Market Report: Candy Canes

As some of you have, for the past six or seven months, I have been buying Candy Cane salvage off the market in large quantities. Over the past two weeks, I have sold all of my Candy Canes. I have also been actively flipping Candy Canes in the market, and I also bought a few to convert into level 10 Winter's Gift: Slow Resist recipes.

I promised to post the final results for some friends on LJ, so I thought I would share it here as well. Here is my uncensored spreadsheet which I used to track profits throughout this venture:

Candy Cane Trade (Google Docs)

Some quick notes:

Total profits: 3,841,061,507
Note that this figure includes over 300 million spent to buy and craft 43 level 10 Winter's Gift: Slow Resist enhancements. There will be further profit on those sometime down the road (probably after another six months but who knows) when the market rebounds from the glut of them currently available.

Methods
The methods were pretty simple. I knew I wanted to track exact figures, so I started out with one character with a very deliberate amount of cash: Rockem Shockem started this project with exactly 500 million Infamy. She was responsible for all the buying in the off-season.

My buy price varied, of course, but generally had a low of 45,000 and a high of 100,000. Those are not exact figures, of course. There was definitely competition and I know several other were working on the same plan as I was. Sometimes the going price got and stayed over 150,000 and I usually would leave it alone at that point and let it come back down. I stopped buying when I ran out of my initial investment of 500 million. I could certainly have gleemailed myself another half billion and kept buying, but I was worried about how quickly I would be able to move that much stock (I shouldn't have worried).

I tried to distribute the canes roughly evenly among several rarely played alts (all listed on the spreadsheet by name). I used my second account to do that, by the way. No way could I email it all. Even using base storage would have been problematic since they aren't all in the same SG. If I do this again, I will likely use Justice or Pinnacle, since I have a one-person SG one each of those. (This was done on Infinity, btw.)

My list price varied. I put up my first batch of canes around the 450,000 mark (all numbers are approximate - I don't want to give away all my secrets) the night before the event went live. Those sold out rather well so I got greedy and upped my list price to 900,000. Those did not sell at all for 12 hours - there were too many other folks out there with stockpiles - so I had to eat some listing fees and go back to a more reasonable price.

Throughout the event my prices went up and down - higher during the day and especially on the weekend, but you can see that my average sale price worked out to about 375,000 per cane.

My active flippers had a much more rigid pricing. I was buying around 100,000 and selling around 300,000. Those went up and down but stayed pretty close to those numbers.

At the very end of the event (this morning) I sold off the last of my remaining stock - price went back up to 500,000 per cane, so I got a little last minute bonus for holding out a little.

Lessons Learned
I had a lot of fun doing this. It was fun to track, and fun to see the large quantities of inf rolling in in a short amount of time.

However, as a financial strategy, I have to say that stockpiling was almost not worth the effort. On my main marketeer, I make roughly 500 million a week, depending on my motivation and the market (and I know many of you make quite a bit more). Sure, I pulled in over 3 billion in a two week period, but that took several months of cane-collecting. The competition to sell drove my prices way down below where I was really aiming for. I have a feeling that it will be even tougher next year since canes were easier than ever to create this time around (and I'm probably making it harder by posting this and spreading the idea).

The active flipping, on the other hand, was very profitable. As you can see, that almost hit a billion in the two week period, which is more in line with what I make in my usual niches. It took some effort over that two weeks, but I didn't have to do anything to prep for it - just started flipping when the event began.

Conclusion
There wasn't really any greater goal to this project than "make tons of easy money" and that certainly happened. But I wanted to share with you folks since I feel like it turned into an interesting experiment in the market and I learned some things I didn't expect.


PS: As to what I'm going to do with this money? Well I already dumped half a billion of it into one of my solo SG bases, and I will probably do the same for the other one. The rest will probably go to purple recipes as I still have a lot of Issue 19 respecs to take care of.

It's time for you to start buying for next year.

I didn't create any level 10 Winter's Gift IOs, although I did buy up a few over the event. (I think I was paying 12 mil per). I did, however, create more than 50 level 50 Winter's Gift IOs, crafted and placed in storage. I know that last year around August I was able to sell a few of these for well in excess of 50 million each. I have no idea if they'll sell that well in 2011, but given that it cost me 4-5 million (in candy canes) per IO, I'm sure I'll make a profit.

I also created a few level 30 Winter's Gifts for my own use, since I prefer that level for IOs.

Do'h! I didn't realize the event ended today.... thought we still had a couple more days. Now my tank won't get her slow resist IO. Sadness.

The event is still active (I clicked a present no more than 20 minutes ago). Assuming you're not at work or school, now is the time to get those last minute candy canes!

If it's still active now, then I assume it'll probalby stay active until the normal downtime Tuesday morning?

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...47#post3409647

Candy cane prices will be very affordable next year




I think I should adjust my buying price downward. I was anticipating being able to sell them for a profit @ 100k.
Now I am, not so sure.

I got my 9999 candy canes on my main, so I'm just dandy now!

I think the lesson learned is that the devs intended to have rare and very rare alpha slots available at the end of the event and extended the winter event to push back their deadline.

I made a decent pile of inf myself off candy cane selling from hoardes.....though I listed them all pre-event and was done by day 2. I averaged 55k acquisition cost and 385k selling price. As the OP said.....I mostly did this on off-servers for me like Guardian and Protector.