How to know when to walk away, and know when to run?

I've been getting into some serious marketeering lately, but I'm still learning the ropes. A couple weeks ago, I found an item that had several of the recipe for sale, a large difference between the recipe and crafted price, and the last 5 on the crafted were all within 24 hours. It seemed like a good target.

I bought enough recipes and salvage to make 10 and listed them. Overnight, I sold 3. Over the next 2 days, I sold 2 more, plus someone else sold one. Over the next week, two sold, neither of them mine. I pulled the 5 I had left, and relisted them at their break-even price. It's been over a week, and only one of these IO has sold, and it wasn't mine.

There's open bids on the item. If I were to pull the ones I have left and relist for 1, I'd probably break even of the stack as a whole, maybe even be a bit ahead. What would you recommend doing?

In general, under what circumstances would you walk away from a niche and find something else to work, and when would you run, dropping anything you had in it, and even accepting a loss, if need be?

I tend to stay away from 10-stacks for that reason. People defend niches, people think I am in a niche and attack it, it's all combat and no capitalism. I hit and run a lot. Nobody's going to get that mad about me snagging three sales out of their fifty for the week. And if they do? I'll never know.

But that's not really constructive advice.

The ones you have for sale? Leave 'em till Tuesday morning. There's a LOT of traffic on weekends. Prices will fluctuate. The number for sale will fluctuate. Yours might sell.

As far as "run"? Kinda hard to say. If I was selling and it was "10 for sale, 16 bids" and all of a sudden it was "43 for sale, 160 bids": Someone's messing with that. I wouldn't sell everything for 1 inf and flee, but I'm sure not putting any more money into that for a while. If I had stuff that I hadn't listed yet, I probably wouldn't list it for a while.

It's very rare that I see something dry up for a long period of time- I may have seen a couple, like, Impervious Armor or something where someone will pick up a bunch of sets and then nobody will buy for a few days.

Occasionally I take a loss, but not on many IOs and not very often. Try three or four recipes each of two different things. Hopefully you'll have a "5 million cost, 11 million listing price, 15 million expected price" kind of setup. So if you sell ONE at the expected price you've pretty much covered costs on all three. Where can you find those sorts of ratios and prices? I'd look at Positron, Aegis, Doctored Wounds, Devastation, Decimation, Impervious Armor, Titanium Coating, maybe Reactive Armor... if it's a less-loved set go for the most-loved items in the set-for Devastation you'd check Acc/Dam- whereas if it's a set with one standout item you check the second-best items [for Miracle that would be Heal/Rech or Heal]: those are things people frankenslot with, giving extra demand.

Remember that a 100K recipe with a 3.5 million inf piece of salvage and 500K crafting cost is a 4.1 million inf investment(so you'd want to sell for 9 or 10 million at least), but people SELL it like it's a 100K item. You can grab those recipes in bulk any time you want. Pay 200K, pay 500K, you're not affecting YOUR profit margin significantly.

My first question is: is this a high demand niche or a low demand niche? Is this an enhancement that you look at and say, "Yes, I would slot this on more than one of my characters." or is it "I can see how there is a build that can use this, but it's not for me."? In general, try to aim at areas that have real solid demand for the items.

Regardless, I'd let it run throughout the weekend before pulling the plug. A block of ten is not a very big number, unless you are dealing with a very low turnover IO. I would also consider pulling just one of your offers and selling it at a low price so that you know where those outstanding bids are. And if you list it somewhere above 1 inf and somewhere below your break even, there is a pretty good likelihood that someone will come in and throw in a bid that is significantly higher than your offer.

To the greater question of when to abandon a niche, I usually wait until it bores me, which happens more frequently than you might expect. I'm not a hardcore marketer, and usually when I get involved in an area, it's because one or more of my respecs are looking at slotting that enhancement. And periodically I'll just clean out a marketing character and start again from scratch.

If the recipes are cheap enough, I'd buy up a bunch of them to tighten supply a bit. I'd bid creep on those recipes, though. You don't want to be throwing away Inf unnecessarily.

This is the exact reason I use mule marketeers... I can 10stack on a toon I never play and just wait it out.. If the price was up there once, it will be again in most cases.
The things I know I can sell quick and for a profit right away I just put up for sale on my daily toons to collect the quick buck

Also, if you are going to craft a block of 10, I suggest not selling more than 1 to 3 at a time unless you think they will all sell by your next log in. It eats up your storage space, but you end up with more profits, usually.

You learn when to walk away and when to run by experience. You are currently gaining said experience. Monitor the rest and see how it goes. Look back at it later. Did you make a profit? Loss? By how much? How long did you have to wait and tie up those slots/funds? Was it worth it?

I vary my playings depending on how big the risk is. I'm not going to bid on a ten-stack of a purple recipe. I will bid ten-stacks of salvage for generic IOs I'm crafting.

Not that I'm in either right now after purples jumped by 50-100 million each vs what I'd been lowballing (and getting for the previous week). Haven't had time to go find a new set of things to occupy. Sorta just sitting and waiting on I20 to drop and see where things are going...

I bid on 10 stacks almost exclusively, and list them all at once normally. But I give them more than just a few days to sell. I won't pull listings unless they fail to sell for an extended period of time (weeks) and it's clear that the market price has fallen significantly below my list price.

Ful hit the main points.

Don't deal in bulk and you don't have to worry much about changing conditions, stick and move.

My rule of thumb for leaving expensive stuff up is "how badly do I need that slot?"

If I don't have a pressing use for the slot, I'll just leave things sit- you never know what kind of weird market effects players will generate if you give them enough time.