EVE Corporation - Page 1460

Joined TL.net Sunday, 16th of May 2010

On February 23 2013 18:07 inph wrote:

Large short term spikes get a reaction from the Eve Central Bank (see CSM minutes):

PLEX Graph Showing ECB reacting to a FW cashout spike.


Long term artificial increased demand by wealthy people would need to raise demand to higher than supply to force normal consumption to drive the price up over time.

Then you'd have a huge amount of stock to sell and the market would not be able to absorb that kind of dumping without causing a downward trend. Likewise if the wealthy buyers were providing the artificial increase in demand they would need to keep buying to enforce that artificial demand to keep prices high.

Other than the actual PLEX price our next metric is the number of active players playing Eve. The more people actively playing means both higher supply and demand. However the ratio of supply:demand changes as well and typically supply increases more than demand.

http://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility

The All time (weekly average) graph at the bottom shows that since retribution there are roughly 8k+ more active players.

Looking at the PLEX graph for the same time frame (Dec 2012) onwards and we a downward trend. PLEX volumes aren't massively increasing so we have a small increase in demand and larger increase in supply that's tied to active population. Events like the titan losses in Asakai also tend get a lot of media attention that subsequently draws in a large influx of new players, many who buy PLEX. Additionally we're also seeing a CCP PLEX sale about once a month.



Downwards manipulation works best when you know there's an influx of supply that's going to slam into buy orders. So it's more a case of speeding/over extending an already existing downward trend than direct manipulation.

The two types of traders you want to manipulate at this stage are PLEX flippers and investors who might panic sell.

If you look at the expires in time and notice there are people updating lots of small orders for both buys and sells then there are lots of flippers active. Investors who dump a large number (50-300+) of PLEX on sells. Getting these orders to move will set new sell boundaries.

Today's story starts during EU prime time when I check the price of PLEX in Jita and I notice there's a fresh 25 sell order just above buy order price at ~493m. Sells are at 504m so I buy all 25 instantly without having to pay a broker fee.

Looking at the buy orders I notice that the flippers are highly active, the lower boundary for PLEX is 493 with a buy order for 50 odd under a whole bunch of small sell orders then not really much in the way of buys for 490, 485 and 480.

Under 480m there are buys for ~20 odd so the target will be to depress the market to at least 480m buys.
Looking at sell orders, there's a 70+ sell order that's being actively moved but being endlessly 0.01 isk'd by a load of small sell orders.

Our goal is to move that 70+ sell order lower to force people to clear out the buy orders down to 480m.
Split the 25 newly acquired PLEX into 3 groups of 10, 10 and 6 (threw in a PLEX I had)

The spread is 11m (493-504) so the first task is to close that gap.

Wait until there are sell orders that are constantly being updated approaching almost 5 minutes from their last update. Then undercut them by 1m and we put up all of our PLEX at the same price ~ 503m. This creates a big visual block and makes traders react to your block by undercutting.

Seconds later those orders get undercut by traders who want to sell their flipped PLEXs. That's good for us, we don't actually want to sell our PLEX yet.

Now keep shifting our orders down 1 at a time typically the jumps are around 0.5m-2m since you typically get undercut by up to 1m or more. The target is to get the spread to around 5-6m, so the flippers are still making some profit but a lot will panic and start to sell. About now the 70+ sell order to moves down to under 500m and a 150 sell order has also appeared at 500m (probably panic sells.)

We're actually looking for an event now, that is when someone who's bought a good chunk of PLEX from CCP and dumps that to buy orders. It will instantly clear out a lot/all of the small buy orders. Typically clearing down to a big buy order.

When you notice the small buys have been cleared, move your sells down to a bit below the cost of flipping a PLEX.
So now we have buys at 493m and sells at 497m which is roughly ~1m loss for flippers.

When the 50 buy order at 493m gets cleared, PLEX starts free falling through the 20 or so needed to hit 480m. Constant pressure from shifting your sells downwards causes the more buys to get cleared since there are no more PLEX flippers putting up buy orders since it's no longer profitable to flip. Instead they're all getting rid of their toxic stock.

This is where you want to put up your decent sized multiple buy orders. I used multiples of 10 and ended up buying ~100 PLEX at ~480m. Pretty much all of the flippers were gone at this point so it was relatively uncontested.

When you're buying your stock, move your sells upwards to where you want to sell at which is typically just below the big sell orders (at 497m) and keep your small buys on top and keep raising the buys. This technically creates a thin market with lots of small orders on sells but no significant volume between the lowest sell (488m) and your block at 497m. Being EU prime time that doesn't take long to clear upwards and you only really need one big buyer to clear them.

Usually you wont get a huge amount of time before other people notice the large spread and put up buy orders but hopefully by then you've got a decent stock pile. Lots of new decent size buy orders is healthy at this point, it will create a new baseline and you can force their price up by raising your small buy orders and deny them stock at the same time.

When it's time to cash out and sell stock, sells have cleared up to the blocks at 497m and there are a lot of buys around 483m-488m.

http://i.imgur.com/OKCKMXs.png last buys ending at 480m and about 30 minutes for the market to settle after

Since it's both weekend and EU prime time clearing stock doesn't take long, roughly 12-14m profit after tax per PLEX. Total profit is around ~1.5b. Not sure if the sale will break 480m, if it does it'll probably drop another 10m to 470m.

As for manipulating buys upwards, if you're putting a decent sized buy order up (50+) follow that with a margin trade scam buy order just below it for a larger amount (70-100). So it encourages the larger order traders to overcut your buy and your margin trade order which can help establish an upward trend.

--

PLEX flipping assuming you have accounting 5 and broker relations 5 and decent standings (8+ faction and corp):

Buying a PLEX you pay broker fee + buy price: this is roughly just over 1m in broker fees ~0.23%
Selling a PLEX you pay sales tax 0.75% and a broker fee if you use a sell order: ~1m broker fee and 3.7m in sales tax (so call it roughly 5m)

Whenever there's more than a 5m spread between buys and sells on PLEX there's ISK to be made flipping PLEXs.

On February 24 2013 02:30 Warri wrote:

Or you could icemin with 50 chars at once and have the same startup cost and isk/h.
I never got why people flip plex, the profit is way too tiny to be worth the effort.

On February 24 2013 02:34 Firebolt145 wrote:

It's a little more intellectually stimulating than ice mining.

On February 23 2013 18:07 inph wrote:
~snip~

On February 24 2013 03:07 Impervious wrote:

See, this is why I kept trying to tell people that there are tons of ways to make isk in the market, when you know how to outsmart the people who already have their spreadsheets up and running to make profit of their own.

And for those of you who think this is risky, it's really not. Yes, you're relying on other people acting in a predictible manner, but they are doing what is completely logical in their minds for them to make profits (and they do make profits). You just outsmart them and make much more than them, with less effort.

On February 24 2013 03:50 Mysticus wrote:


because relying on eve players to be logical isn't risky.

On February 24 2013 05:42 jopirg wrote:
When you ice mine you're an an AFK nothing unless someone decides to gank you for fun.
But this, this is the PVP EVE excels at. Do you have any idea how many people he just fucked out of their ISK by outsmarting them? This shit is why I play EVE.