billythekid’s Blogshares blog

It’s the golden rule of trading. Sometimes you might miss when something is going to go from high to low. Here’s my check-list to help you out.

• Don’t piss people off

This is often underestimated, but the people who can make life difficult for you are - anyone in the game! If you don’t piss them off they’ll be less likely to target you, or even think about you! Piss them off and you could be painting a big cross on your profile! Now I don’t mind pissing people off, but I am prepared to ride out the repercussions and in fact if nobody ever targeted me I’d quickly become bored. I’ll fight the fight just for the thrill. I’m not worried about winning or losing, the fight is what’s important to me. If you’d rather win all the time or don’t like conflict, DON’T PISS PEOPLE OFF! Don’t get me wrong, I don’t go looking for a fight but sometimes people over-react in the game!

• Watch your industries

People have their own ways of doing this. Personally I like to restrict my dealings to a few industries at a time, then I notice if there’s any strange activity going on. If I’ve been re indexing the same industry for weeks, after cleaning it through strategic voting, I’ll notice when there’s another blog been indexed, even if it’s not a ‘dropper’. If you have lots of industries you might watch them in your portfolio, but often you wont notice anything until they’ve turned red, which could be losing you trillions.

• Know who to watch

This is related to the first point. If you’ve pissed someone off, watch them. Watch their transactions, especially votes and chips. Those are the give-aways. If you suddenly see a spate of votes for an industry you’re building, sell sell sell!

• Spread yourself thin

There are huge advantages to not putting all your eggs in one basket. For one other folks can’t see where you are making your money so can’t properly target your industries. For two each hit affects you far less than it would were it your sole source of income.

• Know ‘when’ to sell

This is actually a good one that’s often overlooked. You should ideally sell when your industry is still green. The technique used is to check the drops. Each industry has a “last ten drops” link. It costs you chips but it can be worth trillions to you. The last 10 drops shows 11 drops. this is because it’s numbers 2-11 that are included in the idea maths, the rules behind each drop. If these are all under 300-ish then you are doing alright and the price will (probably) rise. In accordance with regular building. However if any of these has a big number in it the avg10 is pushed higher, making a fall in price more likely. Now, if slot 1 is showing a high number but 2-11 are low, the price should go as normal - higher. So… re index a drop in the usual way but don’t buy up when it happens, SELL UP! You’ve made it go higher, but for the next 10 drops that high number will be in the avg10 pushing it into a fall.

I recently put all of these into great effect in the Communism and Aberdeen(Scot) industries. This industry was a pain to clean, mostly because my blogs are in there and they have lots of incomings as a result of blogrolling, but I did get it spotless. It took lots of votes(all good karma) to get it like that but it meant that it was a very good industry to work. However it started dropping. Checking the blog index records it showed these were from mass-indexing rather than voting, so I got the big number out of the avg10 and it was running upwards again. Then I noticed a huge number of votes from a player against big droppers in the industry. He also indexed them on voting. So from a nice clean 100-300 avg10 I saw in position 1 a 3k drop! Well, I must be being targeted, and rather than try to clean the industry again, as I’d used lots of votes already in it and was pretty much wiped out, I sold high! The industry went red and I was unaffected. OK you spend all that time building the industry and keeping it clean, but the purpose of that surely is to build into something you can spend! Cash balance is the only thing that another player can’t hit. It makes sense to liquidate your money whenever you can.

I don’t care if someone attacks my holdings as I have no attachment to them. I will sell anything at any time for profit or not. (Advice worth taking: see Jazz)

The funny thing about it is that another player, not checking the transactions log for the industry or the avg10, saw this huge dump of ideas on the market and bought them up. If he’d checked these things he wouldn’t now be losing money on every index. Especially as my blogs get re indexed by other players(and therefore drop huge ideas) EVERY DAY!!

Aberdeen(Scot) can be made profitable again, but not by me and not on your own. You’ll need votes from your friends to turn it around - and even then you have a 10-drop wait…

Good Luck!

btk