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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

michaeleisen.org

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Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#131

Post by orijing »

ig1 wrote: post #98
ig1 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offering to sell stocks at a below-market price without an intention to complete the deal is market manipulation and illegal in most countries.

Er...why was this downvoted ? I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked in the financial sector and undergone FSA mandated training courses on what you can and can't legally do with equity pricing. What the OP was suggesting is an illegal practice in most equity markets.

How do you know it's downvoted? I sort of miss the karma number next to each post :(

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#132

Post by ropers »

siegler wrote: post #21

A similar thing happened to me as a seller. I saw that one of my old textbooks was selling for a nice price, so I listed it along with two other used copies. I priced it $1 cheaper than the lowest price offered, but within an hour both sellers had changed their prices to $.01 and $.02 cheaper than mine. I reduced it two times more by $1, and each time they beat my price by a cent or two. So what I did was reduce my p…

And that's how the American economy "works".

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#133

Post by ropers »

Angostura wrote: post #85
naner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could turn this into a book business. List books for sale that you don't own and this other publisher does own. Reduce the price over time until it is super cheap. Buy while it is low and resell it without the competition.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to show how to determine whether the other publisher actually does have a copy, or is indulging in similar behaviour.

This reminds me of a similarly unethical behaviour I've encountered recently: I tried to buy a certain rare electronics component, and found it listed by a bunch of people. There were lots of bait-and-switchers in the Google results, who only had the part listed for the googlebot to pick up, but as soon as I actually tried to order the part, their site told me they didn't actually have it and suggested I buy something else from them.

It gets worse: When I finally did find a seller who allowed me to order the part, they accepted my order -- and then came back later saying that, oh no, actually they didn't have it either, but would I like to convert my order into an order for something else? (Fuck off.)

I still don't have the part.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#134

Post by fr0sty »

hchasen wrote: post #127
anamax wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And (from what I understand) this is just the kind of thing that High Frequency Trading algorithms are doing. In stocks, there's almost always someone willing to buy and someone else willing to sell at any given price, so how are you going to drive the price down without selling stock?

That is the most fascinating myth I continue to hear about the market. As a non-seat owner, you see three prices: The price of the last trade OVER 15 minutes ago, where a buyer and a seller agreed to buy. The highest price someone offered to buy the stock 15 minutes ago, and the lowest price someone offered to sell the stock 15 minutes ago. When you actually buy or sell a stock, you often do not buy from or sell to a…

Please update your facts. Almost every online broker offers real time pricing for US equities and some even provide the depth of book. What you say above (15minute delayed quotes) was true several years ago but things have changed.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#135

Post by eru »

coolgeek wrote: post #120
eru wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you talking about naked calls ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_call )?

Them too. Both involve "selling something you don't own" (the underlying security), a point disputed in the post I was replying to.

I don't see how writing naked puts involves selling. They involve buying, only.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#136

Post by smackfu »

ambiguity wrote: post #29
weaksauce wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that. It's a great lesson to programmers that we should think about the extreme cases and have set lower and upper bounds on our algorithms. Sanity checks should be in your code for most applications and inputs.

Amazon should put an upper bound on the maximum price a product can be. Can credit card companies even process a transaction in the tens of millions of dollars?

So they make it $10k, and the post is about the $10k book instead.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#137

Post by smackfu »

baddox wrote: post #16
lsc wrote: post #14

oh man. reminds me of the days when I sold books on amazon and half.com. I wrote a script that took the 'nickel less than the other guy' approach. These things are /wonderful/ when it comes to making the market more efficient. Really, though, the shipping costs eat up most of the efficiency. Amazon needs an easy way to say "I want these 10 books, used. Find me the lowest price (including shipping)" - the idea is that…

Everyone always mentions that buying more items from a single Amazon store would make shipping cheaper? Is that ever true? Of all the online stores I've made purchases from, I believe monoprice is the only one that appears to base shipping on tiers based on item size/mass. All the rest simply charge a set rate for each item, and it doesn't matter how you divide your shipments up into different orders.

Another very common system is to base the shipping cost on the total order price. Not very accurate, really, but mainly used because it's simpler for people to handle when filling out the order form that comes with a paper catalog.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#138

Post by smackfu »

nightpool wrote: post #105
Qz wrote: post #26

A quick visit to amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_adv_b/?search-alias=s... Multiple books priced upwards of $600m. One has a Kindle edition for 9.99.

A few of these only have one seller. Money laundering? A different algorithmical problem? Something else?

Could be this: If two sellers have the book, and are setting the prices algorithmically, and then one of them sells it offline (like in a used bookshop) and removes it from sale, how does the other seller change their price to be more realistic?

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#139

Post by smackfu »

5teev wrote: post #81
Figs wrote: post #78

I've seen lots of books on Amazon priced at $0.01 or $0.02 before. Maybe a result of similar processes? (I always assumed they were some kind of scam, since why the hell would someone sell a book so cheap?)

Those sellers are counting on making money by shipping for less than the amount by which Amazon reimburses them. ($3.99 for a recent purchase of mine, while the postage was about $2.00.)

Right. Practically speaking, these people aren't actually selling books, they are just making money by doing the "handling" part of S&H.

Re: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

#140

Post by ig1 »

orijing wrote: post #131
ig1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er...why was this downvoted ? I'm not a lawyer, but I've worked in the financial sector and undergone FSA mandated training courses on what you can and can't legally do with equity pricing. What the OP was suggesting is an illegal practice in most equity markets.

How do you know it's downvoted? I sort of miss the karma number next to each post :(

You can see your own Karma
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