I like how you can steal farmers leeks right from under their noses and then sell them back to them and receive "honest pay for honest work".

Honest pay? PffGǪ no-one would be into commodity trading if it paid that littleGǪ

I would like to sell some cheese to compliment your whine.

Maybe put up buy orders if market competition gets you so upset.

Selling the same cheese for .01 ISK less.

Jeebus, I go away for a few hours and the crappy whine I posted about .01 ISK market trading has ballooned into a 4 page thread.

I don't know whether to laugh or apologize..

As I mentioned in my first post, I'm a former trader. I didn't mention that it was also my IRL career for a good number of years. The tiny increment undercutting of the cheapest offer has always been the primary tool of those who have absolutely no confidence in their ability to predict market movements. Which is at the heart of any true, long term success in that endeavor... whether that be in a game or in real life involving millions of dollars.

A successful trader will take a market position based on their opinion of future market values. There are many factors that enter into that opinion: the intrinsic value of the commodity, the expected supply and demand of the materials, competing markets etc. If the trader has judged correctly, he never needs to engage the .01 ISK game because he knows that the market, based on his solid research, will eventually come to him.

The thing about the .01 ISK trader is that they demonstrate zero knowledge of that or any confidence at all they have made a smart purchase in the particular item or commodity in the first place. Most of them think that what they paid for an item really makes one bit of difference in what they need to sell it at to be successful (when in reality it's the FUTURE value). No, the .01 ISK under-cutter simply feels the value of his goods is whatever the cheapest market order is, less .01 ISK.

The reason I don't like the .01 ISK game is that I have always associated it with a dumb computer program... well I find from the many responses here that I am probably wrong and there are quite a large number of traders out there who base thier entire market strategy on what their lowest priced competitor is doing.... less .01 ISK. (or +.01 ISK if you are buying)

No offense really, I think if that's what you need to do then go ahead and do it. It really does point out what I have always really known and that is that one of the largest ingredients of getting my price out an item is patience. I forgot that a bit today and thought it would be fun to rant about it a bit

So go ahead, let the cheapest seller tell you where to sell at... it doesn't matter how many .99, .98, .97 etc sellers there are... if the price is going up, it's going up.

For instance, over the weekend I stumbled across a seller of 5 Feroxes 2 jumps away from a market hub selling them at 30 mil. The cheapest offer in town was 42 mil so I went ahead and bought them and quickly moved them into the market hub. Having an opinion that the ship was worth about 35-38 million and heading higher, I put my first price at 41 million or so... a good million less than the next guy. Within 15 minutes, their were 2 orders at .01 and .02 ISK lower than mine, and soon a third at .03 ISK (no bots... right)... anyway, I dropped the offer 2 million to 39.5 mil.

Again, 10 minutes later 2, then 3 orders within .03 ISK... I then dropped it 5 more million to 34.5 mil.... the market stayed at that for a little while, then... the .01 ISK, .02 ISK and .03 ISK cheaper offers followed.... I then did one of my favorite things (since I felt the sell orders were now priced below my projected real worth of the ships), I raised my order back up to 39.5 million and forgot about it. All those other orders stayed in the 34 million ISK range because they just had to be the cheapest orders

The next day, I sold all 5 ships at 39.5 million

Anyway... none of that means anything other than if you are correct in your projections of market direction you don't need to be the cheapest seller all the time. The market will come to you if youre right

Or you can just be a bot

Thanks

S