Market blunder

Unexpected profits and losses

I don't normally trade much. It might not sound like it, but I dislike it enough not to login daily. Normally I just update my orders once a week and even then not as enough. I'm getting a bit ahead of myself right now. I will talk about "my view" on trading in more detail in the continuation post of trading to the riches. Today I want to talk about market blunders.

If you are trading, there's a good chance you messed up with your pricing. Be it mistyped number, or mixing buy with sell when setting up the order. These mistakes can be costly. Especially if you trade in multi million or even billion stuff. Messing up the price with small difference might not pop up the warning message, while loss may be quite significant. Merchant Monarchy time to time writes about various his or others' market blunders. Like him, I think that EvE's trading system is stupid, to call it gently. Problem lies, that when you adjust too big or too small price, your item gets sold or bought for that price, regardless at what range are the market orders set. If you feel like selling 500mil item for 5 isk, you are free to do so! There are so many wrongs about this system that I'm surprised it still exists.

Anyway, I don't normally notice such blunders, unless they significantly impact my daily profit. I remember a time when I sold some items for 800mil loss without noticing when looking at Jita price of a similar, but different item. I noticed it, when my profit line in the tracking tool went down like an anchor. This time, it was just the opposite. I was being lazy, and last time I touched my trading for more than 10mins was more than a week ago, however I notice this:

Something is not right. I do not believe in miracles. That is about 2.5bil in profit. To get this profit at my normally traded margins, I would need to sell around 30+ bil of worth of items. Which can be quite normal after doing massive update after some inactivity, but not this time though. So I investigate it a bit further and find this:

Quite nice. I guess lucky me and bad luck for the guy that bought it. I am positive he was placing a buy order just above mine and put one number too many. I just can't help but wonder if he bought more than one piece of that. So if there was one lesson we could take from this, what would it be? Well, probably don't drink and trade. Screw it! I like to trade and fly my ships while drunk.  It's fun, you should give it a go.