f13.net

This is a question to our heavy industrialists and traders we have floating around.  I'm going to hopefully have a bunch of zyd/mega to sell very soon.  But I keep seeing them both go down, down, down on the market.  So the question is simple, hold onto it, or sell quickly?  :uhrr:  I don't follow the market or economy much so I really don't know whats going on that's causing the crashes or what to expect.  Or if they were both just unnaturally high and are now steadying out?

Zydrine

Megacyte

It's those sub-prime loans bringing everything down.

Ninja edit: Pretty charts though, Schild should play EVE just for the charts.

We need a CCP mineral business bailout!

Was thinking of just posting this on GF forums since I'm sure they'd have a ton of knowledgeable people, but figured I had a bigger chance of just getting trolled and flamed.  :ye_gods:

You'd get a surprising civil reply in the Capitalism/arkonor forum  :why_so_serious:

If it were me I would hold onto the mega and zyd and wait for prices to head back up. I don't know what causes these cycles but they happen every few months in my experience. The funny thing is while the high end mineral prices are tanking the low end mins get more expensive. My cost for making ships stays more or less the same.

The fact that there's a big war going on might raise prices too. There will be more demand for ship replacements plus less 0.0 mining going on.

I've speculated in mega and zyd prices before, and they are somewhat hard to predict long term. However, one effect that do seem to happen is that they fall in the beginning of big wars and rise again later, possibly because people are selling resources in the beginning to afford war equipment.

Mega has fallen gradually for a while, but the Zyd seems like more of a short-term thing. If I were to guess, I'd think Zyd might rise or at least stabilize but I'm not so sure about Mega.

Mineral prices in EVE always made me wish for an option to view the market data over longer periods - 2 or 3 years even. The price cycles were always long enough that 1 year of data didn't cut it.

This is what got my thinking about saving it up, when I noticed the value of my minerals has been plummeting, but the cost of the ships I'm trying to save for have stayed the same.  :?

I guess I could always look at actually building stuff with the minerals as well.

eve-central.com offers a lot of data. You might find historical data there.

Mahrin is usually the guy with the detailed explanation, but basically the price of all the minerals as a set is fixed by insurance and seeded items.  If mega fell substantially and everything else stayed the same you'd soon reach a point where insurance fraud became worthwhile: building ships just to suicide them.  If the set of prices rose too much it would be worth buying items from NPCs just to refine them/

They only go back 180 days far as I can see  :sad:  It's moot anyway, I'm not subscribed at the moment, thanks though :)

What Endie said.  There's a fairly tight channel for a "basket of minerals" drawn from the maximum prices they can reach before it becomes profitable to buy various things off the NPC market, salvage them, and sell the results on the market (in the process increasing the supply of minerals that were *not* rising in price), and a minimum where ships built from them cost lest than their insurance payout.  If the prices of low-ends fall too far, it's no longer cost-effective to mine Empire ores as extensively, if they rise too much they get clamped by the salvage process.  That in turn drives the high-end minerals market.  Warfare drives a lot of the rapid swings, draining out a lot of both cash and minerals, while people flush the pipeline of high-end mineral stock trying to raise cash.

Total money supply figures in there too, if large chunks of 0.0 are busy fighting and raiding each other, their cash productivity (drawn from ratting) goes down, but often their mineral production (drawn from organized mining ops) goes up.  But in general the expectation and onset of large-scale hostilities will drive low-ends up and high-ends down.

Increased 0.0 production is increasingly coming to matter as well, in peacetime for someone in deep 0.0 the most effective way to "sell" their minerals is often insurance fraud (use the low-end minerals along with a fraction of the high-ends to build ships, then suicide them for the insurance).  But in wartime they may actually be importing low-end minerals in order to build ships and modules on-site for local resupply of combat losses, driving up their price in Empire (and therefore driving high-ends down).

--Dave

Interesting, thanks!

I see these prices are on the rise slightly now.  Mega is almost back up to 3k per unit in Jita.  Now the questions are why is this happening, is it just a temporary spike, and how high will it go?  :uhrr:

*edit* now they are dipping back down again today, doh, damn market.  I think someone just manipulated it up for a few days to turn a profit.