Wednesday 20 February 2013

Market Blunders

It never ceases to amaze me the silly mistakes people make playing the market. This is a screenshot of sell orders.







What's wrong with this picture?

I hope for his sake that was a rookie who hasn't figured out how the market works or what a school system is yet. Otherwise he's not paying nearly enough attention to what he's doing. If so maybe next time ADD strikes he'll sell me something expensive by mistyping his next sell order with a few significant digits missing.

This one's a very minor mistake that won't cost the poster much but I see very costly mistakes frequently too. The worst (yes I've done it myself more than once) is mistyping a price and either paying way too much for something or selling something for way too little.

My own personal worst blunder was entering a few hundred buy orders in a rush while experiencing input lag and paying 2.04 BILLION for a couple implants instead of the 204 million (102 mil each) I wanted to pay for them.

I'm going to make this a semi regular feature, tagged as Blunders and start posting some of the more costly blunders people make.

4 comments:

  1. Could I suggest you make it a little clearer what the blunder is?

    I think the clue is in the order length at Couster of the first order. 364 days means it's a NPC sell order. So someone is trying to sell the item for 3.8m in a station where there's a practically infinite supply at 3.6m. Is that the error?

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  2. Exactly!

    I didn't want to say exactly what the mistake was. I wanted people to figure it out for themselves. I did give a hint by mentioning schools though.

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  3. When you make large volumes of order updates over a week, you are bound to occasionally make mistakes. I try to limit the amount of ISK in my trade wallet to only cover escrow, to restrict losses when you inevitably get it wrong.

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  4. If someone buys out the entire NPC stack at couster for resale in a trading hub the NPC price in Couster rises a little for the next batch.
    But I don't think it's feasible to raise the price this way to over 3.8m?

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