Help understanding buying Lindens

Hi, I could sure use some help with understanding on buying Lindens for the best price.

I usually just hit the buy at the top when I am inworld. And so far I have been paying $1 US for about 186 L........but what confuses me the Lindon Dollar exchange website.
Open Sell Orders at the Best 20 Rates
Exchange RateTotal Remaining QuantityL$266 / US$1.00L$7,496,040
This is where I am completey lost............ Help
Is this saying that for my 1 us dollar I can buy 266 lindens and that is whow much is available? Is it that easy? And I've been only buying 186??? I'm so confused....lol

There is a 30 cent transaction fee for every LindeX buy. So if you're buying only $1 US worth, that's really only 70 cents.

70 cents x L$266/$1 = L$186


(If you want to get the most L$ for your US$, use a limit buy instead of a market buy. The difference is L$266/$1 vs L$276/$1)

Never bought L$ but I know when selling you need to alter the settings to determine a specific sell price. Go to your account page on the sl website, on the right under 'Linden Dollar' you should see an option called 'Linden dollar exchange settings' I suspect that if you look in there you can change the setings allowing you to dictate the price at which you want to buy. may take a while to fill your buy order though if you are buying at a better rate than what is current. Could be 100% wrong there though but worth a looksie.

if you put in an limit order at 277, it usually takes about 2 days or so to fill.
If you put in an order at 276 or 275, it will fill in less than an hour...

So I understand this correctly:

In the BUY at a SPECIFIC RATE box

If I put in 277 in the Quanity of L$
and then I put in a US dollar amount of how much I want to spend say $10.00, then when the Lindens get to that amount It will buy for me and only spend up to my $10.00's??

Why does is say then Apporximate cost US $28.00

I'm sorry, math is NOT my specialty, and I'm just not getting this.......but I want to get the most for my money....Thanks for the help..

ok, that means whatever amount of lindens you entered will cost you 28 dollars.

you can fiddle with the amount to get the corect amount of dollars you want to spend

The set up you mentioned is basically telling it that you want to buy 277L at 10L/USD. In that case 277L/10L/USD=27.70USD. Add the processing fee, and you get 28USD.

You need to put your desired exchange rate, 277L/USD, in the second box, not the first. 277L/USDx10USD=2770L, which goes in the first box. You then have to adjust it down a bit to account for the transaction fee, so it winds up being 2688L total.

I'm dense! But I don't want to give up just yet............


I put 277 in the first box (Quanity of lindens)
$28.00 in the second box which said my approximate cost will be $10.19 clicked the offer to buy,
and it came back as an error
We were unable to complete your request because: •You must specify an exchange rate.Please try again.
What did I do wrong?

ok you must put the rate in the second box such as 277 or 276.

So if you put 277 in the first box(how many lindens you want) and 277 (your exchange rate)in the second box it should read like $1.30 cost.

They charge .30 for each request.

So if you want about 10 dollars worth, put 2700 in the first box and 277 in the second box...

Alright!!! I see the light!

Thanks so much for your help!!!

No problem and welcome aboard.

What you'll generally want to do is look at "Open Buy Orders" and do a limit buy of 1 below the lowest offered rate. If the "Total Remaining" at the lowest rate is L$100k then it's worth waiting at the end of the line, but if it's a few million L$ you'll really just want to jump ahead.

If you place a limit buy at L$277/$1 right now, everyone buying at that rate before you placed your order will need their order filled before yours comes up. That can take a few days.

If you place a limit buy at L$276/$1 right now, you'll have the best exchange rate for a market sell, and your order will get first, before any other pending ones. For me it generally takes about 1-30 minutes before it gets filled.

You'll loose a very few L$, but the trade-off is that you have the L$ in a time-scale comparable to buying L$ in the viewer, as opposed to the inconvenience of getting a few L$ more but waiting a few days to get them.

Lindens cannot be bought. They are incorruptible. Furthermore, trying to buy Lindens could be construed as an attempt to bribe staff. That's an offence that's right up there with abusing phone weasels.

Okay, I've just 'got it' on what the open sell and open buy orders actually mean.

and that brings more questions......lol.........IF you don't mind answering them........

........ here is what I don't see, the open sell best is 266, and the highest open buy is 317. that is a big difference......... how often does someone come along and sell higer? And even at 317??? OR are those orders been sitting a long time?

I have the time to wait.......I wonder how long the open buy at 317 have been waiting?? And if no one ever sells for 317 have they lost thier money?
Once you make a request can you change or cancel it?

Do they have a place to track where lindens are being sold and baught?

Is there people that buy low and sell higher to make money off of this?? Not that I am going to do this, but it just seems to easy for someone to do........

Limit orders are filled by market ones, starting at the best rate (high or low depending on sell or buy).

Assuming that noone else puts L$ up for the sale:

L$266/$1 sells first
Once all those are gone, L$265/$1 next
Once all those are gone, L$264/$1 next

and so on.

Of course, people continually put buy and sell orders, so the only real value that matters is the current high for sells, and the current low for buys.

You could put out a limit buy for L$1 million/$1 but it would just not ever realistically get filled.

There is a 3.5% fee for selling L$.

So if you buy at L$277/$1 and sell at L$266/$1, after adjusting to compensate for the 3.5% you only win about L$1.5/$1, which isn't really worth anyone's time I imagine.

If you are selling you want the L/$ to be low. If you are buying you want the L/$ to be high.

So if you sell at 265/1$ you are doing better than if you sell at 295/1$.

Yea, those orders of 317 have been sitting there for a long time, and they can sit there forever.

And you can cancel any limit order whenever you like

It is possible to make money from trading the difference, but you need around 60,000 lindens to make a few lindens.

i bought from some guy 70k for 200USD and sold 60k on the Lindex for 208USD

even with the fee's i profited about 10kL and 5USD

not bad.... whole thing took about 30 seconds