Guild Wars 2

This is a broad question, so bear with me:

I’ve got a few longer term investments on some low volume items. I’m worried that I set my prices too high and that no one will purchase my listings. No one has undercut me, but, then again, these are low volume.

Do any of you have any general guidelines for how to evaluate when to take an item down from the TP?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Have a look at the item on the buy page, and see how your price compares to the current supply; if your item is buried under lots of cheaper items then it may well be it’ll never sell.

You can also check the trade site to get a feel for rate of supply/demand to work out the odds of it being sold (Are people buying them – or is supply rising steadily over time)

an item that takes 1 month to sell at 100% profit is a worse investment than one that gives 50% profit after 1 week. (3.33%/day vs. 7.14%/day) not to mention the profits after that week can then be re-invested and multiply

Check out the item’s price history at GuildWarsTrade or GW2Spidy. Look at a month graph. Is your price high compared to the average? Is the average moving away from your price or toward it? If toward it, that item may sell at that price. If away from it then may be best to relist it.

John Smith.4610:

I always recommend to people when getting into investing of any kind to define your outs before you invest. Pick numbers for profit and loss and time early and stick to them.

This is good advice but I’d like to add a bit more.

High value assets with large profit margins generally have low demand due to their price; thus the risk of holding these assets are much greater than high volume trade assets.

High risk, high profit; low risk, low profit.

If you’re holding high risk assets; timing is everything. You can be also lucky and find a buyer at your price.

In a video game; I tend to invest in high volume consumable assets. Why? Even though their prices fluctuate greatly and profit margins are generally low; you can study the market trends in order to buy when demand is low and sell when demand is high.

It’s not very difficult to anticipate demand in a video game especially if you follow the trends. This enables me to calculate risk a lot easier.

John Smith.4610:

I always recommend to people when getting into investing of any kind to define your outs before you invest. Pick numbers for profit and loss and time early and stick to them.

I spent about 1000g investing in super skins and right now their market value has dropped to around 300g. ;(

I still think this is a long-term investment but I’m thinking I may have to sell at a huuuuge loss. I’ve had huge runs of big profits on investment opportunities but I was bound to get a huge loss.

But it’s OK, I have lots of gold and just picked up The Legend ;| – it’s a good thing I didn’t invest ALL my money.

John Smith.4610:

I always recommend to people when getting into investing of any kind to define your outs before you invest. Pick numbers for profit and loss and time early and stick to them.

Funny story. I once bought a bunch of Consortium Clipper skins because they were never going to drop anymore. Then I was happy that the price didn’t deflate and I kept hold of them as a long-term investment/hedge.

Then Arenanet made them drop from new content and my investment was ruined. Great job guys.

My advice is to never invest in anything ever. Someone will change the rules and leave you with nothing.

Svarty.8019:

John Smith.4610:

I always recommend to people when getting into investing of any kind to define your outs before you invest. Pick numbers for profit and loss and time early and stick to them.

Funny story. I once bought a bunch of Consortium Clipper skins because they were never going to drop anymore. Then I was happy that the price didn’t deflate and I kept hold of them as a long-term investment/hedge.

Then Arenanet made them drop from new content and my investment was ruined. Great job guys.

My advice is to never invest in anything ever. Someone will change the rules and leave you with nothing.

That’s another reason why I don’t invest in high risk low volume assets. Game developers with the flip of a switch can make an item go from rare to abundant.

or from abundant to rare. it can be profitable if you guess what is worthless now that is about to be rare after an update.

Svarty.8019:

John Smith.4610:

I always recommend to people when getting into investing of any kind to define your outs before you invest. Pick numbers for profit and loss and time early and stick to them.

Funny story. I once bought a bunch of Consortium Clipper skins because they were never going to drop anymore. Then I was happy that the price didn’t deflate and I kept hold of them as a long-term investment/hedge.

Then Arenanet made them drop from new content and my investment was ruined. Great job guys.

My advice is to never invest in anything ever. Someone will change the rules and leave you with nothing.

Any investment is a gamble. There is nothing in the world that is 100% guaranteed to never lose its value. Hedging is what you do to protect yourself if other investments go poorly, and you can lose money on a hedge just as easily as on anything else. The idea is that if you lose money on your hedge, you’re making money somewhere else. It’s tough to do in a market with no derivatives. You have to keep an eye on your positions and get out if them when the market changes.

If you’re averse to risk, just stash your gold in the bank. Nothing ventured nothing gained, but if losing gold on an investment ruins your day, it’s probably the way to go. It’s not ANet’s fault that you chose to gamble that the skins (or something that was a good substitute for them) were never going to drop again. Even if they never dropped again, you had no guarantee that folks would still want them when new content came out.

Svarty.8019:

Then Arenanet made them drop from new content and my investment was ruined. Great job guys.

My advice is to never invest in anything ever. Someone will change the rules and leave you with nothing.

This is why a wise trader has a wide portfolio, in order to spread risk. It happens in real life too; disaster, unexpected problems etc. can all serve to kill an investment dead.

As the saying goes don’t put your eggs all in one basket

I generally flip on middle-priced items on short-term investments. The way I do business, I calculate the numbers before I flip, and then I try to sell my items as quickly as possible.

This is applicable, I think, in a particularly interesting story from when I used to flip Sharp Claws, back in the day. Can’t remember how long ago it was, but they were selling at a very nice price of about 2s 50 or so. I’d buy them in bulk and then sell them, and, for a time, they didn’t seem to change in price in spite of my flipping. One day, however, they started to roll off a cliff. I’m flipping SCs, when I notice that the price on them is falling pretty rapidly. I sold off all of my SCs as quickly as possible for a price that, overall, lost me some of my money (I perhaps sold 100 SCs at 2s when I bought them for 1s 90). Not too much longer afterwards, they were selling for less than 1s 50. A few months later, they’ve now risen in price back to 2s 40 or so.

There are two points to this. First of all, like I showed, it’s better to just cut your losses to be as low as possible when your calculations don’t quite work out, but I’m sure you already knew that. However, another important note is that dead money is worthless money. One of the reasons why I usually invest in short-term flips is that they’re typically quite safe; however, because they’re short-term, it means that I can use my money to invest even more after I have gotten my returns on my flips. For example, would you rather get 30% interest on X amount of money that you invest over the period of one week, or get 4% interest per day on that X amount of money? As it so happens, assuming that those interest rates stay constant, if you chose the second option, you would net a total profit gain of 28%, but that’s assuming you don’t use your interest money to invest more. If you did, then you would get, in total, approximately 31.6% interest on your original X amount of money, meaning a 1.6% increase in income over the first option. So, I’d say that you should probably just cut your losses now and get investing with the money that you get from your investments, so that you can make more in the long run. No point in gambling when you could be using your money for better purposes, or could find your investment decreasing even more in value.

Ryuujin.8236:

Svarty.8019:

Then Arenanet made them drop from new content and my investment was ruined. Great job guys.

My advice is to never invest in anything ever. Someone will change the rules and leave you with nothing.

This is why a wise trader has a wide portfolio, in order to spread risk. It happens in real life too; disaster, unexpected problems etc. can all serve to kill an investment dead.

As the saying goes don’t put your eggs all in one basket

It’s also why they try to go into safer investments.