@zukaus, I don't know where you got impression that I have "hard feelings" toward you. Maybe from my stated wish for you to have "5 months retirement" ? The point of my post is not really about your retirement, it is about how I might never, ever catch up to you. Of course, I could get lucky, and find you making mistake after mistake after mistake, but I didn't like to win because someone made a mistake, I like to win because I made better investment decision :).
Anyway, I don't have any hard feelings, and I don't think I will have hard feelings in the future. I have only a few "hot button" that can made me upset, and losing money is not one of them (being called a fanboy (without base / proof) is one of them :). )
If your motivation is something other than profitability, you wouldn't be able to amass such high networth, and you wouldn't be able to stay #1 for long (investing badly is way worse than retiring, you can go down very quickly that way).
I think you forgot that we have different position on BotB Wii (you short, me long). Unfortunately, that game really did very badly, so I don't think I can get much money from you (If I can recover my current 1 Million loss, I would have been happy).
The only weakness I can detect on your visible portfolio is your significant long investment on Sadness. IF Sadness are doing as bad as BotB, you are going to lose some money (Every 10K price point drop will cause you around 6.5 Million DKP loss, so if the price drop from 44 to 14, you might lose 20 Million, which is only 7% of your total networth). But without knowing more info about Sadness, it is dangerous to short them too much. I have some short on them, just to keep track of the price :).
When and on what stock did you make your last mistake ? Are you willing to share them (details and reason and when you decide to get out / stop) ? I always find that learning from other's mistake can be very useful.
Oh yeah and one more thing more on topic about Diablo III, I know there was some discussion on disc based sales vs. digital distribution and how that would affect sales. It's likely that in time Diablo III will eventually see release in both formats. All of the last generation Blizzard titles including Diablo II, Warcraft III, and Starcraft are available by download directly from Blizzard.
Sorry for the delay. I've been busy. You are right, most of my positions won't show up in my profile because I have to acquire a relatively large amount of stock before it shows up. It's usually not easy to get 3 million+ DKP orders in anything without moving the price dramatically. It's even harder to get out of those positions when you realize you've made a mistake. =)
Although I would say it wouldn't take that long for someone else who was dedicated to the game to rise up if I retired. If I didn't make the money someone else would. There are a number of players that I think would move quickly to the top, including yourself.
I hope we have no hard feelings friend. I am not purposely out to make anyone's life difficult. Unfortunately that's part of the game, over time it's almost a sure thing that I will eventually find myself in some position against yours. I know at some point I've probably been in disagreement with most of the active players to one degree or another.
It's especially interesting to see how people react sometimes. It seems like some people take things very personally and get angry because they feel that I am out to get them or that I am irrationally bullying them by throwing my money around which is just not true. My motivation is profitability, and I try to always have a good reason for buying or selling even though I won't always express my opinion in the comments. However, you have always been very polite and articulate in your arguments and comments and I can respect that even though we won't always agree.
Well I think that predictions overshooting the actual sales would be very very unusual. A game isn't delisted usually until sales slow down significantly, and that slow down is taken into account by the market. The only way an overshoot would happen is if it seemed like sales would be steady for a while, the game was delisted, and then sales stopped abruptly for some random reason...like the company goes out of business and stops producing copies for sale in the first place or something random.
As far as the other scenario, like I said before, i think we could have a system where we could bid on the effect of certain events on the life time sales of a game. In other words, imagine a graph of the lifetime sales. There are basically two types of patterns. One where a game sells a bunch at first, and then sells less and less over time until sales stop. The other graph would be similar, except after sales slow down, there are little spikes every once in a while, when an expansion comes out, when a game develops a fallowing, etc. The problem is that at the beginning we cant predict when these spikes will occur or how many there will be. We do, however, usually get a good sense that a spike will be coming shortly before it arrives. My suggestion would be to find a way to bid on how large we believe/expect these spikes to be. I think it can be done. The only issue would be your first point, letting people know about it. However, i think that the trade page could have a section informing people what spikes are being bid on, similar to how it shows the highest increasing and decreasing stocks of the day.
@drl21, Yeah, I'm not really sure how they could effectively deal with the problem, but it exists. It seems like the main points would be: 1) Letting people know there has been a change affecting the game somehow (i.e. expansion, release on Steam, etc) 2) Allowing the GLS prediction to change even well after a year or two
I still don't agree with awarding the full DKP based upon the prediction alone though. Say there is some release that fuels a significant shift in sales after the stock has been delisted, you can't take the money back that you've already paid out. A worse scenario would be predictions vastly overshooting actual sales, and it's only confirmed after the stock has been delisted (i.e. the speculation was completely wrong).
All that is definitely true, but it would be impractical to keep every listing open for years and years on end on the off chance that any given game will be one of the few with an a-typical sales pattern. As you said, these things are hard to predict, and that serves as a double edged sword, so it were. (I hate that analogy...anyone who knows how to use a sword would never be dumb enough to cut themselves with it.... but I digress)
Anyway, my point is that the vast majority of the time the SE is fairly accurate. But there's no denying that there are examples where SE can't do the job, because things do sometimes happen later in a games life. That's why I think there needs to be some sort of system where under special circumstances a game can be RE listed. Although that would pose a complication in and of itself....notifying people that a game has been relisted, giving people their shares back, etc. Or maybe go through the whole process of price determination a second time? I don't know.
Or maybe it could be similar to how we can sometimes bid on the sales of games for specific months. What if even a year and a half after a PC game has been delisted, with the news of an expansion we could bid on how many units the expansion will add to the sales of the original, via boxed sets etc. Not actually bidding on the sale of the expansion mind you, but on the effect that it will have on the sales of the original.
@drl21, I'm a mathematics major so that stuff unfortunately leaks out every now and then.
I think that's pretty much the main concern as well. Take Diablo II for instance, it's seemed to tail off and continue at what would presumably be a fairly slow by steady rate, but when Diablo III was announced it rocketed back into the top sellers list. The Sims also had a very jumpy sales distribution, which roughly correlated with each of it's billion expansion packs. These kinds of things are hard to predict unless you have insider information of what will be released in the future. I also think that the introduction of old classic titles on Steam and the just announced Good Old Games will have a significant impact on older titles.
When the reward for predicting GLS roughly correlates with the actual GLS, delisting will work by virtue of reflecting reality, but in the cases where something changes the sales quite a bit later the payout doesn't really work in reinforcing the goal of the SimExchange. Hence I don't feel like delisting is fair because of situations like I described above.
Grinding out the numbers will be a pain in the ass, assuming I can get enough historical data, even with something like R, so I'll leave it to the SimExchange staff if they want to comment on their accuracy (that's also part of the reason I left it to you -- there was a remote chance you'd want to grind through all those numbers).
It seems like a hard problem to correct. In the real world markets operate on currency that has significant value -- it costs you something of great worth to make the wrong call about a company and companies can go under entirely. There is no such threat at all on the SimExchange, which makes it far easiest to artificially inflate GLS predictions.
Think back to Diablo 2 again, what do you think the SimExchange would have predicted for it's sales? Most games are done almost all their sales within a year, and the last sales numbers before now for Diablo 2 were about 4.5 million. I don't think the SimExchange would have produced good results.
If you look at The Sims 3 discussions here, people can't even agree on what the last known Sims 2 sales numbers were let alone predict what the current sales could be. One person claims 50 million, another person 6.3 million, someone claims another random number -- that seems insane and is, but if you look back at the sales figures from the first year or two there would have been complete consensus on GLS.
Even the relatively stable Assassin's Creed predictions will probably quite a bit off in the end given the current prediction has settled near the last known figures, and the eventual release of Assassin's Creed 2. Maybe it will change, maybe not -- the point being there's quite a few titles that the SimExchange seems ill equipped to predict.
Woa!...Standard deviation....normal distribution....I'm having Quantitative Analysis flashbacks here. Crap....now that I think about it, I start Quantitative Analysis 2 in the fall.....I wonder if i can use the SE for homework....haha
Anyway, you make great points. Especially about how people tend to estimate what peoples average estimation will be rather then what the game will actually sell. However, even that estimation is affected by sales trends, as if a game becomes very popular, one would estimate that peoples estimations would increase, so essentially your doing the same thing. In general, the longer a game is listed, the smaller the standard deviation from the mean the sample will become, baring drastic changes in the market.
So say a game sells for 5 years. I game delisted 1 year after it comes out will be less accurate then a game that gets delisted 2 or 3 years after. However, I would say that 2-3 years after a game comes out, the market will have (generally) stabilized enough, and sales will be fallowing a predictable pattern, that a game delisted at that point in time will probable be 95% accurate. I can not support this with numbers, as I don't have any, this is just what I would imagine would be true based on experience. So if you have numbers to prove me wrong, by all means post them, I won't take offense.
My mane concern is, if a game get's delisted, and then something drastic happens that does change the market (game suddenly gets a cult fallowing and sales start going back up for example) is there a process on SE by which a game can get RElisted? There might be some occasions where that could be appropriate.
BTW, this is an awesome debate. That's why I like SE....intelligent people.
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I'm moving this discussion to General, so I don't clutter the Diablo III thread.