quinta-feira, 17 de setembro de 2015

Trading – Coincidence, Bots or something fishy?




While updating market orders in Hek, I noticed that the Federation Navy 200mm Steel Plates had been undercut by 10 mil. This was indeed annoying meaning, that I had basically 2 options:
- Wait until they go up the price I have, achieved once all my competition gets bought by consumers;
- Undercut my competition, saying goodbye to my large profit margin. This way I might still make a smaller profit or sell at a small loss, getting the bulk of my isk back to invest in something else that might be more profitable. I never really go check the “buy price” of my items… It takes too long, so I just risk it.

In order to make a decision I do check for 2 factors. How many items are really undercutting me by a large value and how many are sold per week. I clicked the market order and here is what I found out.


I just had a WTF moment… now take notice that this is happening in Hek and not in Jita. No less than 12 orders were put up (they did not existed before as far as I remember), with similar prices, and extremely similar creation times, because they have pretty much all the same age, with few seconds apart.

This sort of activity in Hek, with so many new created/updated orders so closely is very odd to me. I don’t see it that often, specially after a big undercut. I’m wondering… Is it all the same guy, that for some reason is putting the same item in several orders, with a few minutes apart? I could really buy the 1st order and one item from the 2nd order to find out, but it’s not like gonna do much use. Was it a bot going haywire? Is it just a big coincidence and I’m just crazy to think there’s something fishy? Might never find out.
Nevertheless the decision here was simple. Considering the item sells little, and having 40+ new items undercutting me, I’m gonna kiss my margin goodbye and try to ditch them for now...

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