By "magically" do you mean "because people buy up 'cheap' energy offers"?

You are mixing thing up.

In real market, WHOEVERS OFFERS MORE GET THE PRODUCT.

Same thing here. The only difference is that in real market the products are more diverse, but just to take a sample... go to Microsoft and ask them to lower the price of his OS. They have the money, they have the monopoly, they decide the price.

The solution to your situation is stop buying energy and stick to mist.

If someone goes to the market tab and post cheap offers on energy, then someone else comes to sell energy and sell it to the one that offered cheap they will get energy that otherwise would be put into the vendor list at a higher price (due to market tax).

Mechamoose, you're finding significance in the motion of birds my friend. These are random, inconsequential fluctuations and would be impossible to engineer.

When someone who has energy decides they need crowns, they tend to sell at least 11 blocks of 100 energy (the amount required to buy a 5* recipe). Since most of the orders on the leading edge of the market short-board are the result of competitive undercutting, they all tend to have only 1-2 orders for the given amount. Thus a single energy seller tends to wipe out the short board and tanks the sale price of energy.

Following this, the price gradually climbs back up as people looking to maximize their profit nickle and dime their way past the next best offers.

The same thing happens in the reverse when people sell high level gear for crowns. When I sell a 5* gun for 100-300,000 crowns I tend to turn that immediately into energy, which for me is the more useful currency. I have a large stockpile of crowns already and only a few recipes left to buy, whereas I go through energy like crazy crafting and adventuring.

As a result, those blocks of 100+ orders you see on the short-board are typically the result of the board being wiped out so much (two+ people buy or sell at the same time) that people's idle prices start showing up. These are the prices people typically try to buy/sell at for long term orders, when they don't need the trade immediately or are logging off for a while. They tend to be nice round numbers about 100-300 away from the day's average trading price in either direction. It's no one player "fixing" a price, it's a very large number of players coming to a shared, blind conclusion.

In fact, fixing energy prices is pretty much impossible. Energy "day-traders" (of whom there are many) will inherently stabilize the price by making any profitable exchange that nets them more than 10 crowns per transaction pair (one buy and one sell).

There is also nothing to be gained by attempting to fix the market. Since you lose a percentage of your crowns with every transaction, buying up all the cheap energy and then attempting to resell it at a higher price doesn't work. The two currencies here are roughly equivalent and are interchangeable now that they have attained a metastable value.

That's called energy speculation.
You post a cheap offer on energy and then sell it for a price that's higher than cost+2%tax.

Right now for example:
- Buy Offer: 3850
- Sell Offer: 3950
- 2% Tax on sale: 80 (rounded to 4k)
So you make a tiddy profit of 20 crowns.

If the market price drops beyond the profit line, you just cancel the sale offer and use the energy or wait the market to bump a little bit the price.

Neo, that's what day traders do. They are the restorative force in the market and the yare what keeps the buy/sell prices roughly in line with one another.

Back in late beta/early release there were about four of us doing it in an appreciable way, one of whom was in my guild. Of course this is just an estimate based on observing the under/overcutting and how many "blocks" of obvious day trade orders showed up at any one time. My guildee and I actually had nicknames for our phantom rivals, but that's another story. Back then you could make 150+ crowns per transaction pair quite easily even after tax.

Yes, we were making money for doing very little, but what we were doing helped the market rather than hurt it. If not for us, the "value" of bought energy vs sold energy would have been wildly different (well, even more than it was already).

As more people caught on and the competition became steeper, the undercutting and overcutting became more aggressive. The difference in buy and sell prices collapsed to less than 3% of the average price. This meant that the profit per trade was down to ~20 crowns per, and trading was no longer profitable enough to keep my interests. I got out.

Anyway, day traders give the market stability, and it is impossible to make profit beyond the impatience/ignorance of other players. It is absolutely not profitable to try to price fix since you lose more money than you could ever hope to gain.

Energy traders don't make money based on whether the buy/sell price is high or low. They make money on the difference between the buy and sell price. It is actually in their best interest for the price to be low rather than high, because then the fee for each trade is smaller (it's percent based, remember) and they can make more money off the same 100 crown gap in prices.

In short, stop assuming their is deliberate intent behind recurring natural phenomena.

You're missing some crucial information.

I need four sets of numbers to explain to you why you're imagining things.

Buy offer / # of offers at that amount /// Sell Offer / # of Offers at that amount

Also, please make a new post rather than editing old ones. It muddles the dialogue and makes it harder for anyone following this thread to follow the discussion.

I understand what mecha is trying to say, and although it would be valid if it were happening in world economics, it is impossible in SK due to the competitive model of the energy market. If someone were to attempt to do it, it wouldn't be market manipulation, it would be suicide.

I actually do it the moment I get online. I check the market and my outstanding orders that I placed the day before and figure out which side of the line is best suited at that time. I would then place X amount of Y on the positive side (usually in increments of 3-4 units per some set crown within a range), and then on the other side I would place roughly the same amount Z crowns away. This allows me to quickly make either crowns or CE and later (when I log off), the other ebb will hopefully go to the other side and make me a profit that way.

Rinse and repeat each time I get online. Because I place "breakpoints" in the market, I actually help the market stay within the Z range that I place...this is a positive for those who don't want the price to go too high or too low. I'm certain other players are doing the same thing. XYZ change on a daily basis for me, depending on how I feel, so I cannot give you specifics...but as an example, I remember one day I had 20 orders to buy 100 CE for 3920 and 20 orders to sell for 4099....all the orders went through, making 1940 crown profit while I was offline. And no, this "secret" won't hurt my profits even if everyone does it, it'll just take longer to make them (and it's more about keeping the market stable rather than making fake money).

Mecha, you can't raise the price of energy to then sell it at a higher rate. This does not work.

The only way to raise the price is to buy up everyone's offers to sell cheap. Congratulations, the price is now higher! You can now sell back the energy you just bought, along with the energy you wanted to sell to begin with. Good for you!

Except that as soon as the price gap widens the day traders step in and begin restoring the market with surprising rapidity. It's a cut throat market preventing the price gap from widening one way or the other for very long. Meanwhile legitimate sellers will continue to undercut you as well adding further pressure to restore the price.

You'll end up selling your energy for less than you paid for most of it if you managed to open any appreciable price gap.

This kind of manipulation is not practical. You gain nothing and do considerable damage to yourself in the process. This isn't a one sided commodity market. It's a two sided currency exchange.

What you're actually witnessing is people doing large scale crown to energy conversions (usually someone who just sold something for a lot of crowns after spending a lot of energy crafting and leveling it) which wipes the top part of the market out and temporarily damages the short-term supply of cheap energy. Fortunately the day traders will restore this over time.

If only we had the ability to buy/sell options lol

Now THAT would be interesting!

It -is- Market Manipulation, but the sky isn't falling because of it.
Here's how it works. When energy drops to its low, say 3880 lately, you buy... eh, 10,000 energy or so. It won't work with small amounts of energy.
Now, you've got a huge stash of energy, but you bid to buy more... but you no longer really want to buy it. So you throw up 5 or 6 bids for 100 energy each at 3900, 3902, 3904, 3906, 3908. Now people can't see that the 'level' price has been 3880. Now you hope that other players start outbidding you, and when they do, you remove your bids and outbid them (you want to buy as little energy as possible as you raise the price of it.)
Once there's 4 or 5 'real' bids, you go ahead and repeat your push-up the market bids. When you get the energy market to, say, 4100, you wait until people are outbidding you and then you start selling them your stock of 10,000 energy as long as the price remains profitable by at least 1% or so, remembering to calculate the 2% tax in. Of course, the ceiling price is 2% less than the current offers to sell energy, so this manipulation has sharp limits (which is why the sky isn't falling... there are -two- sides to the trade interface. This manipulation is within a range.)

If you aren't working with at least 10k energy, I don't think it would be worth the risk of buying expensive energy to slightly increase your profits in margin trading. Anyway, this kind of manipulation is common on puzzle pirates doubloon exchange. It's actually less common in Spiral Knights because you have to buy blocks of 100 energy. I suspect this may have been a way to deliberately check this exact kind of manipulation - you need to be working with such large sums that it limits sharply the number of people who can do it profitably.

Now, notice that to run another cycle you have to let the market drop back to its natural level, or do the same kind of pushing in reverse and force the price of energy -lower-. So while this kind of manipulation increases market fluctuation, it doesn't actually increase average price. (Arguably it decreases average price in the long run, like all market profiteering arguably does, because the 2% tax is a crown sink.)

Personally, I cannot imagine engaging in such a tedious method of earning crowns when I could play the game instead, but... whatever. It doesn't really hurt me, because I try to always have a few hundred energy and put up bids to buy before I log off so that when the market drops again (as it must for the profiteer to do another cycle) I'll get -my- energy at the low price anyway. It only hurts me if I happen to need energy in the middle of a push. (And the more people that do put their energy buy bids up 12-24 hours before they need that energy, the less effective this profiteering will be ... it's 'need energy right now' buyers that allow this bid-pushing to work. If no-one outbids the manipulator, he's going to end up buying energy and not changing the market level.)

Except what you're witnessing and complaining about is the product or normal trading, not any attempt to "fix" the price. Prices fluctuate naturally.

But it won't work.

There is a limit of how many buys/sells that work on the market by people "outside the circle" which brings the profit....everything in the circle cannot be used (daytrading) in the calculations because that only occurs to keep the 2% gap. Knowing that....

If you start placing bids to BUY energy at 3910, 3920, 3930, etc. etc. then eventually you get to a point where people will NOT overbid you, but rather BUY those orders. Instead of you raising the market, you're effectively only getting 100 CE units for each time you place a bid over a specific market midpoint (usually that's around 4002 for selling).

Now look at the sell orders, in order for you to "raise" that, you have to purchase the lower bids off the market (costing you at least 4000 for each unit). Let's say you buy 40 units to get the price to 4100 (which is now showing probably around 50 because that is considered a market "endpoint"), that means you've spent let's say 160k crowns (given benefit of the doubt that they were all selling for 4k). You now place those 40 units on the market for 4099, which you think you will make 680 crowns...woohoo right?

Wrong, the "outside circle" people who would be suckered into purchasing from you would be minimal, you might get 1 or 2 before the market gets filled up from undercutters blocking YOU off. You are now sitting with 38 or so 100 blocks of energy that you would have to sell at 4081 each __just to break even__. And what have you accomplished? Absolutely nothing.

The market works because it is 2-sided....let's look at a 1-sided market, like WoW's AH on linen cloth. If you haven't played WoW, don't worry, just imagine an item that normally sells for 70 copper per, is bought ALL the time, and can be easily farmed in the game. I come into the picture and buy up every single unit of linen cloth below 130 copper (let's say 1,000 units coming to about 100k copper), I then place it on market for 129 copper. I then keep scanning and buying out ANYONE who tries to place under me, no matter what...forcing people to ONLY buy from me. I know to 100% certainty (because I did it all the time for years) that I would make nearly 122,550 (after the 5% ah cut), which is a 18% profit-to-investment ratio. Because people don't know the price that others are willing to pay for it, there is no knowledge of the actual price linen should be going for (meaning that players don't realize that I've just jacked the market).....now when people start placing bids, they'll place them closer to the 129 mark. That allows me to place MY personal inventory of linen higher than what the market was...making me even more profit.

Again, this is 2-sided....if the gap becomes too wide, traders will close the gap real quick, so pointless.

"But it won't work."

And now, cousin Levi shares a tale from the market.

So, last night, I wanted to shift some energy. I put it up for sale, asking 20 less than the 'next best' offer. As it happens, I wanted to shift a fairly large pile of energy - so I put up 70 sell offers (two lots of 35), all at the same price.

While the market was chewing on that, I sold about 25, and buy offers got picked up in fair numbers. Slowly, a margin opened up, such that I could have re-bought the Crystal I was selling at 100 less than I sold it for. When that happened, people started to outbid my sell offer, being impatient and all.

Annoyed, I pulled the untouched offer for 35 blocks, and reposted it lower down. It then happened again.

With a big enough pile, I believe I could have taken it for a short walk, and then slowly rebought for less, unless I met someone doing it the other way, or ran into a "firebreak" like the ones you tend to put up (which I'll be joining you in doing, by the way). With an enormous pile, I could have rolled a few firebreaks.

I'm not sure I like that this is do-able right now, but the solution is easy:

Teach more people to trade moderately, and have more firebreaks go up. The firebreakers get a small profit, we all get a more stable market, and stuff like this becomes impossible.

I didn't say that market manipulation wasn't possible.

What I said was that the GMs aren't going to do anything about it because they have the exact same system in another game run by the same company and they keep their hands off the market there, too, without that game being negatively impacted.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Or in this case what's good for the pirate is good for the gamer.

I love your walking strategy....but in my opinion, unless we can get enough economists together, we'll just end up beating on each other (some want to walk up, others down...a power struggle ensues). I didn't put up my bottom endpoint today, and look at what happened (I just logged off with the buy offers down to 3860 or so....crazy low), not saying I'm the only one who puts these points in, but holy crap right!?

And yes, I try to keep the market within 100...I don't do it for much profit anymore, just want to help stabilize. I usually have 3950 and 4050 endpoints, giving me only a 19 crown profit....only when I feel like "daytrading" do I drop those and be aggressive, otherwise I don't see how my plan hurts anyone at the moment.

I just hope the auction house works the same way....oh the things I could do :D