In another discussion I saw that the recommended way of using auctioneer is to buy on bottomscanner recommendation, and sell on apparaiser recommendation, but without even checking to see if you're selling for less than what you purchased it for.

This is either counterintuitive, nuts, or a deep mystery which perhaps someone will explain the logic of this to me. In the real world, you don't sell your shares without bothing to see how much you purchased them for. You don't sell your house at the bottom of a market, just because the price you get is comparable with other current sales.

There are some circumstances, when you realize that you've bought a dud and that it will never sell at a profit, that you have to just unload it. But blindly selling without bothering to check the price you purchased it for sounds very odd to me.

Perhaps someone can explain their philosophy on this.

i don't want to stretch the analogies you suggest to extremes, but...

in the stock market, if you ignore issues of taxation, you absolutely should sell stock in a way which is completely ignores whether you are doing so for a gain or a loss. the only consideration you should have is whether you can move your money from a stock with lower growth potential to one of higher growth potential.

as an example, say you bought a single share of stock for $100. Say it loses value, and is now worth $50. Your expectation is that in the coming year it will climb back up to $105. But there is another stock, which is also worth $50 now, but your expectation is that in the coming year it will climb to $200. Do you sell the stock, even though it will make a loss for you? Yes, you do, because you have someplace better to put that money.

Another example, perhaps closer to home. Same stock, you bought at $100 on the hot tip advice of your brother-in-law, but it dropped to $50 the next day. As you look at its fundamentals, you're now convinced it's really only worth $50 now. In fact, it might be worth even less. Someone offers to buy it from you for $50 today. Do you sell it for a loss, or keep it indefinitely because you don't want to have to admit that you bought a loser, maybe losing even more if the price continues to drop?

The bottom line: focus on selling an asset for as much as you can get for it. Ignore whether or not that price makes it a winner or a loser. There is nothing you can do to turn a loser into a winner, if you're already selling it at the highest price you can.

A similar case can be made for housing. If it comes time to sell your house, you sell it at the best price you can get for it. If you think the price may go up tomorrow, by all means hold on an extra day. But only do so because you think you can sell it for more tomorrow, regardless of whether you'll gain or lose money by selling it today or tomorrow. It doesn't matter whether you are making a profit on it or not, it only matters that you are getting the most from your asset that you can.

No one is suggesting "blindly selling" anything. By all means, know what the maximum amount you can sell it for is, and sell it for that amount. But don't avoid selling it for the maximum you can get, just because it is going to lose you money to do so. The price you paid for an item does not matter one iota to determining the maximum price you can sell it for, and following through on that decision to maximize your profits, or minimize your losses.

heh, i almost said "dead money" and made a poker analogy, but it was already getting a little far afield.

agreed, that the first example was mainly useful as an example of opportunity cost for your capital tied up with items, but I needed to make it to better set up the second example.

we actually would do a better job of tying goods to their purchase price if we could, if only to make "end of month bookkeeping" stuff easier to automate. alas, it is nearly impossible to do, and the correlation process isn't instant. old, old versions of beancounter actually did this, but the user confusion it caused was high, as was its internal complexity.

getting the "highest reasonable price" [that you can sell an item for] is the holy grail for auctioneer. Heck, the Auc Classic stat is even called HSP or "highest sellable price". Just about all our work goes toward creating stats and pricing algorithms which can help the tool automate the process of calculating that single number.

Theoretically, the price you pay for items is one of the few pieces of definitive data we have available to us, since we have to infer a lot of information about all the other auctions out there that we neither listed nor bought. However, since you are generally buying for resale, and are thus buying only for significant amounts below what even you think is the HSP, it turns out to be almost irrelevant to the calculation of an HSP.

As for knowing whether you bought at the top of the market or not, the simple stat, with it's EMA calculation, was basically designed to do exact that - tell you what the short and long term moving averages are, so you have a better idea of whether or not you're just in a local slump, or a long term trend. I do agree that it isn't perfectly suited to this task, but that was its intention.

We have lots of grand plans. Auc Advanced was designed to be modular, so that if developers, or even users(!), have an idea for a way to better calculate things like the temporal nature of pricing, or even a price forecast, they could build a new stats modules and plug them in to our system without affecting anything else. By all means, if you have that idea, get cracking! And, if you feel like giving back, please donate it back to the community to use, review, and maybe even improve upon.

Personally, i have more cash to invest than i can invest so i'd rather have dead money than sell at a loss.

On a side note, there is a value to time not just having enough money to cover the float... Consider having to check a market over and over for each item you have stored in your bank 'waiting for the market to correct' This time ads up... take that time and apply it to something more valuable and you can increase your rate of return. Its simply the concept of Time Value of Money(TVM) I -used- to hold onto a TON of stuff for market corrections to happen, I used to make good money at it... but I make more NOT bothering with it. Don't get me wrong there is a time and a place for this in which everyone can make a large amount of money, a prime example would be when you know of upcoming changing to game design. Pre-Patch info can help you make a TON of money this way. Generally speaking for that one or two times tat is the better decision to make because you can make the most money (TVM) by simply holding onto the item(S) in question.

Just thought I would bring up the other side of such a beast of requiring a profit on everything...

There seems to be two streams of thought running through this thread, so I'd like to focus it down to just one if I can.

Let's assume, for this discussion, that you sell off duds (items that don't have a reasonable chance of making a profit) and that you restrict yourself to the number of relists for any item type.

So, now, given the fact that you're trading in normally desirable goods that have a market, you could:
1) Buy items cheaply and sell them at a higher price - (probable) guaranteed profit but be prepared to hold onto items sometimes for several days.
2) Buy items at what you hope is the bottom of the cycle and sell them off at what you hope is towards the top. Don't track your purchase price, but rely on market sell indicators - mixture of profits and losses but you keep your money moving looking for the next opportunity.

1) Sell at a Profit isn't well supported by auctioneer simply because there's no easy way of matching up which stack equates to which sale, particularly when you buy partial stacks and end up selling aggregates. Like the purchase of a stack of 16 and a stack of 6 will sell as stack of 20 and stack of 2. This method more or less guarantees a profit (given the provisos I stated at the beginning) but I find that I can only purchase a small quantity of an item after which I need to sell it before buying more. Otherwise, it quickly becomes unruly to match buys and sells.

2) Keep the money moving is well supported by auctioneer: between btmscn and appraiser you have those bases covered. And there's no need to track individual stacks, so you can buy up all the cheap stacks you want. However, you could buy up 100g worth of wool cloth because btmscn told you it was cheap, to find that the market drops dramatically and soon enough appraiser gives the OK to sell it all off at the new, much lower, but good for the current market, price.

So I'm certainly interested in hearing from people who have opinions about these methods and also from people who have tried out both - testleK is one example.

The average/total sales info certainly can give you some comfort that things are in the right direction overall. The one extra piece of information I'd like to be displayed in the tool tip is the #sold vs #failed auctions. Appraiser gives you this, and Bean Counter will show the information if you manually type in the search to match the item found by btmscn and then count them up yourself, but you can't actually get that info from btmscan or the tooltip.

I'd agree that the guarantee of profit is if you then were to sell of your purchased item immediately, in the same market. Frequently I find that impossible, since there's one or more items that are being bid on that have to be cleared from the market before you get a sell signal. I've also seen the market (on many occasions) drop by 50%, hold for a bit, and then be consider the new fair market. So it's not only small cycles like 10% that take place.

I"m wondering if people who use the "keep the money moving" method have to use much stricter Appraiser > undercut >max under and Btmscan > evaluators > appraiser > min discount settings because they don't have the added safety check of manually checking the buy price before selling.

I do generally use a more stringent min profit percent (50-60% discount) and tbh, can generally care less about min profit as an actual gold figure, I do normally for the purposes of appraiser, toss in a number between 5-10g as a min profit. I build the 50% safety net into my buy price and validate my buy price at the time of purchase. Things with no deposit I will generally cut that down to 40-50% because these items tend to be markets like mats or coins where they can take forever to sell depending on the current demand.

I do -not- use undercut at all. I use BeanCount market matcher and base most of my movement from the market price line against previous success or failure at moving the item and can care less how many others are competing with me as IMHO if I set a fair price it will move regardless of the competition as can be consistently proven in the larger volume markets (example: Mats, you can set a higher price and it pretty much will sell unless your higher price is no longer 'fair'...) The only time competition comes into play for me when posting items are the 'hard to get' items and they tend to be the more expensive items. These rare / expensive items I will tend to manually adjust against current market conditions vs allowing any portion of the script to manage that side of my selling.

For the last bit, you may want to look at the filter talked about in this thread:
http://forums.norganna.org/discussion/6795/idea-filter-by-beancount-succeededfailed/#Item_21

It allows you to automatically ignore things that didn't sell in the past. I find it very handy myself.