Well, regarding this article, I’ve tried to use your formula, but I’m a bit dumb and it’s not working for me.

As for an example let me copy-paste the formula and the data:

Ps = (ROI * (365/DI)) * ((1 / (1.005^(ROUNDUP ((Bs * 0.01) / Bu)))) * ((ROUNDUP (N / 4)) / (ROUNDUP ((Bs * 0.01) / Bu))))

47 copies of Spoils of the Vault, purchased at 0.12 Tix each, for an ROI of +480% in 244 days.

OK

This makes:
(ROUNDUP ((Bs * 0.01) / Bu)= 10000*0.01/0.12= 833.3->834
((ROUNDUP (N / 4))= 47/4= 11.75–>

Then:

Ps=(480*(365/244)) * ((1/1.005^834)*(12/834)) = 0.16

It should have been 14.53 as you say in the article, but unfortunatelly I don’t know what’s wrong.

Maybe you can help me, I would really appreciate it

Hi Dylan,

You are pretty right all the way. In my opinion, two big factors that should drive your speculation strategy is the size of your bankroll and your spare time for this activity.

The less time you have the less interesting (and performant overall) cheap card will be. The bigger the bankroll the more expensive cards you need to make a significant difference when selling positions.

With the limited time I have for speculations on MTGO (about 4 to 6 hours a week, and this include buying/selling but also reading a bit, doing some research and looking at prices charts) it makes more sense for me to seek “higher value cards” (which means that for my bankroll I’m looking for cards I don’t need to buy more than 30-50 copies in average to make up for 1-2% of my bankroll).

Modern mid-priced staples (from 2 to 15 Tix) are great for this, they swing very often with 100-200% variations and it’s “easy” to buy 100 Tix worth of them (from 1 playset or 2 to 10-20).

From experience, moving 50 copies of cards without really affecting the selling price is doable, more than that you will either affect the price or you’ll need more time to sell. If the trend is a nice upward trend supporting by real player demand it’s fine. If it’s a spike moving a high number of copies at the same price will be more challenging. And when you want to move a card that is not in demand you will quickly affect the price.

Here is two different examples:
– Hushwing Gryff. To me this card was really great. With a price as low as 0.2 Tix in August I bought 60 copies of it. (But I know I’m already in a situation where it needs to perform well to be worth it, but I really believed it could reach 1-1.5 Tix). Then it dropped down to 0.05 Tix briefly late September, I bought an additional 40 copies and stopped at 100 copies because of what I said above. The price took off and was supported by real demand (it never really went bellow 1 Tix after the initial spike). I sold part of my copies around 1.5 and the rest more recently around 2, and the price is still up! Great investment since I made 100 Tix profit on this cheap card. I know core set cards performed really well (my M15 specs have been terrific) so I knew I could drift away a little bit from the rule. But here is another different experience.

– M14 Junk mythics (Ring of the three wishes, Devout Invocation, Windreader Shpinx…). I bought more than 200 copies of these as part of my experiment on the core set mythics (if you read my articles, I bought all of the 15 mythics for an equivalent Tix amount to see what would happen). None of these mythics really took off and pretty much always stayed in the 0.4-1 Tix range. When a slight spike occurred I decided to sell them all. I sold the first 50 copies with a little profit, the next 50-70 copies breaking even but lost value on the 100 or so last copies. I took me forever to sell all of this without sacrificing to much on the price. When a card is not in demand the market is easily saturated and prices drops.

Hope it helps.

Also, you have a high bankroll I believe. Do you not invest heavily in the smaller specs simply for the issue of having to move all of them? That seems to be the factor that a lot of people in both MTGO an paper don’t take into account. Cool, you bought 500 copies of a bulk rare that is now worth $1.50. You made 1000% profit, but how are you going to sell 500 copies of this card? Cards like Voice are easier to move because they are staples and the demand is driving the price up, where as some random spike card is harder to move once the spike is over.

Am I on the right page?