GOM software upgrade - YAY

GOM just changed their site to support market trades and partial fills. It makes a lot more sense now, because sellers don't have to try to guess how big a chunk people want to buy, and buyers don't have to pass up lower priced lots to find one the size they want, especially when they want a small amount.

Check it out!

YAY!

Maybe this will also help the undercutting some. Then again, maybe not.



-Shaun

Its probably a little thing but I prefered it where the board calculated the USD amount for the Lindens on offer.

This poll is biased since I can't vote for both YAY! and pie.

Why doesn't ANYBODY think of the CHEESE!!!

*cries*

How about we ask for cheesecake? Then we can have the best of all worlds!

You're not the first to make this comment. So, now in the works is a "Buy $|___| worth of L$" feature. Deposit however much cash you want, and the system will buy up L$ to whatever amount you specify.

That new thing is just bad. You do not go to the store and say I'm only buying 3 eggs from a carton. Or that you are buying enought cake mix to make 2 slices of cake. If the seller is selling 3000L$ it's 3000L$ that should be bought not 1000 here and a bit more later...

So buy L$3000, no one is stopping you.

The motivation behind the new market style was the feeling that "every user who buys or sells through GOM should be able to get the best price available". To us, that just seems fair.

If we want to go with the egg carton analogy, then think of it like this: One block (i.e. L$1,000) is a indivisible carton of eggs. You can't come in and buy half a block of L$, much like you can't buy half a carton of eggs. However, you can buy as many (or as few) cartons from the available supply as you like. When you place your L$ for sale, you're adding cartons of eggs to the sale queue.

Now, you'd probably be pretty angry if the price you paid for a carton of eggs depended on *which* carton from an identical pile you were trying to buy. So now the price to buy a single carton of eggs is "the best price available", taken from the open orders in the market.

If you want to buy up all the eggs in the store, then that means (a) you value eggs highly, and (b) the store won't have any eggs to sell to the next customer who comes along. The laws of supply and demand say that if you want to buy a large number of cartons of eggs, you will drive up the price. At normal egg-purchasing volumes, that's not an issue. However, if you had a need for say 100 million eggs, that would almost surely deplete the global egg market and cause the price to go up. This is in contrast to the "volume discount" notion which is really just a marketing tool some retailers use because typically in the case of packaged goods, they just want to move inventory, and they're willing to cut down their margins to move a large amount at once.

Ricky, I guess I don't understand how this works for people that are selling linden. I understand it from the buy point of view, I'm just purchasing from a "bin" of linden at that price. I'm not concerned with whom I am buying from as much as how much I can buy at the lowest price.

From that point of view things are simpler.

That said, I'm not understanding how orders are being filled from the seller's end. Is there some sort of queue system, where the first person in on that price range the first to sell? If I put in 20K to sell, will I just be selling 1000K pieces until its gone? Hence actually lengthening out the process for me by keeping me from selling directly to someone that wants...say.. just 20K? I'm a bit confused by this end of it.

I will say in the positive I see this as putting and end to the non stop listing of 1K linden sales at the price above my 20K so as to push me so far down the list I have to scroll to find me. For that I say, Thank you.

-Rose

The poster is not saying they want to buy 3K, they are talking about selling 3K. If a seller puts in 3K that seller wants to sell it at one time, not piece meal. That is my question as well. I don't understand what the priority is on which seller is being compensated when someone buys that 1K or 3K or 10K of linden.

-Rose

ok so you're a seller. You have 3k you wish to sell and you place a sales ad for them.

With the old system if someone came along that wanted 2 or 1 they could not buy yours at all, so they would sit unsold. Then someone else would come along wanting 10k, see another add offering 10k and buy those. Again yours are left unsold, and so it could continue.

With the new system you place your 3k order and it goes on the bottom of the queue for that price. Each time L$ are sold from that price range your order will move closer to the top. So let's now say there is a 5k order above yours, and a 20k order below. Someone comes along wanting to buy 10k, the system will give them the 5k from the top, YOUR 3k and 2k from the next order down...

Get it?

Yes, gotten, and thank you for taking the time to explain.

-Rose

I haven't made up my mind if I like the new system or not. Seems to me like the new system is going to hurt the day traders. I also *think* that the $L can devalue faster now, but for the same reasons the converse may be true.

I am a believer in bulk purchase discounts, the old system allowed sellers to use this to their advantage which helped support the day traders.

I would have liked to see a change in GOM's fee structure, as I feel the discounts occur at much to high of a level. But then again, I do not know what their operating costs are.

Before this change you might have been able to buy a large lot that was listed at a low price, and split it up into smaller lots and selling them at a higher price. Once in a while there would be 100k or bigger lots sitting there at the bottom, with no 5k or 10k lots in sight. The 100k lot could get hung out there because smaller buyers snap up all the small lots around it, leaving a gap. You could buy the 100k lot and break it up into small lots that the small buyer could afford.

You can't do that any more. I seriously doubt the opportunity to do that arose often anyway, or that you could actually make any money doing that.

Other than that, I would think that "day trading" would actually be easier now.

Buster

The whole idea is that the average consumer buying L$ to spend in-world or cashing out proceeds from a successful weeks club owning/land selling/etc. can go to the "buy it now" or "sell it now" pages as appropriate and do just that, buy now at the best price or sell now at the best price. The trade happens instantly and you don't need to worry about block sizes or paying extra because you only want to buy 2K. The 'volume discounts' in the old system for large block sizes that others have talked about are a myth, the reality is that you paid extra for small amounts and it was that 'extra' that made up the profits for most day traders.


So where do day traders fit in the new system? In order for the 'buy it now' and 'sell it now' functions to work there has to be a float of both L$ and US$ to draw from. This float is provided by the day traders placing orders. Each time someone cashes out with 'Sell now' the system fills the top order(s) from the wanted list, the trader then uses those L$ to place new orders on the Sale list. And vice versa. Consumers can place their own orders in the lists, however their motivation for selling is generally "I want the money NOW" so they place right at the top, often undercutting the best price and thus pushing the price down...


How does the price change if traders are "fixing" the prices with their orders? Well, we're not exactly fixing prices. If the price is too high there will be a rush to sell L$ by consumers to take advantage of the high prices. This empties the wanted list, leaving traders with stocks of L$ they can't sell, and so the price is lowered. The reverse is true if the price is too low.
So ultimately the price is set by the consumers and not the traders. But the system only works to full effect if the buy now/sell now functions are used properly.

i vited as not liking the new way... but now that i read how it works now..... i like it better!

w00t go GOM

I haven't finished reading the thread so I don't know if anyone has mentioned this...

Bulk discounts are just fine, but the old system didn't support that. It supported price gouging. The "fair trade" price was the bid and ask prices at the top of the list. If someone had to pay a vastly different price because an amount wasn't available to them at the "fair" price, I consider that gouging.



The fee structure will change. Tom and I just need to figure out how best to support the traders and continue covering costs. The high-volume traders are the ones that keep the market liquid, and so it's in our best interest to keep them happy.

J

I wouldn't call it "gouging", because that implies that somebody did something unfriendly. That was never the case.

I would just call it "unfortunate".

The new way is much better. Nobody has to be unfortunate because they want to buy or sell the "wrong amount".

Buster

these Poll results are looking familiar

I dunno.

Went over this a couple of times... didnt seem like an all too good of a change to me.

the red states are in the lead by a slim margin =o

The Pie party has siphoned off the blue votes.

i hate it i cant .... look at the total next to it .... and cant compare the prices .... do they have a calulator there for us too .. im am so bad at adding thios has made it imoppible

least the old way i didnt have tio get out may caualtor and see if i had enought money to buy
this way stinks big