Ulstan
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Posted - 2008.04.22 17:18:00 -
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Edited by: Ulstan on 22/04/2008 17:22:31
 Quote:
If someone has got a Howitzer they want to sell, why the hell are they selling it to you for 950k, when they can put a sell order in at 1200k and go top of the selling tree with the lowest sell order???
It is not necessarily stupidity or laziness. It's very common for a mission runner to have dozens and dozens of such items to sell. Easily far more items to sell than he has sell orders, even if he knew which items had good margins.
Now, he can either spend a long time researching every item, putting up sell orders, then babysitting them constantly until they sell OR he can just sell them to the highest buy order, collect his cash immediately, buy that new ship upgrade he has his eye on, and be back out killing rats with greatly increased efficiency, all in a couple minutes.
If he thinks that the money he he will gain from returning to speed running missions exceeds the money he would gain from babysitting lots of 1 and 2 quantity sell orders, then just selling to the highest buy order is the best bet for him.
Say that guy has 20 such items, all of which have buy orders for 300k less than the lowest sell order. If he spends all the time to research *every* item he is selling to see if there is a good market spread, then figuring out the lowest sell order and undercutting it, putting up his sell orders, etc, grats, he can make an extra 6 million.
Or he could just right click 'sell' on every item he has, and with the time saved, go run another 20million reward mission. That was clearly the better option for him.
So why doesn't the trader go out and just run missions? Because of the scale: he's buying these items 1 and 2 at a time from hundreds of mission runners, and he has all the skill and knowledge (a not inconsiderable initial investment) to make the most of his sales and to know which items are good to work with. He has the capital to have a lot of it tied up in stock while the orders come in, so he doesn't have to turn around and sell every item the moment it comes in, he can wait until he has a couple hundred or so.
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