When to Cash Out (Part 7)

Last time I discussed my attempts at writing my own MTGO bot and the difficulties which lie therein and how my failure to plan for the contingency of YATBot 3 not being created cost me profits while my inventory gathered virtual dust.

After I had given up my pursuit of writing my own bot, I began to ponder what to do next. Did I want to sell off my inventory and walk away, or did I want to seek out another bot?

This decision was fairly an easy one to make. EBay was being inundated with collection auctions and some auctions were pretty much being given away. Since this created a massive glut, I knew that my collection would not bring fair market value and holding onto the collection would not help matters any. If anything, this was the perfect time to gobble up all this inventory but I had no plans or available monies to take advantage of this fact. So the search began for a replacement bot and slightly lamented over this missed opportunity.

I came upon MTGO Library and have been pleased ever since. It had all of YATBot's features and so much more. I could even run one bot and have MTGO Library handle all the cards, so I began the process of transferring all the inventory to a single account.

I also began to conceive of a way to measure the effectiveness of MTGO Library. Under YATBot, I had a spreadsheet which showed the number of trades and the number of cards traded were tracked. I let my wife handle this bookkeeping details and once a week I looked at the progress. I could tell you how many cards in profit each of the bots were bringing in. Obviously the commons would give me more cards than rares, but beyond that, it was difficult to explain to non MTGO people what my profit margin was, how much money the bots were making on paper and even more importantly, how much cash in hand I was actually receiving.

We'll get into how MTGO Library solved this problem next time.