Monday, March 11, 2013

Buying Big, Selling Big - In Conjunction with Limits



Buying Big, Selling Big

When you are a very small bot looking to make leaps and bounds in growth then you need to be very aware of how you buy and sell high value cards. Last time I spoke about minimizing risks with big cards in an article about what MLBot provides us here. In this article I'd like to discuss what you as a user can do to minimize these risks.

If you run one bot with email reminders and habitually check each trade for continuity and unusual patterns then you’re already in a great position to make money back or even profit on cards you aren’t ready to hold in your bots inventory.

Expanding your horizons

I propose to attentive individuals that instead of limiting your bot to purchase only cards you can afford to retain in inventory that you expand and purchase cards of even the highest value.

Why would you do such a thing? Because big money cards are an easy sell. Suppose your bot buys a card for 20 tickets. You are still a new bot and have very little inventory and the bots purchase ate up your last 20 tickets. You may not want to invest everything in a single card. What if it takes months to sell? Maybe it never sells? What if in the time it takes for you to sell the price drops and you’re actually losing money on that trade? As is often said, never put all your eggs in one basket.

Using your limitations to your advantage
 
Instead of limiting the bot to making only affordable purchases (which will reduce opportunities and possible profits) you expand your limits to encompass all kinds of trades. It can be scary but if you check your trades at least once a day you shouldn’t have to worry about loss.

You don’t want to hold on to the money cards just yet but that doesn’t mean you can’t purchase them. When you make a purchase you are uncomfortable holding onto you may want to assess whether or not the card is in high demand and if you will sell it very quickly. If it’s a card everyone is scrambling to buy up you should be safe to leave it on your bot and expect a trade within hours or days. However, if you anticipate that the card will drop in value or is not flying off the shelves you have another option. You are not the only bot on MTGO and if you are uncomfortable holding onto high value inventory then you are probably not the bot paying the most for money cards.

Instead of purchasing a card and placing it into your bots inventory you can take that card into your own hands and sell it to another bot or another player in the classifieds. Larger bot chains usually are willing to pay more for cards than you would be and they have the buying power and audience to sell cards you wouldn’t normally be able to.

Pros

  • Minimize the risks you take in purchasing high value cards.
  • You can easily make a small profit by selling to other players or bots directly for very little effort.
  • You benefit both your own bot (by increasing the number of tickets you have to buy more cards) as well as benefit larger bot chains who desire to hold such high value cards

Cons

  • If someone comes to your bot looking for high value cards they will be disappointed and you may lose a customer

No comments:

Post a Comment