting that the volume of goods sold on sell orders and buy orders is roughly proportional.

Now this thread is going places.

A couple of things:

a) Your figure of 100 PLEX an hour in Jita is waaaaay off. What you have done is taken the daily average and then proceeded to treat each hour as if it conforms to that average. This is not the case. The vast majority of PLEX trading is done in EU and US prime-time, a window of about 8-10 hours. During this period PLEX volumes are much higher than during the hour after downtime, for instance, and I would estimate that the average in the peak period is closer to 200 than 100.

b) As to why I'm a small player, it's because I trade casually and infrequently. While I might be very active when I'm active, the periods I'm active are brief and inconsistent. It's pretty easy to corner about 10% of the volume in any market if you are willing to 0.01 constantly for a few hours. I certainly have nothing approaching a monopoly but I do concede that if I traded everyday for significant periods then I would probably count as a relatively major player in the market.

c)



Go and buy a stack of 5 plexes on a buy order and then sell it on a sell order, then come back and tell me there is no 0.01isking. There is probably more in this market than in any other market I have traded in when the spreads are decent (although see d below) and I can't begin to understand why you think otherwise.

d)



No, Bobby is right here and you're wrong. Just watch the market for a while and you'll see that those 0.01ing don't let the spread get too high for too long. There is already a lot of competition and when the spread gets big enough to allow those without standings to play as well, activity on the market becomes much harder to compete with. As such, while I might enjoy half an hour of a higher than normal spread, I know with absolute certainty it will be closed down in the 30-45 minute time frame if it opens up during peak hours (off peak the wider spreads can last longer). I don't shut the margins down myself because I'm not sufficiently invested as a player in that market to seek to exercise control over it (or any other - I just ride the waves maaan), but if I were trading in it every day for significant periods I would absolutely be closing the margin down actively to shut people out. This is hardly rocket science or anything new to eve. Margins are not a 'natural' product of the good being traded, they are a product of the way traders trade them. As Bobby pointed out, the situation is the same in a lot of the other very high volume markets in Jita (look at low end mins for example). These markets are largely controlled by a relatively small number of people with deep pockets who keep the margins slim and also have the resources to push the markets around a bit.


e)


I think you are confusing two different things. Day traders control the spread on the item but not necessarily the price. Manipulators control the price but not necessarily the spread. However, day traders and manipulators are often one and the same people, so Bobby signalling that he is trading the margin and Bobby signalling that he is to some extent controlling the prices are signals about two different activities from the same person, not a claim that trading the margin sets the price. It doesn't, at least by itself, but it only takes little nudges to open and close margins in the plex market, partly because the margins are so small in comparison to the value of the item that being caught on the wrong side of even a small drop can cost 100s of millions. I suspect that what is having its effect on the plex market is a combination of day traders/light manipulators who have found that it is easy to keep nudging the market up a little at a time without much significant downwards resistance with a few speculators who have caught onto this trend and bet big on it.

Now down 50 mil from 1b.
The only way it can go is up, up, up!
*popcorn*

It's quite rare to have 15000 on Serenity at once. The average is around 6000 to 7000.

Now here is one to think about:

Right now the price of gasoline is dropping.

As a result, the number of miles you can get per dollar is increasing. Are we, as a result, spending more money on gasoline? No, we are spending less, and the sellers of gasoline are getting less money.

Now take the above and substitute "PLEX for "gasoline" and "ISK" for "miles".

As a result, the number of ISK you can get per dollar is increasing. Are we, as a result, spending more money on PLEX? No, we are spending less, and the sellers of PLEX are getting less money.

But a mile will always be a mile (until we all get helicopters) while the RL value of isk is dropping rapidly.

The demand curve for gasoline says consumers will probably drive more with a lower price of gas even if they spend less for gas in total. For example a 10% decrease in the price of gas might mean a 5% increase in miles driven.

A 10% decrease in the price of isk may or may not mean an increase in the isk bought for RL money. If the isk you are buying today has a perceived value to you of 20% less than before, a 10% price break may not seem like such a deal.

Isk is not a commodity, it is a currency. If the pound becomes cheaper than a dollar then Americans might vacation in England more because they can get more value for their money. But at some point if people don't want to visit a country no matter how much you devalue the currency they will still stay away.

Not that Eve is a third world country yet, but we do need more space tourists for PLEX prices to stabilize.

And while we may moan about the lack of space tourists driving up PLEX prices, CCP is going to have to layoff more employees soon if it doesn't get better.