Jarnis McPieksu
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
101
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Posted - 2011.12.21 09:57:00 -
[1] - Quote
Seems like market manipulation and artificial volatility without any "real economy" operation behind it. Just leeching off Goons idea and trying to do the same with some careful misinformation and garden variety market manipulation.
You do know that with Gallente ice interdiction the biggest cause for price move was speculation? Yes, the incoming supply did go down as well, but that alone would have raised the price far more slowly. Massive quantities were bought out by speculators with deep pockets (who then flipped it all back after the price had spiked).
In the grand scheme of things, the number of Mackinaws killed was secondary. Yes, the ice miner ganks dwindled incoming supply so the reselling speculators had easier time moving their stockpiles at the inflated price. Yet this effect was secondary to panic buying and speculation ("it looks like Goons will cause Oxytopes to spike hard, so now is the time to buy") However, the market also reacted in a funny way; a lot of people replaced their towers and carried on as before using alternate fuel. I would say the drop in demand far outweighed the drop in supply due to dead mining ships. Yes, Goons posted lot of carefully crafted propaganda that gave the impression that Oxytopes were completely cut off - great marketing for those massively overpriced isotopes from your friendly market manipulators.
With the POS changes of Crucible, it no longer takes a weekend of micromanaging tower mods to replace a tower. The only real limit is the silly archaic "one tower launch per day per corp in a system" limit (leftover from the days of "POSes count for Sov") which means that it will take a few days to re-setup a reaction chain but you have to spend only a bit of time on each of those days, setting up the tower for that day. And the price hike was so large that a lot of people did just that.
I would imagine there may be additional nitrogen isotope demand due to larger number of Caldari towers used in reactions. Smart money is of course already stocking up on Gallente towers (if those are not still in hangar waiting) and pay attention to the related fuels, swapping back to Gallente when Oxytope price reaches pre-drama levels. Gallente towers (and Gallente JFs), last I checked, were still at firesale level prices.
It is all a very entertaining side-show of real cutthroat capitalism in action. Lazy people who do not pay attention will lose ISK, active participants who have the skill to look forward a bit and a bankroll to take (calculated) risks will profit. It is up to you to figure out if this latest market move is "real" or an attempt to milk out ISK from less educated market participants.
Based on the activity so far, I'd say this is not real and will pancake fairly quickly. So please, by all means, panic buy some speculative stocks. Just make sure you are not left holding the overpriced pile when the price drops back down... |