But that's not the fault of the programs that is 100% the fault of the person who is idiotically inputing a price higher than they are willing to pay. That strategy makes absolutely zero sense and 100% defeats the purpose of using a program to bid in the first place. I don't use a program to bid but the same logic applies, if my limit for a coin is $500, that's the bid I input at the end of the auction. What sense would it make for me to input $600 and think "it will never get there anyways!". It might and then I'd pay more than the $500 I wanted. Therefore I don't do it. I would, however, from time to time potentially increase that $500 bid if I had an extra 15 minutes and was outbid. Having that extra time is extra opportunity for me to make an emotional "how dare you outbid me!" or "hmmmm maybe it is worth more than $500" type decision. I'm still inputing my max bid in before the auction ends, now I just have more time to increase it with davidh's proposed method. People can drive their cars in the wrong lane. That's not the fault of the car or the construction crew who built the lanes. It's the idiot driver's fault.
So you're saying that most people setting snipes pick an unrealistically high price, but most people won't succumb to the temptation to raise their bid just that little bit more during a live bidding war? O... kay. If that's the way you see things work most of the time, I can certainly understand your position. That's not what I do, though, and typically not what I've seen on eBay, whether I'm sniping or just bidding.
I couldn't disagree more with this. Let's say you're at a show and a dealer shows you exactly what you're looking for but your maximum is $200 for the coin and they are asking $250. If they offered to split the difference at $225 would you say no? If it's the right coin, saying no has an opportunity cost. Perhaps you won't find as nice an example after much additional searching, and that wasted time is money. Perhaps you eventually find another example for $200, but it's not as nice, and you spend another $200 upgrading it a year later. Now passing on that extra $25 cost you a two year additional search and you've got an extra coin to sell that you paid $200 for. Is that worth it? What if it turns out that the coin was a sleeper with a market value on the rise, and you can't find an example that nice for less than $250 later on? I know I've passed on coins before because the price was a little more than I wanted to spend, only to spend more than twice as much over the next few years buying examples I didn't like as much and upgrading them. What has this taught me? That my maximum bid needs to be flexible when bidding on the right coin. Think of it like shipping insurance. Someone pays $10 insurance for every coin they mail out over and over again, until they realize that very few actually get lost in the mail and they are paying more in insurance than the losses would cost them out of pocket. So at this point they stop paying for insurance. In the long run they save money even though once in a while they end up taking a hit. In the same way, if you consistently place bids over your maximum when the coin is the right example, most of the time your winning bid will be well under this value, but once in a while you take a hit and end up overpaying. In the long run you may very well save money by saving time and extra money searching for examples of the right coins you missed out on.
What you typed here has absolutely nothing to do with what I posted. Since you couldn't disagree more with what I posted then you believe the following: 1. You believe it's the computer's fault when someone spends more than they were willing on a coin after they inputed that amount into the computer as their max. 2. You believe if the most you're willing to spend on a coin is $500 it's a good idea to input $600 as your max and assume it won't reach it anyways, instead of just putting in your max at $500. If you truly disagreed with what I wrote and believe the 2 above examples (the opposite of what I posted), then I don't believe we have anything further to discuss here. But to answer your question: If my max bid is $200 then yes I would say no to meeting in the middle at $225. My max is $200 and $225 is more than that, I've only been collecting for a little over 6 months but I can tell you with certainty I've learned the dangers of not being disciplined with your budget. Where does in end in that example? You inch up to $225 then the dealer gets an offer for $245 and comes back to you and says "hey it's now $250, you were willing to spend $225 would you come up?". Again now it's only $25 more. You have to have a limit and if you're worried it's a rare coin and you need to act on it then that limit would be higher. Now in the style auction davidh brought up if my max was $200 and it got outbid but 15 more minutes was added to the clock I am MUCH more likely to emotionally decide to go up to $225 with that extra time.
I, for one, do not participate in auction formats of that nature. They practically guarantee that the coin will hammer at an unrealistic price. Why should I bother? Doug says it the way he does because he knows that the format will drive away most knowledgeable bidders, past the critical point of having enough interest for a good sale.
You described the practice as "idiotically inputting a price higher than they are willing to pay". I'm saying spending more than you are willing on a coin is a valid strategy that can actually save you money. Yes that is correct, provided that it is the "right" coin. Since you've only been collecting such a short period of time, my piece of advice to you is that being disciplined in your budget is of course wise, but it can get you into big trouble too. It's much better to be disciplined in what you collect. Having the discipline to wait for the right coins will, over time, get you a much nicer and more valuable collection for your money than passing on coins because an extra $25 isn't in your budget. You may think that sounds silly now, but see how you feel after you put 10 years into the hobby.
Here's the thing though. If it's the "right" coin, and $600 is a fine price for it, then your max is not $500. It's $600 (or more). Inputting a price higher than you are willing to pay is NEVER a valid strategy, it's always a losing strategy, otherwise what you are willing to pay should be higher to begin with. If you are saying there's some coins that you should reach for I completely agree...for those special coins set a higher budget and make sure to not miss out. But the original notion was that some people here spend over 2k on a $200 coin and posted about not wanting to honor it here. That is absolutely idiocy and insanity and the fault of no one but those individuals.
I agree spending over 2k on a $200 coin and not wanting to honor it is not okay, but I disagree with what you're saying otherwise. If your max is $500 in your example, bidding $600 may be perfectly fine. I'm talking about a long term bidding strategy, not just looking at a single coin. That is the point of my earlier insurance analogy. If you look at only the one coin out of 100 that gets lost in the mail where you lose $250 out of pocket, not buying insurance for that one coin sure does look like a bad deal (and it is a bad deal when you only look at that one shipment). But when you look at all 100 shipments where you would have spent $1000 on insurance, you can clearly see that it actually saved you money in the long run. And that's what I'm talking about here. To be clear, for this bidding strategy to work you have to be disciplined in your coin selection (premium quality rare coins), and you have to know the market well. I'm sure the kind of person to keep bidding $2k on $200 details coins, common coins, or examples with poor eye appeal would quickly find they have overpaid for everything. Let's see what actually happens with this bidding strategy. Let's say you bid on 5 coins where your max is $500 each and you bid your real maximum of $500 on each coin: Coin 1 hammers at $250 Coin 2 hammers at $510 Coin 3 hammers at $525 Coin 4 hammers at $425 Coin 5 hammers at $650 So you won two coins for a total of $675 and you lost out on three coins. Now you still need those three coins for your set, so now you spend a lot of time (time is money) trying to find them down the road, and if the three you lost out on here were rare premium quality examples, so you may be hard pressed to find them again. You may settle for lesser examples and end up wasting quite a bit of money on upgrades over time. Keep in mind, you only lost one of the coins by $10, and the other by $25. You're going to spend way more than $35 worth of time tracking them down again, so it really doesn't make sense. But let's say you bid $750 on each coin instead of $500 (a +50% buffer): You won the same two coins as you did before, but you also won two of the coins at just over your true maximum, saving you time and money finding those examples in the future. You overpaid for the last coin, sure, but your "true" maximum for the 5 coins was $2500, and you ended up paying $2360. You're still under your true maximum bid overall for the five coins. I can assure you this strategy does work. You end up ensuring auction wins on way more bargains than you end up with coins you have overpaid for, and it's balanced out by eliminating the opportunity cost for coins you would otherwise lose by a nominal amount.
A true max bid should have everything you discussed here (all valid) factored in already though. Also maybe someone who buys and sells coins may have an "ideal max" where they have a more comfortable margin to work with and they would be wise at times to go above it essentially shrinking their margins a bit but still having a positive expected value. I'm not one of those people, I have no notion I can profit with coins and to be honest don't really care to right now. I just want to collect coins I like at prices I feel are fair. If I miss out on a coin by $25 that fills a need I'm comfortable with that and it happens all the time to me. The whole conversations started when discussing people who put in max bids they assumed would never hit, that did hit. I can't imagine anyone thinking that's a good idea in any instance. Going over what you're comfortable with from time to time when your gut tells you to is a different story from that. I'm a gambler myself and can certainly understand going for it from time to time.
If credit cards weren't available people couldn't get into credit card debt. If cars weren't available, people couldn't drive them in the wrong lane. If alcohol wasn't available, no one could drive drunk. etc. I don't even use a program so not like I have a personal interest in them. I just don't think they should take any blame when used irresponsibly by folks.
That's what his point was though. More time and time to contemplate results in higher prices realized not lower like Doug has said. If the auction time was extended every time someone bid they would have time to think and be more likely to make another bid. Live auctions use that method of giving bidders time to react because they KNOW that it drives their results higher. It's actually the sniper programs and hard deadline auctions that will more often than not keep the prices down not allowing others to respond to the final bid That's not true. They all have max bid options that bidders can input by hand that get stored in the system. The ONLY difference the program does is hide it from the host and put it in at the last second. The process is the exact same whether someone inputs it by hand or whether or not a program does it at the very last moment.
Tell me this then. Is it safe to say that there are more people on ebay who use sniping programs than there are those who do not ? Let's assume it is. Give that, if the sniping programs do not play a part in driving prices higher, why is that just about any coin you care to pick that is sold on ebay, can be found cheaper elsewhere ? And I'm not saying that sniping programs are solely to blame for higher prices, merely that they play a part in it. The other part is of course the majority of ebay buyers - they don't know what they are doing. They don't know the market, they don't know coins, they don't how to grade correctly, basically they don't know a whole lot. And probably worst of all, they use realized ebay prices as a benchmark to establish values. And if you are using prices that are too high to begin with to establish values, then you are by definition perpetuating prices that are already too high when you buy coins on ebay. Bottom line, unless a collector is very knowledgeable and knows all of the things I listed above, the smartest thing he could do would be to not buy coins on ebay.
No, of auctions a small percentage use those programs. Because that just isn't true as much as you harp it. That's a very snobby statement. We all appreciate your research Doug, but you are very out of touch with the current market and collecting. You have a beef with eBay (all sellers do nothing wrong with that) but you are doing a huge disservice to people telling people to avoid it. There is also this thread https://www.cointalk.com/threads/need-help-grading.279102/ where you gave your sticker from an internet picture that was then downgraded to a 64 in this thread https://www.cointalk.com/threads/segs-not-honoring-guarantee.279756/ based off internet pictures. Do you not think is it possible digital images might throw off your grading?
Really ? It's my grading that's the problem and not the grading of SEGS ? Please excuse me while I hold my sides, the laughter is a bit too much !
Meanwhile, you, and anyone else who chooses, go right on believing what you want. Use sniping programs, buy on ebay. It's your pocket that suffers not mine.
I will just leave it at this as I said earlier in the thread. Ebay, to me, is just like every single other option for buying coins in the entire world. They have coins available. Sometimes I want to buy one of them. I try to buy it at a price I think is fair. It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. To condemn an entire platform is absurd and shows a clear bias that you developed at some point for some reason.
It's easy to overpay for coins on eBay. It's difficult, but possible, to find bargains there. You can replace "eBay" with "local coin store", "big coin show", or the other venue of your choice; from what I've seen, it doesn't change the truth of the statement. But, Doug, I'm sure you'll go on believing what you want, too.
I don't disagree with what ya just said Jeff. What I know is what I said above, you can almost always find the same coin for less money than you can buy it for on ebay. And to me that speaks volumes.
I think it's possible that could be confirmation bias. I know I haven't seen it to be the case. Apparently a lot of sellers havent either since there seems to be no shortage of sellers willing to consign their coins to other venues at higher seller fees. The coin market is not different than other markets from the standpoint that things have to revert to the mean eventually. If as you say ebay was "almost always" achieving higher realized sales the market would respond as most people aren't willing to leave money on the table. I understand there's a segment that has been burned as ebay sellers and are willing to sacrifice money and that's valid for them.
