I know that it's a stupid idea, but it's less stupid then trying to buy stuff with money that doesn't exists.

I am not placing orders for something I can not afford. I place just lots of orders and am sure that not all of them will be executed at the same time. All of them at the same time would be higher than my liq, most of them at the same time I could cover. If I place less orders I get less orders executed reducing my trading activity. If all traders place less orders there are far less buy orders meaning you will always have to wait till someone buys your sell order as there will simply not be enough buy orders for you to sell at a reasonable price.

If I understand your proposal you're welcome to try. In general you'll notice that a) you'll be only the highest bidder at 20% from sell order price in very illiquid assets b) you'll hardly ever get an executed buy order. Together this leads to: not enough profits.

I dare to say that your scheme would only work if margin trading skill was removed.

Even in real stock trading - depending on how you do it - there is the possibility to have orders that are not fully covered. In one tool I used you set up orders and further orders would be cancelled (after some have been executed) should your margin no longer cover them.

Further, I'd assume the skill to be quite important for the Eve economy. If all traders can only set up buy orders in maximum of their current liquidity, there just would be far less of these orders, making it far harder for a seller to sell his stock.

So what you're proposing is to make live harder for many in order to protect some few from a lesson they might be better off learning in Eve than elsewhere.

I'm fairly sure that was the Enron defence too.

IMO, just somehow indicate buy orders that will fail--color them red, or something.

as i said he has to be fast. obviously the 1 mill slicers are gone within seconds (and no, not by alts... at least not my slicers; can't speak for the copycats though ^^)

I was under the impression that with real life margin trading you actually had to cover the bill if your sales didn't end up covering your buys when it came due one way or the other. Either through sales of other stock, often at unfavorable prices, or through loss of other assets.

That would be the best thing to do and also the easiest one.

The overhead for that would cripple CCP, every buy order would have to be constantly compared to the current wallet balance of the person who placed the order and the appropriate filter applied to the market.

How do you decide which orders will fail and which ones won't? I and many many other people have multiple buy orders that often exceed our ability, in liquid ISK, to complete if they all came in at once, we rely on our sell orders to provide the liquid ISK to complete those buy orders.

So far I brought up 4 ideas that would fix this topic's issue and I'm pretty sure that any of them would fix the scam part of the issue at least:

- In contracts, show the same value you get when trying to buy or sell something (Warning: This sell order is 9001% higher then the market average, are you sure you want to continue + a warning in the contract before clicking accept) + Add a way to filter orders by minimum quantity

- Show the buy orders from people who cannot afford their current margin in red. (I prefer the first one)

- Remove the Margin Trading skill

- Base the maximum margin on your wallet + sell orders value at market averages, you cannot cancel sell orders until you have cleared your negative ISK wallet and cannot lower the price under the market average. (Most complicated method, fixes everything and is more clear about the real use of margin trading)

So far I brought up 4 ideas that would fix this topic's issue and I'm pretty sure that any of them would fix the scam part of the issue at least:

- In contracts, show the same value you get when trying to buy or sell something (Warning: This sell order is 9001% higher then the market average, are you sure you want to continue + a warning in the contract before clicking accept) + Add a way to filter orders by minimum quantity

- Show the buy orders from people who cannot afford their current margin in red. (I prefer the first one)

- Remove the Margin Trading skill

- Base the maximum margin on your wallet + sell orders value at market averages, you cannot cancel sell orders until you have cleared your negative ISK wallet and cannot lower the price under the market average. (Most complicated method, fixes everything and is more clear about the real use of margin trading)

Having a negative wallet is currently a big fat red flag imposed on a character by CCP for RMT, changing the system so that trading puts you in that situation would make that flag less meaningful.

To pick nits, you can also go negative due to Customs fines.

Wrong forum. Crime & Punishment, Market Discussions... Ok but GD?

As for your post - yes this uses a poorly implemented game mechanic. Yes it's been discussed before repeatedly and I imagine CCP will "eventually" get around to addressing the problem.

IMO - treat margin trading like flying a T3 - if the order collapses due to insufficient funds, they lose a skill level and must retrain it.

I thought they'd kind of fixed that by improving the dialogue so that people knew to eject their contraband when collared by customs for smuggling, but TY for the info, edited my post accordingly.

and which one would that be?

e.g. 10 open buy orders at 100M each, available liquidity 800M.

Now, which order would you like to see cancelled?

In the above example you can assume that usually the 800M will be sufficient for these open orders. You just drain the market of liquidity cancelling uncovered orders. And why? In order to protect people from their own greed?

Maybe instead of canceling the buy order, all market traded buy orders should be colored differently to indicate there is a risk that the order won't go through?

The problem here is that one of the party in this transaction has insufficient insight to make an informed choice about whether they want to participate in this transaction. In real life I guess the equivalent would be to be able to perform a credit check on a customer before ordering the raw materials for an expensive custom job. Sure, they would still be stuck with the materials at the end of the day but at least they had an inkling of what they were getting into.

I'm actually sitting here in my leather thong right now...

RL trading on margin has very little to do with what EVE's Margin Trade skill does.

RL trading on margin is trading (as in actually buying securities) with borrowed money. That's why there are margin calls, because you're reaching the limit of your credit line.
IRL, you can place an order, and the broker doesn't have to check how much money you have in your account* until the order fills, no skill needed.

*A good broker may check as the clearing price approaches your order, so he can give you a heads up if you're short of funds, but that's just customer service. The brokerage house may also cover your shortfall temporarily (as a loan), again as a customer service.

it is used by some to manipulate prices of certain items.

- Allow people to check the status of any order by right clicking it and select "Check if funded" option
- Since this would only be on a on-demand request, this requires very minimal overhead to the server. Basically it would allow to check if the order is good without have to actually having the items in hand and having to try to sell them.

The problem here is that one of the party in this transaction has insufficient insight

How? or do you mean in the scam-cases?