After reaching the richest point in my life after a lucky god drop, I had just read an article by andrewk about taxes and one line stuck out at me. It was something like 'heck, buy out the netherstar market'. So I decided that is what I was going to do. But my experience as an investor in real life made caused me great consternation at this thought because I realized that the market was surely fraught with danger. I began by sniping up what looked like a good deal on stars at the time. I think Pixel had auctioned 640 stars for just 640k. Stars were going for 1500, 1600 and up-- even up to 2k at the time. It was just after winter festival and I had even heard rumors that stars had hit 3000 at one point. So I snapped up what I thought was a lucky deal and then slowly started flipping the stars 1, 2, 3 or 10 at a time. I was making good money and the sale had triggered other sales, so I kind of acted as a mop for a bit and it seemed to be working. Then I had a brilliant idea. How could I set up a floating market? I could put up a chest with buy and sell like normal. But then I could put up a chest beside it with a lower or higher price, and people could sell into it. My original idea was to have a line of S chests and a line of B chests and then manually move stars, but then I realized that I would end up accumulating either stars or money at either end of the market and pressure would move the market in the opposite direction, and that having one chest per buy/sell pair would control my risk (i.e. limit the depth of the market) and reduce my overall exposure. I wasn't trying to control the whole market, I just wanted to participate in it as a meter and make money on the spread. So I ended up setting up five chests. The prices were something like 2000-1800, 1800-1600, 1600-1400, and 1300-1100. people sold into the 1800 and 1600 almost immediately and I ran out of cash. I didn't expect this so I started farming and selling my magic tools. After about a week the market seemed to hit a wall at around 1100 and I had a couple mil in cash so I felt I could relax a little. ===== HOW IT ALL WORKS ===== I set a buy-sell price on a per-chest basis and I let the market float. I never need to worry about the price. a) If my high priced chests are empty this will induce people to sell into my chests until the market reaches it's true balanced price. b) If my low priced chests are full, this will induce people to buy from me, returning the market to a more fair price. c) If one of my chests sits near the true market price people will buy and sell from that chest without it filling up. This is when I make the most money -- the service I provide -- I provide a reasonable number of stars, at a price other people are willing to pay. I am not involved in setting the price for the stars. I can never make a decision over price. I can never buy or sell beyond the middle price of the chest or I will lose money. If I try to move stars from one chest to another what happens is that when the market moves back to the place where I bought stars at a higher price, I lose money. In the short term what happens is, if I move stars cheaper, I've sold them cheaper than what I bought, and if I move them to a more expensive price, people are less likely to buy from me because my stars are more expensive. Yes, if I paid more attention to the market I could probably make more, but this way I don't need to worry about the price and I can just relax and let the chests do the work. [edited for brevity]. I hope this shows people that there are different ways to run a store and shows that a non-prestige shop has a way of competing against prestige shops. The little guy can carve out a niche for himself. I hope this leads to a new era on ECC where shops compete on design and user experience and not just on price.
