One month ago, to within a matter of hours, somebody on r/eve asked if he and/or she should invest in zydrine. At the time the post was made, zydrine had fallen from the initial peak of 1900 down to 13-1400. The reasoning was that it would rise in the long term.
He received conflicting advice:
Hedging my bets as strongly as the english language allows, I told him not to buy.
In no uncertain terms, another person told him to buy.
So what ended up happening in the intervening month?
I'm definitely not always right, and I don't trust myself enough to put my money in something even when I am confident, but somewhere out there somebody is very glad he took my advice instead of the other guy's.
Of course, the price is still higher than it was before the announcement, and it may well remain so. Assuming Guilane cashed out today instead of continuing to chase a sunk cost, he has made a net profit of around 2 billion.
My investment idea is always right: DON'T!
ReplyDeleteNo one sees the future, one shall get money from providing a service (like hauling, crafting ships, picking up items on buy orders instantly and turning them sales available instantly) instead of wishing and hoping.
That is an easy response and for most dilletantes like myself probably the correct one. But it is also a tacit admission of failure. Ironic that you should make that comment on a blog entitled "EVE-fail" written by someone who obviously doesn't.
ReplyDeleteSpeculation is just that, speculation. It is gambling. You are correct, you can't see the future. But you can predict parts of it with varying degrees of accuracy depending on your smarts, knowledge and research. Those that are good at it earn fabulous sums, those that are bad quit or lose their shirt. Unfortunately I am still in the second camp.
The advantage of speculation and some forms of trading is that it scales not with time/effort but with knowledge and money supply. If I mine or mission my maximum income is sharply limited unless I seriously multibox. If I manufacture it is somewhat limited by the number of build queues available and the time to keep them flowing, though as Parasoja has shown by building capitals you can scale it up to quite large numbers. But with clever trading and speculation the sky is the limit.
I will never make it to 1 trillion isk, but plenty of people have. Want to take a guess at how some of them did it?
In my experience, predicting the future is hard (I, too, do not expect to ever make it to 1 trillion), but predicting other players - especially the more reactionary types of speculator - is easy once you've seen a few speculation bubbles. In this case, "everybody knew" that most zydrine came from the drone regions, so it was a sure thing that the price would spike after the removal of drone materials was announced, and equally sure that it would then fall sharply because that's what happens every single time this type of speculator thinks buying something is a good idea.
ReplyDeleteWhere the price will settle in the long term, though, I have no idea.
Trouble is, it's very hard to get a meaningful investment in on the ground floor of this type of thing. I was asleep when the announcement was made, and by the time I heard about it the price had already doubled. To make money one would need to have already purchased a large stock before the announcement, which would be... tricky.
I've been thinking about this in the background for a while now. Any ideas I might have are extremely premature, but maybe in a few more years....
Technetium stockpiles took years to run down (assuming you believe they emptied within the last 6 months).
ReplyDeleteHow big in comparison do you think the mineral stockpiles are?
(Having said that, looks like they're on the rise again, probably not a good time to 0.01 isk on capital ships)