Planetary Interaction markets emerge

I'm going to examine two categories for PI products: POS fuels and components for tech 2 production.

POS fuels: Coolant, Oxygen (P1), Mechanical Parts, Robotics (P3)
Tech 2 production materials: Construction blocks, Consumer Electronics, Guidance Systems (P3), Mechanical Parts, Miniature Electronics, Robotics (P3), Rocket Fuel, Superconductors, and Transmitters.

Both Robotics and Mechanical Parts fall into both categories. Unless otherwise noted, all of the products are P2. There's a slideshow below with comments, and you can click on the graphs to see a larger image.







Broadly, this follows the pattern for new markets from in my previous post (required reading if you're going to make the most of this post, sorry!). This is most evident if you look at the Superconductors, where the player-driven market actually started a bit early in this region, since there were no NPC sell orders. The hoarding and buying/selling between players started when Tyrannis was announced, not when the patch actually happened.

So what can we take from this as a guide to prices?

• We can probably exect to see the "normal" new market price patterns
• The trouble is, with many of the materials it's hard to know right now if they are going to continue to rise (i.e. we have not reached the high point of the initial peak yet) or start to decline
• Volumes traded are VERY much lower than previously
• Interestingly, you can see from some (it's most noticable on Guidance Systems) that volume traded is almost zero and yet the price pattern remains the same! This I find very interesting - the price pattern is down to buyer/seller psychology and apparently not dependent on any significant trading occuring. Interesting for me anyway, doesn't have that much real impact on the actual market.
•  I predict volumes will only return slowly and may never reach the levels they were at before. This is partly because of hoarding, and partly because POS owners and tech 2 producers will have set up their own supply chains. I know I have.
• I think what we'll see is a flattened out version of my "new market" pattern, with a fairly bumpy ride along the way. Like so:

 

Where it's "bumpy" (especially in the coming few months where I predict prices will stay at the higher end but fluctuate pretty wildly) there is money to be both made and lost through speculation, but I would describe this as a high risk strategy. Your best time for speculation was before the market started - I did that, I only regret that I only sunk a few tens of millions into buying up NPC goods, and not hundreds of millions.

Since blog posting is limited for space and I have only finite time available to me, I haven't done all the analysis I could (note: I'm a market analyst in real life). There is one particular thing you might think is missing, but it actually would not form part of my analysis anyway. It's production costs. Largely, I do not care about production costs in my analysis. In a free market, it does not matter what you'd like to sell your product for, the market will decide what it's worth. Also, profits based on production costs at a time when every component is rapidly changing price on a daily basis are really quite arbitrary figures.

That is why I have chosen to specifically look at these products - because they are an end product in themselves with value, not merely a production material for a larger process. Those other PI products which are (in effect) just materials are likely to have their price dictated to by the ultimate price of the new player-built POS structures, and it's far too early to see how that might shake out.

However, if you do want to look at (what I would call arbitrary) costings, then someone did a good job on the forums. Eve forums post. It's an interesting analysis but since I believe the market wil dictate prices, I can't help but agree with one of the comments by another poster: "Friendly advice from someone involved in RL trading: make your tools follow the market, not the market follow the tools." Couldn't have said it better myself.