Why do investors share their picks?.. (Part 4 of 4)

Part 4 (Conclusion)

Once the prices start to drop drastically, all the investor's followers will start selling out the cards, some will still make some profit but many will make a loss.

The 210 Event tickets this supposed investor made will be coming from a combination of losses between followers and sometimes even bots. 

What can we learn from this?

If you are someone looking for making some profits and decided to follow someone else's investment idea, remember that the investor will likely always make the most out of it as he/she got to buy the chosen card at the lowest price. If you're just getting started, I would recommend you to try your investment skills in low risk cards such as "bulk" 10cent rares that have potential of becoming "decent rares" (if a bulk rare goes up to 0.30, you may be looking up to 200%+ return).

If you are just a everyday bot user, luckily MTGO Library bot has options to deal with this!

The Buy/Sell consistency tool would help you on this specific situation the following way:

After selling the chosen card at its "lowest" ~30tix sell pricemark the bot would very slowly increase the old ~25 tix buy price and even limiting it to 30 tix for a set number of days, preventing you from "accidentally" buying it for 35+ after the burst of people looking for it.

Although this feature was heavily criticized by investors themselves, it's still a crucial tool to prevent bots for taking up big losses on these specific cases.

Introducing the Price Consistency Tool

Hello Botters,

today we take the market back and ban speculators and raiders out of our lives forever. We are introducing a new tool, Pricing Consistency.

Take a look at any card on mtggoldfish.com: compared to paper magic (right, blue line), mtgo prices (left, red line) go up and down suddenly in short amounts of time. In the example Ashiok crossed the value of 5.5 tixs 27 times in a month. This happens because the MTGO Market is lively and very efficient. Without any protection, you could easily buy Ashiok at its highest price and sell it at the lowest, all the opposite you want to do. You can price each card manually via PersonalPrices.txt, but this is really time consuming and simply you cannot do for every card.

The goal of the Price Consistency tool is to decrease the amount of sudden spikes of cards and increase the overall stability of the market. As you see in the first graph the red line represents the current market, the blue represents the market of the future. Price Consistency will help increase your overall profit.
So how does it work? There are two sides of the table, the buy price consistency and the sell price consistency.

Sell price consistency:
For each card, your bots will automatically adjust the selling price to minimize your loss for market fluctuations. For example, if you buy a card for 10 tix and the market drops in value so that you are now selling it for 9 tixs, you will lose 1 tix if you do not have selling protection.

The % dropdown menus defines the force of the price adjustments. You can have a time decay so that a card bought long time ago won't affect the selling price too much.
100% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 100% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a selling price of 10 tixs.
80% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 80% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a selling price of 9.8 tixs.
0% means: no protection, simply use the current selling price. Using the example above, this will result in a selling price of 9 tixs.

You have the option to override Personal prices. Please note that if your protection percentage is set too high for too long you risk not selling the card, and therefore not re-buying it at the market value. This may result in a lower than normal inventory rotation and an overall loss in profits. Remember that some cards fall in price and if you don't keep up with the market you may be holding onto the card for too long.

Buy price consistency: 

For each card, your bots will automatically adjust the buying price to minimize your loss for market fluctuations. For example, if you sell a card for 10 tix and the market rises in value so that you are now buying it for 11 tixs, you will lose 1 tix if you do not have buying protection.

The % dropdown menus defines the force of the price adjustments. You can have a time decay so that a card sold long time ago won't affect the buying price too much.
100% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 100% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a buying price of 10 tixs.
80% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 80% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a buying price of 10.2 tixs.
0% means:; no protection, simply use the current buying price. Using the example above, this will result in a buying price of 11 tixs.

Happy botting!

Jason - Teamstoge

Approach MTGO Finance like Warren Buffet

If you have been living under a rock, you may never have heard of the most successful investor in the world: Mr Warren Buffet, 83 years old right now.

Here's how happy investing money makes him.

This guy has managed to get 20% a year on any money he has invested - over a long period of time. In the world of investing money, he has no match.

Based on a long article in the Swedish financial magazine Aktiespararen, I have tried to figure out how mr Buffet would approach MTGO Finance.

Here are some of his principles and how they may apply to Magic Online:

• Evaluate the company, not the market:  Think about the deck the card you are evaluating goes into. How will this deck do in the future? What will the demand be? Can the card be reprinted?
• Choose the right company and act as an owner: If you invest in cards, make sure you have played them. Be aware of the interactions of the card so you can properly evaluate if a card is overshadowed by a newer card. If you deep on a card, make sure you play it. Constantly.
• Think about the difference between a card's price and its value: Rageblood Shaman spiked on MTGO as it has a lot of value if a Minotaur deck becomes a viable (even tier 3) Standard strategy. The card has a lot of potential value but had a very low price. If you managed to sell in time, you could have earned 1000% on the first spike (5 to 50 cents) .There may be future spikes.
• Buy cheap and keep for a long time: This may apply more to stock that actually on the average have positive expected value (EV). Magic cards do not. BUT overall MTGO speculators are too shortsighted. Act on the major trends - such as PTQ season and not fancy guesses about the future. (Check out my Seasonal Trading video - link below).
• Trade as little as possible: Warren wants to avoid fees and you should also act to avoid fees! Do not give the bots 15-50% every time. Sell to humans. Get your own bot from mtgolibrary (you only pay when you sell!). You can trade a lot if you do not lose rake every time you do. Be aware of fees.
• Invest deeply in a few companies: Specialize. Choose a format or a set and learn everything about it. Do not try to speculate in all MTGO cards. Avoid more complicated areas like foils or promo cards until you are ready. We have all tried to speculate in too many areas. Consider how many speculators are trying to break Standard prices - maybe you should be the one that ignores the current set?
• Never borrow money for investments: If you borrow money to invest in MTGO cards, you are adding even more risk to a market that already has huge risk. Do not do it. I do not think there are many speculators that do this but if you even think about it - DON'T!
• Act rationally, not emotionally: Be aware of yourself and your emotions. You are your own worst enemy. Do you have pet cards? Are you attached to an investment and can't sell it to cut your losses? Learn about yourself. Know yourself.
• Be aware of interest on interest: There is probably a situation where you can get interest on interest on MTGO but I fail to think of one right now.
• Learn from your mistakes: When you have to sell with a loss think about why this happened. What could have turned out differently? Why didn't it? Did you make the right call and then something bad happened (like a sudden reprint, for example) ? How can you avoid this situation in the future?
• Take your own path: MTGO finance is different because most of the people on the market are players, not investors. Even so is it really your best option to check Reddit and Twitter and do what Marcel does? Or can you find your own niche?

Thinking like this made Warren Buffet the fourth richest man in the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires#2013_Top_10

He was beaten only by three guys who built worldwide companies. It is hard to approach MTGO Finance like Bill Gates, btw.

Some of my other MTGO Finance material:

• Check out the Weekly MTGO Finance tips show here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEgvEaipZg
• Warning! Speculation on Magic Online will probably fail for you. Here's why: http://youtu.be/mHwCO4QCWqA
• Seasonal Trading on MTGO: http://puremtgo.com/articles/mtg-finance-seasonal-trading-cycles-over-year-magic-online

• Dan on Good Bots and Spreading Risks: http://mtgostrat.com/2013/09/mtgo-finance-good-bots-spreading-risks/
• The Most Important thing about MTGO finance: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/10/the-most-important-thing_23.html
• When do you sell your card? http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-sell-magic-online-card.html
• When do you invest in the fall set (Theros)?  http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-invest-in-fall-set-theros-for.html
• Is Core Set mythics the safest investment on MTGO? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmyOxWT5qp8

Contact Info:
YouTube: MagicGatheringStrat
Web: mtgostrat.com
TwitchTV: twitchtv.com/MagicGatheringStrat
Bot:  mtgostrat. Show your support

Many Magic Online bots: Virtualization on Windows Comparative Benchmark

We host an article by Enrique taken from his blog: http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en
You can read the original article here: http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/instalar-bots-de-magic-online-virtualizacion-en-windows-parte-8-2/

Let me say that the main reason for writing this series is the enormous difficulty I have found when trying to search for articles that compare the reliability of different virtualization utilities (in fact I have not found anyone good enough). Therefore, I decided to write my own experience and test the main existing applications so you can decide the program that best suits your needs for your Magic Online stores machine.

What is virtualization?

Virtualization consists of emulating an Operating System (from now OS) inside another one which is the hosting OS. This software runs a full OS inside a window, as if it was another computer. The window that contains that emulated OS is also called a virtual OS or virtual machine (VM in advance).

If you remember from previous articles, the bot gets the resources of the mouse and keyboard to interact with the Magic Online client, which prevents you to use the computer where it is installed. With this software you will not have that problem if you install both Magic Online and the bot in a VM, since all the commands in these input devices are virtually processed.

A VM consumes resources like any computer. You can configure these resources with the only limitation of your hosting OS, considering that it also requires a minimal amount of resources. Some virtualization software can overcome these limits but such software emulation greatly reduces the VM performance.

Of course, nothing but the limits of the hardware prevents you from running more than one VM on the same computer. Thus, you could have several stores in Magic Online using a single computer.

Minimum requirements for a virtual machine

Since each VM will consume a significant part of our computer resources, I recommend that you set the minimum requirements in order to run the Magic Online client. The general requirements are (this is valid for the current version 3.0 not for the beta):

• Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 “Lite”
• CPU: 1 kernel
• RAM memory: 1.5 GB
• Hard Disk: 20 GB
• Video Resolution: 1440×900

The OS is a very small version of the original one. You can create an installation disk from the original image and remove all non-required extra tools with a program like nLite. In my case, my version of Windows XP consumes about 60-70 MB of RAM.

The CPU can be configured with more cores, but I think 1 is more than enough to run the bot with the Magic Online client.

The minimum RAM memory needed is about 800-1000 MB. However, with this amount of memory the OS can remap the loaded programs to the Windows swap file, leaving the VM unusable. An amount of 1.5 GB is the minimum size I have set on my VMs with no problems.

The hard disk space of the VM does not have to be 20 GB, in fact all installed applications and the trades backup files will not take you more than 6-8 GB. Anyway it is always better to leave more capacity, because if you create a virtual hard disk file with dynamic space assignation it will not use more space on your physical drive than required.

About the last feature, the minimum resolution is 1280×800 but it is too limited and the bot may have problems. It is a good idea to set a higher size (1440×900 or 1280×1024 for example), and if you have a lower resolution on your hosting OS the VM will add navigation bars so you can see its entire desktop.

You must also consider that the VMs will have more or less available resources depending on the hosting OS. For example, it is not the same that the hosting OS consumes 1 GB of RAM rather than another one that only uses 100 MB. However, you should also keep in mind that maybe the first hosting OS runs special services for the use of hardware virtualization or other useful features for VMs that are not present for the second one.

The ideal hosting OS would be the vSphere Hypervisor ESXi platform by VMware, which has been specifically designed to manage VMs consuming as little as 32 MB of RAM. However, installation is complex and is not compatible with any PC. If you would like more information about this topic, you can have a look at this series of articles written by Thrillski.

Virtualization with Windows hosting OS: benchmark setup

Once you have viewed the settings for each VM, we will create them with the Windows virtualization software selected for this comparison. Two of the applications I have chosen are completely free and unrestricted: VirtualBox 4.3.4 by Oracle and VMware Player 6.0.1. I have also considered a paid tool, VMware Workstation 10.0.1, in order to see if there are relevant differences that justify its price for its use with a Magic Online bot.

I have compared the performance by measuring the average times of a sequence of tests that any VM will run frequently. The three applications have been tested on two computers with the following configurations:

	Computer 1	Computer 2
Hosting OS	Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit	Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit
Processor	Intel Core Quad Q8200 2.33 GHz	Intel Core i7-2600 3.4 GHz
Hardware Virtualization	No	Yes
RAM memory	8 GB	4 GB
Hard Disk	500 GB 7200rpm	500 GB 7200rpm
Graphics Card	nVidia GTX 285 1GB	nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Although it is interesting to see the performance differences between these computers, the rigurous comparison is done for the virtualization software running on the same machine. The tests involve measuring the time taken for the VM to perform the following tasks:

• VM first boot. Measures the performance without using the cache memory, useful if virtualization software starts upon booting the hosting OS.
• VM second boot. While you don’t run other programs, if you reboot the VM you will see how its performance is improved.
• Simultaneous boot of 2 VMs (same software). The aim consists of testing how virtualization software manages computer resources among multiple VMs. This test is useful for measuring the performance if using more than one store.
• Simultaneous boot of 2 VMs (other software). This test is used to test how an virtualization tool manages the system resources without caring about other VMs from other software.
• Running Magic Online update tool (Kicker). As this application mainly depends on the communication with the server of Magic Online, I wanted to use it to get an idea of ​​how virtualization software manages the network connection.
• Running Magic Online client. This test allows to compare the performance of data loading of Magic Online as well as the management of the CPU computation performed by the virtualization software.
• Load the price list of the MTGO Library bot. This phase of the bot setup makes heavy use of memory, which is important during the execution of the store.

Results and discussion

Firstly I will detail the conditions under which I have done every test to ensure repeatability and a good comparison between platforms:

• The first 4 time trials start right after clicking the start button of the VM and end when the desktop is fully loaded (icons and Start bar are shown on the window).
• Kicker starts right after clicking the icon to run it, and ends just after the check for new updates is completed. Magic Online client has been previously updated in all tests.
• The Magic Online client starts right when the Launch button is pressed on the kicker tool, and ends just when the login screen appears.
• Finally, the test of the MTGO Library bot starts when pressing the Launch button, and ends just after loading the OCR and before launching the Kicker. For this test the buying list has been configured with 4 copies of all cards available up to date in both, regular and foil versions.

Each test was repeated 5 times and the result is the average time obtained from these repetitions. The virtual OS has just the required applications pre-installed (Magic Online 3.0, .NET Framework and MTGO Library), and its hard disk has been defragmented and optimized. The bot version used is 6.31. In the following graphic you can see the results (the lower the better value).

As conclusions, firstly it can be seen that the overall performance of VMware products is higher than the provided by VirtualBox. Oracle software only seems to highlight on the bot load list test with the computer that has hardware virtualization, something that shall be considered. But in general terms, VirtualBox does not seem to be a suitable product for bot virtualization in Windows.

Perhaps the only exception is when you want to run more than one VM. As you can see, the test for 2 VMs with VirtualBox and VMware show a signifficant improvement on performance over the use of only one software. This is an interesting result because one could expect that one virtualization program should better manage the computer resources, but this has been proven to be false at least on the computers of this benchmark.

If we focus on the free and paid versions of VMware desktop, we can see that the time differences between the two solutions are not very noticeable. At least they are not for the cost savings of using the free version. Therefore, in my opinion I do not see it necessary to use the payment application to manage Magic Online stores.

On the other hand, it is also interesting to compare the difference in terms of performance between both computers. As you can see from the results, the improvement of speed for the second machine processors is very relevant. Although the memory of the first machine is twice the second one, this fact does not affect the load times for 2 VMs even with the exact required amount of memory. Therefore, it seems clear that the processor will be a critical element for the proper functioning of our stores.

In conclusion, for computers with Windows as the hosting OS I would personally use the VMware Player application. If you have a more powerful computer with more RAM you can try these tests with more than 2 VMs, compare the use of this application together with VirtualBox and comment your results.

In the following article I will describe the tests I have done to test virtualization in Linux with the most relevant software I could find for this task.

ML Bot Webshop Automation

Last week I found two interesting examples of webshops based on ML Bot and mtgolibrary.com. These are interesting because the owners found a way to interact with ML Bot and expand it beyond its original features. I'll talk about jbmtgo.com (a shop to buy cards online) and mtgotickets.com (a place to sell and buy tixs). Please visit them to get an idea.

• JB Mtgo Shop (click on the image to visit it)

Jbmtgo.com is a shop selling mtgo cards. You place the order, you pay with paypal, you go online on mtgo, contact the accont of the owner and you get the cards immediately. I tried it and it's very efficient. Technically speaking, the shop parses the file "cardsNeededAndCollection.txt", originally designed for debug purposes (and not documented on the manual). The files contains a list of all cards in the collection and their prices, so the shop can populate the inventory. One could do the same by parsing the csv of the collection, a file named .csv located in the C:\ folder (where "some_strange_characters" is a random string with numbers and letters such as hd67c2msd13d02p.csv).

• Mtgotickets (click on the image to visit it)

The other shop, mtgotickets.com is even more interesting. It just sells and buys tixs but it is more automated than jbstore. To buy tickets, just click on the orange button, choose the amount of tixs you want and then pay with PayPal. Right after the payment your account will be credited. This works more or less like this: when you send a payment, PayPal sends an email to the owner of the shop. A script on his server looks for new emails every 5 seconds and when one is founds it sends an SMS. The owner will connect, possibly via mobile, and adjust the credit on the Online Control Panel, so you can take the tixs in 1-2 minutes.

Prices change with time. Yesterday the price was 1.03 usd per tixs, today it is 1.02. I asked the owner if he has some sort of automatic updater to adapt the price with the market , like mtgotraders, but he didn't answer the question.

On mtgotickets.com you can also sell tixs. There is no automation here since the payment is manually sent via "gift" payment to save the fees. If the shop would have sent regular payments instead of gift payments, this side could have been automated too: the shop would have parsed the Tradelog on the Online Control Panel and once a "deposit" is found, a PayPal payment (via the PayPal REST Api) is sent.


Do you own a service like the ones above? Do you know / use one? Please write us (staff@mtgolibrary.com) and we'll talk about it!

Daily Events are back!

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/275b

Sales will be back to normality!

When to invest in the Fall set (Theros for 2013)

This fall people have asked me several times when to buy Theros cards. I have always answered "between December 15 and New Year". That is still my answer, but let us examine if that is really the truth, using data from the last Three fall sets, as well as considering how the non-existence of Daily and bigger events affect this.

When should you have bought Return to Ravnica cards?

One of my favorite MTGO Finance sites, mtggoldfish.com, has a very useful index function.

Let us look at the index for Return to Ravnica here: http://www.mtggoldfish.com/card/RTR

So the bottom prices of RTR were Dec 14 2002, Jan 5, 2013 and Another dip on Feb 9, 2013.

That does reflect well on our hypothesis, but we also need to consider the differences between Theros and RTR. Theros will be drafted all year, first alone, then with Born of the Gods and finally with both Born of the Gods and Journey into Nyx, whereas Return to Ravnica was not drafted at all during Gatecrash.

Let us look at the fall set of 2011 then.

When should you have bought Innistrad cards?
We are only considering the Standard Life span of the cards here, so the real answer ("right after rotation!") is not relevant to our Theros discussion.

Here is the ISD index: http://www.mtggoldfish.com/card/ISD

We have the two deepest bottoms at Nov 29, 2011 and Feb 22, 2011 but then ISD drops again (!) and reaches its very lowest Point in May 2012, right around the release of Avacyn Restored.

ISD was also drafted differently. It was drafted with its first small set, DKA, but then it was not drafted at all during Avacyn Restored.

We will need to look at Scars of Mirrodin, which was actually drafted just the way that Theros will be drafted. What did that do the price of rares and mythics from SOM?

When should you have bought Scars of Mirrodin cards?

Once again ignoring the huge effect of rotation, lets have a look at the index: http://www.mtggoldfish.com/card/SOM

There is again a valley around Christmas. The very lowest points are Jan 17, 2011 and March 3rd, 2011, but then something strange happens. There is a huge dip! On June 16, 2011, SOM prices are as much as 20% lower than in February. There is also very importantly no significant spike in prices during the first two quarters of the year. The spike comes right when M12 is released.

Goldfish has no data for Zendikar. If anyone knows where to find that data, let me know.

What will be the effect of the non-existence of Premier and Daily events?
All events bigger than 8 players are gone from Magic Online when I write this. This has caused prices to drop. This will probably accentuate the drop around Christmas, making picking up cards in December more attractive than what would have otherwise been the case.

Standard PTQ Season
This year, Standard PTQ Season has been moved. It now runs from December 7, 2013 until March 9, 2014. This probably means that Standard prices will go up as soon as PTQs return to Magic Online and that they will drop more sharply during the second quarter without PTQ support.

The conclusion
It is probably premature to buy into Theros in December and if you can wait until May/June, you should do so.  My suggestion? Buy playsets that you need (I will do so, especially as I advocate Selling Everything from Theros block as early as in March 2015 with the current PTQ season Schedule unchanged) in December and then buy your speculation stock in May/June.

When to sell a Magic online card

Hey! I bought 26 pack rats at 0.05 cents and a couple of weeks back they were suddenly one dollar due to the Mono Black Devotion deck! High score! Right?

I sold most of my Pack Rats. To humans, to avoid the bot rake.

Then Pack Rat Went up to two dollars. I bought some at 1.20, sold them for close to 2. Brought out my playset and listed them at two as well.

Then Pack Rat crashed back down to about one ticket again.

So in the end I sold most of my stock at one dollar when I could have received two tix each for them.

Most speculators, bot owners and MTGO finance buffs know (or at least think they know) when it is time to buy (HINT: Buy Theros in mid-december when the fall set is traditionally at its lowest price during its Standard life cycle). But when is it time to sell? That is a very hard question to answer.

If you never sell, you never make any profit
It is so easy to just sit there and Watch your cards rise in value and wait for just a couple of percent more. But leave the last 10% to the other guy. Get out while you can. Bring home the bacon! If you never sell, you never win.

Some good rules to keep in mind when you are selling cards on Magic Online

# Sell when demand is at its highest. Sell Standard cards in february when the Winter set has just come out and Standard PTQ season is going on. Sell Modern cards in July when the Modern PTQ season is in full swing.

# Do not sell at the bottom. Have patience.

# Set a price where you sell no matter what in advance. If you speculated on a penny rare, maybe you want 10 times the Money when you sell. Then sell at 50 cents, even if the card is still rising. Take the profit! I usually sell when I get 200% profit, except for penny rares. 200% in under a year is my magic number. I am surprised at how often I get that.

# Sell before rotation. Long before rotation. Rotation is what costs people money on Magic Online. Do not be the guy that got rid of Thragtusk for 3 tickets. Be the guy that got rid of Thragtusk for 13 tickets when demand was still high. This is probably the single most important thing you can do for your MTGO budget. Be aware that you are paying a steep price for playing the old block rares and mythics in Standard during the summer. Actually, if you care at all about your Magic budget, be aware that you probably pay a very steep price for playing Standard at all, but that is another story.

Also, Always remember the most important thing! http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/10/the-most-important-thing_23.html

My contact information
Twitter: @MagicGathstrat, youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat, magicgatheringstrat.facebook.com and mtgostrat.com

Should not post this..

Today I received an email. It made me happy.

"Something seems to have improved I have had more traffic than I have in a long time.

Thanks for the effort and hard work."

Well, I guess this is the result of the hard work we are doing here at mtgolibrary. Most of the work is hidden to the eyes but your account feels it :-)

Psychological pricing vs Float Pricing

What is Psychological Pricing?

Psychological pricing or price ending or charm pricing is a marketing practice based on the theory that certain prices have a psychological impact. The retail prices are often expressed as "odd prices": a little less than a round number, e.g. $19.99 or £2.98. Consumers tend to perceive “odd prices” as being significantly lower than they actually are, tending to round to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 is associated with spending $1 rather than $2. The theory that drives this is that lower pricing such as this institutes greater demand than if consumers were perfectly rational. Psychological pricing is one cause of price points. (Source)

This Pricing does not only gives the false idea that something is cheaper than normal but also means your will be undercutting competition that are selling a Magic Online card for the "same" (0.01 more) price. This also means that your bot will be listed first on wikiprice when sorting by price and so on.

(Example of Psycological pricing on a well known bot chain, Buy on left, Sell on right.)

This sounds like a straight foward better option when it comes to pricing cards, but there are many situations where "float pricing" can be used in your advantage; Specially on Magic Online.

Float Pricing

Float pricing is a pricing method that takes advantage of the credit system in Magic the Gathering:Online. Pricing a card at 15.01 will benefit a regular customer with saved credit (against a newcomer) as they are likely to be able to take the card for just 15 Event Tickets (plus 1 cent credit). The main advantage of this are the extra sales you will make with this technique with new customers and the reduced amount of "raiding" trades. The same can be done to buying prices (ending on .99).

The way this method helps against raiding is quite simple. If a card is worth between $11.75 and 12.25 and you have it priced at 11, the chances are that you will sell it very quickly to a non regular customer for 11 that will never come back. Having that card at 11.01 means that you will either sell it to a regular customer for 11 Event tickets (while a raider with no saved credits wouldn't take it); or, with a bit of luck, will result in a trade like the one I had bellow last month. 

(on this example you can see one of the big advantages of the float pricing method)

While the trade above was happening I was lucky enough to watch the whole process. The Customer started by picking up the Polukranos, World Eater card, which I had manually priced at 11.01 Event Tickets.

on this specific day that card value spiked up to over 13 Event Tickets

 The Customer had no credits so the bot quoted 45 tix (saving 0.96 credit). If the card was priced at 11.00 the trade would be over within seconds and this person would probably never use my bots again unless he found another great deal in the future.

What happened was completely the opposite to the typical "raiding trade", the customer after a minute or two, started picking other cards trying to round things up to 45.0 so he wouldn't leave 0.96 credit. All the other cards he needed were worth between $2 and $5, meaning that the end result would never be near the 45.0 mark.

On the end this Customer ended up picking up all his needs from my bot resulting in a overall small profit (even though the Polukranos, World Eater were sold quite under the fair price). 

Needless to say that all the other bots that sold the card via "psychological pricing" at 10.99 and even at 11.99 on that day, made a worse deal than me selling this whole package.

This person is now a regular happy Customer... :D

Please comment or share your success stories!

Estimated Profit

Starting from today, 6pm, all the ML Bots with version greater or equal than 6.11 can view the "Estimated Profit" in the Tradelog. 

What is this? This is the projection of the profit, computed as sum of the selling prices - (minus) sum of the buying prices / (divided by) 2.  

The profit is computed as difference between the actual selling prices and the buying prices, divided by two because the profit will be "full" only when the selling (or buying) part of the trade will be performed. This profit is "estimated" because prices can go and up down, and you could sell (for example) sell at slighly higher or lower value. In a normal market the two values (estimated profit and real profit) are close.

Let's have an example. The bot in the image bought 4 Dissension Boosters 20 minutes ago at 1.92. The Estimated Profit of the trade is 2.008 because the selling price here is 2.924 and the buying price is 1.92 (and thus (2.924-1.92)/2 and multiplied by 4 is 2.008).  Only the CardLog, of course, can tell you the real Profit, so let's click on the link (see second image).

  

The CardLog basically says that the profit on a single item Dissesion Booster is 0.473 tixs on average. Multiplied by 4 (because 4 items are involved in the trade) we get 1.892: a value very close to the Estimated profit.

Hope you'll like!

Competitive Pricing, Regulars Only!

Special Buddies Explained

Theros release did teach us many things, to both experienced and new bot owners.
Firstly, most of us noticed a massive increase in the volume of trades. This was not just caused by the influx of new MTGO players but also by the massive price swings on Theros cards.
As we all know, new sets are not so easy to judge and deal with as older ones are, which have more consistent prices. When it comes to set releases some of us choose to not buy them all together for a while, others will deal it, but with big profit margins and others take a gamble and buy it at a high rate (this one often disappoints).

While the Theros set release might sound a bit off-topic, it has some of the features which cause us to think about which profit margins to go with. Like I have shown on my last article, on the same card, some will buy for 28 and sell for 36; others will go with buying for 30 and sell for 34.
The first bot isn't simply a "rip-off" bot, there can be many reasons for a higher profit margin. Some botters don't have as much time to tune their pricing as often as others (personal prices), or have higher rental fees. Higher profit margins will reduce dramatically the number of bad trades.

I don't want to open a discussion about Bot-Raiders, but often, when I buy a card for too much, or sell it too cheaply I have this thought: "I wouldn't have minded selling it this low (or buying too high), if it was one of my regulars, instead of being someone that never used my bot that came in and bought (or sold) 12 copies of it at once.". Special buddies will not solve the occasional "bad deal" but will make it more likely to happen to your regulars.

Assuming the values above: The riskier bot that buys for 30 and sell for 34 and your "safer" bot that buys for 28 and sell for 36;  you now have a chance to compete and give a deal to your regular customers. If you give , for example, a 5% bonus on buying and 5% discount on selling to regular customers, you will now buy that card for 29.4 and sell for 34.2, this makes you a very fair bot to your regular customers, and if the card value goes up from 34 to 35, the chances are that you will sell it to your regular customers for 34.2 (while the riskier bot sold all his copies to a raider for 34 that won't come back, which means that his regulars will look for it elsewhere).

Special buddies feature will allow you to be the "safe" bot to new customers, and the "riskier" one to your regulars, which will make sure the regulars carry on being regulars and give you a "safe gap" against professional traders.

The "Five" types of bots

Often I get asked the same question "What is the best way to price a card?" as easy as this might sound, all will depend on how much money you are willing to invest into the game and how much risk you're ready to take.

I will start by showing this generalized bots with different price strategies:

We all already know that some bots buy cheap to sell cheap and others buy high and sell reasonable cheap, but many fail to understand that trying to be the cheapest seller and highest buyer at the same time, often leads to massive losses.

BOT 1: "The Cheap Seller"

This kind of bot is quite simple, it involves very little to no risk at all and while not getting the most visits a day, when it does buy something good, often sells it quickly and for a good profit.

It seems like a good easy way to make money, but this kind of pricing will make the supplying customers feel ripped off (when they realize how cheaply you buy) and the buying customers hardly will become regulars, as they might just be buying cards for the sake of being so cheap (or to sell them back to BOT 4/5).

BOT 2: MTGO Library Default Pricelist

This pricing is what I would recommend a new bot, while having a good decent profit margin to be called "risk free",this often falls in the trap of still being a bot that "doesn't buy quite as high as the others". Theres a chance of making some regulars, but with time they might move on into bots like BOT3/4 as they seem to have the 3 things regulars like: Higher buying prices; Cheaper selling prices; Bigger stock.

BOT3: "Average Bot"

While I would recommend the default pricelist to a new bot, once you start getting a few customers and regulars, you should slowly edge a bit the buying prices forward, this will keep your regulars happy. This bot will always pick a bunch of cards from what you are trying to sell, and also likely to have a lot of cards that you need. This is the perfect bot for attracting many constructed players, while having a decent profit margin.

BOT4: "Minimal Profit Bot"

This kind of bot might seem a smart way of making profit. Many would be fooled that this bot will make much more profit than BOT3 simply because it will sell and buy the same card more often, but this bot hasa few downfalls. Firstly a very short gap on profit margins often mean that you will not get profit in a few specific cards, possibility big losses. The reason for this is because you will sell a newly popular card before you have time to increase the price, or the opposite, you will be the first to buy a card when it gets banned before you can reduce the price. To cover the loss caused on "not so good" trades, you will need to make many "regular" ones to break even.

BOT5: "Top Buyer, Expensive Seller"

This is the bot which every drafter will have on their buddy list. Very popular for top buying prices, this is the first spot where drafters will try and unload their cards. The downside is that, in order to buy this high, you will have to sell the previous bought copies of that card at high prices. This means that while a drafter might be excited that you are paying top dollar for 2 of his cards, he will be quite disappointed that it hasn't picked any other of his 10.000 tradable cards. This bot requires "rich" regular buying customers that want a fully stocked bot and don't mind paying extra for having it all under one roof.

Where do you think your bot fits? Currently my BestDeal bot is somewhere between BOT4 and BOT5, then each of the other bots on the chain sell slightly cheaper and buy slightly lower.

Quantitative Easing (Part 2 of 2)

Last time I wrote about Quantitative Easing (QE) and why the powers that be justify the vast injection of money   We discussed their justification of this by stating that the fears of deflation and how it can wreck an economy is justification of this unorthodox strategy.  It is along the lines of “We are afraid of dust bowls so we are going to flood the plains so dust bowls can not occur.”

While I understand their thought process, I still have the “what are they thinking” thoughts rummaging around in my head.  It simply does not make any common sense.  Let me explain.

Injecting large amounts of currency into the ecosystem will discourage new money from coming into the game.  Let’s say WotC gave each account 243,586 tickets.  Prices for each card would eventually adjust to match the new level.  This is what you would expect.  However, now imagine a new person coming into the game.  What would their level of satisfaction be if their real $20 could not even buy the cheapest and jankiest of commons?  What if it took $1,500 to get into a draft?  Such a level of entry would quickly discourage new players from joining the Magic community and would also prohibit new money from coming into the ecosystem. 

Over time, players who had a healthy collection value (Defined as the worth of their cards and tickets) before the ticket injection will do well with the hyper-inflated prices while players who had little collection value will quickly be swamped by those with assets.  These players will eventually drop out of the game because they could no longer afford to keep up.  In other words, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

The same thing is happening in the real world.  The banks are receiving this huge injection of cash and bankers want to do something with this money.  Where is the place to put money right now?  Not enough people qualify for loans or are comfortable in trying to get a loan in the current situation.  Bonds are paying close to nothing.  So the money is going into the stock market.  This is why the stock market is at record levels even though the underlying economy is in shambles.

Quantitative Easing (Part 1 of 2)

If you were watching the US Stock Market (DJIA) on Wednesday Sept 18, you noticed something a little weird.  Just after 14:00, the DJIA went up about 200 points in about five (5) minutes.  All the experts said that this spike was due to an announcement by the Federal Reserve that they are going to keep in place their policy of Quantitative Easing.  (QE)

So what is this Quantitative Easing anyway?  In a nutshell, it is where the government simply prints money. By this, I do not mean currency which is used in day-to-day transactions.  This money is being created out of thin air, by pressing a button and bank reserves are now increased digitally.

If this sounds unconventional, you would be correct.  This was first tried in Japan in 2007 and three (3) rounds of QE have been done in the United States.

So what is the purpose of QE?  The purpose of QE is to keep the inflation rate above a certain threshold.  Why keep inflation above a certain point?  Doesn’t increasing prices make it harder for workers to make ends meet and doesn’t it lower the quality of life?  Absolutely.  But the government fears deflation even more.  Deflation is where prices fall and if left unchecked, can collapse an economy.

Let’s discuss QE and inflation in terms of Magic Online.  If WotC decided to give every account 261,384 tickets, what would happen to MTGO?  The prices would jump out of whack for some period time but eventually the prices would stabilize.

Such a move would be chaotic but it is far preferable to the alternative: a deflationary effect where each card drops in value every day.  Why buy a card today when it will be cheaper tomorrow and cheaper the day after that?  While we do see such things happen in technology, we do not fear the deflationary effect because there is a new “top end” item that is being produced, be a new car, a new phone, or in MTGO, new sets.

Profits

How much profit do your bots make?  Do you even know?  Do you even know how to calculate it?  Why is this even important?  This is important to know because you never know when opportunity will come walking your way.  It is also helpful to track trends and can help you anticipate opportunities.  If you know there is a period of heavy trading, you can increase the prices of your cards.  If you know there is a period of low trading approaching, you can mark down your inventory and advertise a sale.

But first you need to know your bot's finances.  How do we do that?  For this example. We will use a simple LITE bot which buys rares at 2 per ticket and sells them for 1 ticket each.  Now for Monday, this bot bought 20 cards and sold 18 cards.  So what is the profit?  The bot purchased 20 cards, costing 10 tickets and sold 18 for 18 tickets.  10 from 18 yields an 8 ticket profit.  Do this for the other rarities and you have your bot’s profit.

Doing this for the PRO bot is done the same way.  It just is a little more complicated because of the arithmetic involved.  But the math is the same.  If your bot purchases 10 tickets worth of cards and sells 18 tickets worth of cards, then your bot made 8 tickets worth of profits.

I can already hear the objections.  This does not include the rental fee.  You haven’t lost money as the tickets are not lost, just went in inventory,  Your method does not take into account price fluctuations.  Your analysis is not even applicable because one part of my bot chain is used to refill other parts of the chain.  This doesn't even consider computer hardware, maintenance or operating costs.  

All of this is absolutely true.  This is why you need to customize everything to your specific situation.  Fortunately for us, the website has a feature which tells you the value of your collection.  Track your collection total over a period of time and this will give you a rough estimate of how much profit your bots are making.

New wikiprice is online

The new wikiprice is officially available online now. Please visit it here: http://mtgowikiprice.com/

Wikiprice offers now faster searches (the average search takes less than 2 seconds) and more frequent updates - a total update takes 6 hours while the old version took 24 hours. Under the hood there is a technology able to go real time - right after a trade wikiprice will update and will reflect the changes in the collection.
The times where you found an item on wikiprice and the listed bots didn't have it are going to finish soon. 

A problem of the old wikiprice was the unreliable update algorithm: some bots weren't able to update properly and after 48 hours their inventories rotated out. The update mechanism has been totally redesigned and the issue won't repeat.

Still not perfect, I am sure you will fall in love and get addicted soon :)

Why So Sad Hybrid? (Part 1 of 2)

There is a Chinese proverb; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  There is a similar saying when it comes to the speed of computers; its speed is determined by its slowest component.  In the past, the bottleneck would be the CPU itself.  It has also been the bus or pathway between various components.  Today, the slowest component is the hard drive. 

While other components are chugging along at the speed of light, hard drives have to wait while a spinning platter reaches its proper placement so a magnetic thingamajig can read some random 1’s and 0’s and attempt to make sense of it.  Various strategies have been developed in an attempt to solve this problem.  One attempt is to use multiple hard drives and combine them into one monster hard drive which while it increases the storage capacity linearly, the read and seek times increase geometrically.  But this RAID solution is fairly expensive and not really applicable in small servers, desktops or personal machines.  It’s just not cost-effective.

So you can imagine the cries of joy when flash memory was developed.  Not quite ROM (Read-Only Memory) and not quite RAM, but a memory which would hold its state like ROM but can be written to and hold its state, like RAM, and can hold its state without the need for constant electricity.  It is best known as USB drives, thumb drives or flash drives.  By whatever name it is known, this type of memory is found in all of these portable drives, and has allowed for the explosion of growth in the tablet market.

The next logical place for this memory is to try and make an entire hard drive based on this flash memory.  The technology is fairly simple.  RAM disks were popular in the early days on the personal computer and one could really detect the performance increase.  While no one really expected to replicate the performance increase, people did expect to see a performance increase when this type of flash technology was made into a stand-alone hard drive or even its cousin, the hybrid drive, a drive with an SSD partition as well as a traditional platter for additional storage.

Billions of dollars have been spent in infrastructure to build the drives that experts said there would be a demand for.  Yet SSD drives and hybrid drives have not really taken off.  It is not the cost of these drives, although that is a small factor.  It is not the performance as every independent test shows that these drives perform as advertised.   Why haven’t flash memory drives taken off and more importantly, how does this affect us bot owners?  I’ll discuss that next time.

MTGO Library Bot 5.91 is online!

Hello,

we are glad to announce ML Bot 5.91, the first bot to fully exploit the new wikiprice, available online in one day ! More info will follow... for now just upgrade and your business will thank you :-)

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

Bots: costs and initial strategies

So far in this series of Magic Online bots, you have learned the economic fundamentals of the digital card game. We have also reviewed how to create a bot store that automatically manages your collection so it gets benefits for you. If you decide to start this quest and build your own store, it is important to know some marketing strategies that can determine a great success and a better relation between cost and benefits.

Initial costs and maintenance for Magic Online bots

You should not create a Magic Online stores without wondering how much the initial and maintenance costs will be. Besides, you have to take in mind ​​the benefits you will get from each store depending on what cards it will have in stock. First off, you must know that for every digital store on Magic Online that you are creating, it will have the following rough expenses:

Description	Value
Magic Online account	$9.99
Compatible computer with CPU Intel x86	~$400-$1200
Windows 7 Professional OEM license (allows a Windows XP license)	~$125
Virtualisation software (optional)	$40-$70
Energy consumption for a PC of 100W with fee of 0.2$/kWh	~$15/month
Investment on initial stock	$100 or greater
MTGO Library account and software	FREE
MTGO Library renting fee	2.5% or Lite/Pro license

Except the Magic Online account, all prices are estimations and may vary depending on where you live. With Magic Online version 3 you should use Windows XP as it consumes fewer resources than their successors. The problem is that official licenses for this windows can no longer be officially purchased. The only way is to buy Windows 7 Pro OEM and request a downgrade to Windows XP (this is supposed to be valid until 2014), although I have not checked this because I use my old operating system licenses.

Additionally, you can see that there are some initial fixed costs and others for maintenance. To decide how much you should spend on the computer I will write a sepparate article, because I think it is a very important topic to ensure the smoothness and scalability of your future chain of Magic Online bots.

On the other hand, you can check that I have highlighted the possibility of buying virtualization software. These applications allow you to run more than one operating system on the same computer, and they are the basis to have several Magic Online bots on the same machine. Although there are some companies that offer free versions, sometimes you may prefer to use the payment option in order to gain extra performance. Like the selection of PC, I will make a comparative analysis for a future article that will allow you to choose the program that best suits your needs.

Previous suggestions to plan the setup of your Magic Online bots

As you have seen, the initial cost of a Magic Online bot is relatively affordable. For this reason it is very important that you plan the growth of your business based on the resources you have. Below I give you some tips that may save you some time and money.

1. If you have an older computer, certainly this is the cheapest option in the short term to start testing bots Magic Online. Of course, this PC will probably have high energy consumption problems, it will be outdated and with limited hardware expansion capabilities. These factors reduce the capacity expansion of a bots chain in the long term, but it would be useful for you to take some practice with bots at almost zero initial cost.
2. You might also have the Windows XP license of any old computer you no longer use because probably your current PC will be updated at least to Windows 7. However, if you are planning to setup several stores this initial cost increases linearly. Therefore, you should only create the stores you really need or you will be losing money.
3. For virtualization software, there are some free programs but with the disadvantage of being slower than the payment option. For this reason you should choose it depending on the number of stores that you are going to install on your bots machine. 
4. You will need an initial investment for each store. The greater the value, the higher the growth rate of stock but you will also spend more money. If you make a large investment on each of your stores they may evolve rapidly, but if that investment is low in the short to medium term, then you will spend more money on the maintenance of your Magic Online bots than the benefit obtained, because initially the flow of customer will be low.

The relevance of having a strategy for the future expansion

From the tips mentioned above, I will give my recommendation assuming you want to create a chain of Magic Online bots for the long-term. Everything will mainly depend on how many tickets/cards you are willing to invest for the initial stock of each of your stores. In this way, you have two options:

• Low initial stock (~$100 per store): In this case you should have 1-2 stores. The main one should have a Pro license (buy/sell any card with unique prices) with 2.5% renting fee and buy/sell cards just from the latest expansion available in Magic Online. This limitation is very favourable because that set will be the most drafteable one, so there will be huge quantity of cards at a very good buy/sell rate. If you choose to have a secondary store, it should buy cards in bulk through a Lite license (all rarities at same prices) also with a renting fee of 2.5%. This second store must buy the cards cheaper than the main one, and it should be configured to refill the main stock because clients are more interested on pro stores that are always full of stock. As new sets are becoming available, your store should accept them to slowly go expanding your business. 
• High initial stock (~$500 or more per store): For these quantities the store should not have many problems to grow quickly (obviously with a good marketing). With amounts between $500-$1000 I would start buying/selling standard, and from there I would include Modern and even Legacy. The Professional version is required for these types of stores, but it would also be a good idea to have one or two Lite stores to maximize profits. Use the monthly license fee or better when you move amounts greater than 90 tickets/day (these licenses cost 63 tickets/month or less), and 2.5% commission per transaction otherwise. One strategy that can combine any of the above options is to use, for each store you are planning to create, two stores instead: one that exclusively buys cards and another that only makes sales. As this alternative would double the computation costs of your computer and limits you to create new stores, this strategy is only recommended whenever you have a high traffic of customers. Thus, you avoid your Magic Online bots from being always busy (remember you can only trade cards with one customer at once, so if a customer is waiting for trade he would probably go to another store).

Final thoughts

Although the growth stock of the strategy (a) is slow in time, it is also safer and with a relatively low initial cost. Therefore, this solution is favorable for those who cannot afford high investment and for those who will not spend much time maintaining their Magic Online bots.

Unlike (a), in case (b) the growth is much faster but you have to be careful and keep the prices updated. If you have cash, your stores will be targeted by customers who hope to also make some profit with the most expensive cards. The problem is that those cards leave your store/s without tickets and until sold you do get zero benefit (in fact it is a temporary loss state). The main problem is that those cards can vary greatly over the cheap price and generate losses due to these fluctuations. Thus, with this strategy you must be much more aware of your store to avoid short term buys/sells that may provoke loses.

Now that you have a long-term idea of ​​how you are going to expand your chain of Magic Online bots for profit, in future articles I will comment more technical aspects related to mount your stores, such as the required hardware and software.