I feel kind of jaded in using the energy market as well when there are x100 offers in any places - makes it a store, not a market. What you want to do is have an easier way to trade energy to people who need it without being online... Which is fine in itself but not as needed.

Personally I think energy market issues could be solved by making players only able to have 10 buy and 10 sell offers active at the same time (20 offers tops). Makes market manipulation a chore rather than something you can easily just do, and makes creating walls something you have to actively do and be in the game for instead of logging on and setting a new price wall whenever you feel.

A private "seller" list might work though. Similarly a private "auction house" could serve a similar purpose - have those offers outlined in green rather than the featured auction's sky blue.
Both of these things are kinda circumvented by just trading those people, as you're supposed to be talking with them anyways so it's not something that we desperately need - unlike the auction house back in the day. However it's something new, and something that would prove its worth over time.

Petater is one of the people that make the price walls on the energy market. He has a vested interest in preventing people from bypassing it.

Oh please, I wouldn't have my walls around if people weren't hiding their own CR/CE imbalance. I simply was shooting for equilibrium and being able to margin off delta. I keep my walls up because there's others who will lock out buying if I don't price it high. I also kept it high so other marketers trolling it with repeated much smaller quantities run out of cr so the price can crash.

That being said SK does need a reason to spend on CR again to bring said equilibrium down.

But seriously, you're slow here. We needed a CR sink again back in July.

To be fair, Petater is just being a good business man. Monopolizing the energy market is a very easy way to make money.

Analogy:
OOO is the sole producer of a rare fruit that many people like to eat. However, OOO is located on a remote island and does not ship the fruit themselves. Only people who pay a special fare can travel to the island to buy the fruit. People who buy the fruit have the option of reselling it, at a high price, to those who cannot or would rather not travel to the island themselves.
Simple supply-demand stabilizes the the prices. When not enough people are traveling to the island, the price of the fruit goes up, increasing incentive for people to buy more of the fruit when they are on the island (or for more people to travel to the island).

Along comes someone like Petater, call him Tamatar. Tamatar may or may not have access to the island. However, Tamatar definitely has a lot of money. Tamatar notices that there are a lot of transactions involving this tasty fruit. Instead of going to the island himself to join the business, he decided to become the middle man instead.
Tamatar stands by the dock every day, offering to buy the fruits at prices significantly higher than the average market price. Whenever someone returns from the island, they eagerly sell any fruit they don't want to keep to Tamatar. Tamatar ships these fruits to his personal warehouse.
Because Tamatar is buying out a large majority of the fruits, this reduces the supply available to the rest of the population. So prices go up. Tamatar imposed an artificial choke on the fruit supply, causing demand to build and market price to go up. When the price is sufficiently high, Tamatar opens up his warehouse and sells the fruits at a competitive price, but a price still higher than the ones he paid. With the money he got back, Tamatar can repeat the process.

This isn't a problem since all the fruits Tamatar bought out still ended up being sold right? In theory, yes. However, the fruits are now being sold at higher prices than they used to be, despite the supply and demand being the same. Tamatar is effectively taxing people for buying the fruit because they do not have the money to compete with him. This screws over low-income people more than well-off people.

To mitigate this problem, OOO is effectively advertising trips to the island. This makes sense because if more people travel to the island, there would be more supply and OOO would make more money. Any other method would risk angering the people who are already buying the fruits from the island. The huge gaping hole in this solution is that most people would rather not eat the fruit than pay for the trip to the island. It's simply not worth it.

Bonjourhippo,

Investing 450k CE for a mere 15k CE return is just a waste
15k CE can buy some pretty things. That's after one single iteration. It's also 15k CE that's taken off the market until you see fit to sell.

not only does market come with no guarantees due to competition
Competition from who? There's only a few people that do this, but it's enough to make life difficult for many others.

The player(s) building huge buy walls are just loaded with crowns and trying to get rid, that's all; rarely do we ever see equivalent "Sell CE" walls
Um...what universe are you playing in? I see sell walls all the time.
People who want to get rid of crowns will post outrageous buy prices, and the market will actually plummet as a result. Once, someone bought out all the CE up to 11,000. But that occurred during a time when few people are online and the sell walls were taken down.

so I just can't imagine there being someone sitting with 450k CE thinking of no better way to profit than spending hours opening emails from the market, as well as watching it. MEH.
People AFK in haven, managing the energy exchange and the Auction house. Transactions aren't delivered as mail if you are logged in. It's a LOT less work than going into the clockworks, where you actually have to interact with the game constantly to earn money.
Most people probably just stay logged in all day, while doing other things irl. They only check in periodically to update their offers.

If you want to profit, just stick to the essentials: buy some highly valuable, highly demanded items cheaply, resell them not so cheaply, say average price. That will put your money to much better use than some ridiculous 3% benefit over your investment; hell in some cases profits from reselling these items go well over the 70% mark.
Item markets are not as well quantified. There's a risk factor that a once popular item will go out of demand. There's also a need to do a lot of heavy advertisement. Also, there's nothing stopping people from doing both. When they need the extra money, they just take down some CE offers.

You seem to miss the fact that Petater openly admits he does this. He just claims it's not harmful.
The point is not about how much the merch makes, it's about how much the merch takes from the supply. In your hypothetical, the merch ends in the crown stage. A wiser merch will stockpile energy instead. Why? Because energy prices tend to rise, it is a better way to store your wealth.

As for the competition on market offers, it is there, especially at peak times. It's very hard to list a "Sell CR" offer that stays on top of the list, especially with the market showing live the evolution of offers.
You don't need to be on top, you just need to be high enough such that anybody paying more than you will drive the "sell energy" prices up.

Let's say the lowest sell price is 8000. Like you said, the equilibrium always insures a slightly lower buy price, equal to 98% of 8000, or 7840.
So the merch puts up a buy wall for around 7840. Now if someone offers more than that, their offer will be taken quickly. If a lot of people offer more than that, the sellers will get smart and bump their prices up, to say 8100. At that point, the merch just has to bump their wall up a bit to 7939. Eventually, the other people will run out of money to compete and the wall will float to the top.
What usually happens is that there is a sell wall along with the buy wall. The buy wall keeps bumping up the offer prices until it violates the 2% difference with all prices under the sell wall.

Buying and selling CE on the market keeps it flowing
A flowing market doesn't mean a healthy market.
In the stock market, buying and selling shares are good because it promotes investment into companies. Those companies can create money in the form of goods and services.
The SK market is more like buying and selling gold. If people actually bought gold for the sake of using it, that's great! But people are buying large amounts of gold just so they can sell it later for more money. This wouldn't be a problem if gold wasn't so rare, but it is. So the price of gold inflates.