[FW]Trading on the Monetary Market

In this article i want to show you what you can do on the monetary market (MM). the currency displayed here is ruble as i have the russian citizenship (CS). if you go to the MM it is all the same because there is not one MM for every country. instead all offers are displayed on one MM and the currency displayed is always the currency of the country of your CS. therefore if you are citizen from the USA you will see my offers in dollar even if i see my own offers in rubles. this means that in fact there are no different currencies as they are just displayed different on the MM to match your CS-country. because of this i will speak just of 'currency' (cc) hereafter.

The structure of the article: first i will give a quick overview on the MM-page. in the second part i will tell you how to change your gold to currency. then i will tell you how to change currency back to gold. in the last part of the article i will give some tips about how you can make money on the MM. so if you already know how to trade you can scroll down to '4. HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH TRADING'. (at the very end there is a short list of abbreviations)




1. THE MONETARY MARKET – OVERVIEW

so for all newbies a quick overview.
if you visit the MM you will end up on the page you see in fig.1. for now i will just tell you in short what you can see and do here.


fig.1: buy gold marked


red square
this indicates that you are on the page where you can buy gold (with your cc) = 'all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page

green square
here you can see the 2nd cheapest offer of gold (g). the citizen who has made this offer is ikosony34. he is offering 12.40g. and he is selling 1g for 388.3cc (1g:388.3cc). in the column 'buy' you can type in an amount of gold you want to buy. don't forget the 10g-limit: you can get at a max 10g per day. getting donations also will fall into this limit! so if you got a donation of 6g you can buy not more than 4g on the same day. if you sell or dissolve companies this will not effect your 10g-limit.

orange square
add offer: here you can put your own offer on the market
my offers: here you can see all your own offers you have on market
all offers: here you can switch back to 'all offers' if you are on the 'my offers'-page. this means you go back to the page with all the offers on the market either the 'buy gold'-page (fig.1) or the 'buy currency'-page (fig.2).

yellow circle
here you can switch from the 'all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page(fig.1) to the 'all offers buy currency ↔ sell gold'-page (fig.2) by pressing the arrows.

grey numbers at the bottom
here you see at which page you are. in fig.1 you are on page1. here are the best/cheapest offers.


2. HOW TO CHANGE GOLD INTO CURRENCY

well you have made some gold through working hard or fighting even harder. now you need new food and weapons to continue. the problem is: you can't buy these with gold on the market – you need currency! in the following two sections i will show you 2 different ways to change your gold to currency.


2.1 BUY CURRENCY
as covered in the overview you can switch from the 'buy gold'-page (fig.1) to the 'buy currency'-page if you press the arrows. if you do so you will end up on the page you see in fig.2.


fig.2: buy currency



on the left you see who is making the offer, then the amount of cc he is willing to sell and then the prize. the offers here are all the same so it doesn't really matter from whom you will buy. here the rate is 1cc costs 0.003g. so if you wish to buy 1000cc it will cost you 3g. you have no limit for buying currency you just need to have enough gold. but this is not really the best way to change your gold to currency.


2.2 OFFER GOLD
there is a better way to get currency than to buy it – that is offering gold in exchange for currency. the question now is how to do this. it is quite easy: just click on the 'add offer'-button. you want to offer gold which means you want to buy currency and sell gold! so please push the switch button until you get 'buy currency ↔ sell gold' and all offers below are offers of currency to gold (see fig.3).


fig.3: offer gold



to see how high your offer has to be you should open the MM-page in a second tab where people offer gold to buy currency. you get there if you push 'all offers' and switch to 'buy gold ↔ sell currency' or if you just open the MM in a new tab – because it will always start there. you will end up on the page you see in fig.4.

fig.4: buy gold page1


here you see that the best offer is 0.14g for 1g:387cc. because this will be bought very quick you can make your own offer a bit higher. if you need your currency quick then you can go just below the second offer of 1g:388.3cc that would be around 388. so if you go back to the tab with your offer (fig.3) type in the amount of gold you want to change and the rate. here you have again no limit – same as before with buying currency. as we said a good rate below the second offer but higher that the first on the market would be 1g:388cc. so you type a 388 in the second box (fig.3). now just push 'save' and your offer will be on the MM shortly. you can even see it if you open the 'all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page as long as it was not bought.

so why making it so difficult? why not just buy the gold – it would be just 1step!?
remember that with buying gold you had a exchange rate of 1cc:0.003g. and we said this means if you want to buy 1000cc it will cost you 3g?so lets take a look what we get when we make an offer to sell gold for currency instead of directly buying currency with gold:
we said a good offer would be 1:388 meaning for 1g you get 388cc. so if you don't buy currency with 3g but offer these 3g for 1:388 what do you get? right you will get 3 x 388cc = 1164cc. and how much did you get with buying currency for 3g? yes just 1000cc! that makes a difference of 164cc which you lose if you just buy currency directly!

what if you need gold? you need to know how to get gold too. so in the next part of this article i want to show you the 2 ways of changing currency to gold. over all it will be the same procedure so i will make it short.


3. HOW TO CHANGE CURRENCY INTO GOLD

one reason you need to know how to get gold for currency?
well, maybe you know the situation: yeah you sold products and worked and now you have a sh.tload of currency. nice! but now there is a special offer for upgrading companies and training-centers so you need gold! well then, lets see how to make your currency to gold.


3.1 BUY GOLD
to buy gold you need to go to the 'all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page (see fig.1 or 4). there you see all the offers and can buy one. don't forget the 10g-limit. so if you need 10g the best offer to choose from in our example is the second with 12g for 1g:388.3cc. you would pay 3883cc for 10g here. (of course you can also buy from the first cheaper offer if it is still there and more from the second to get the full 10g you need – i just didn't want to make the example to complicated)


3.2 OFFER CURRENCY
well how to make an offer is something we had already (see 2.2 OFFER GOLD) in fig.5 you can see that the screen for making an offer of currency is not that different from the other one where you offer gold (fig.3).
in fig.2 (which is the 'all offers buy currency ↔ sell gold'-page) you could already see that like over 10.000 offers are at 1cc:0.003g. so you won't put your offer at 1cc:0.004 it would mean that for 1000cc one would have to pay 4g. meaning your offer would be gone at the very end of all the list and nobody would ever buy because at 1cc:0.003g he will just pay 3g for 1000cc. but you also don't want to offer at 1cc:0.002g. you will certainly sell this one. but it would mean for 1000cc you offer you just get 2g. that would mean for 10g you need to offer 5000cc!

so what to do? well you have no other choice than to offer your currency for 1cc:0.003g too like everybody else. that way you will maybe get 10g someday if you offer 3334cc and if you are lucky.

this is way less currency than you need to pay for 10g if you buy it directly. but the problem is: it takes time and with your luck you won't even sell enough currency... so this is the best way to save money but it is not suited to make quick gold for upgrade-events!


fig.5: offer currency



4. HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH TRADING

what i will say here are not really tips. because they are not mysteries and i even thought every citizen of erepublik would know this stuff and use it. but i had to learn that this isn't really the case at all. so in this last part i will show you the different ways to make money on the MM.


4.1 LONG TERM TRADING
watching the MM for some weeks you will see that the MM will go up when there are some special offers. so if you are ready to risk some money you can buy gold now for ~388cc/g and hope that with the next special offer the MM will go higher than that. if the MM goes up to 398cc you make 10cc profit for every gold that you bought before! note that there is the 10g-limit to buy gold but no limit for selling gold – so you can buy much gold in 10g-packages and then at the right moment you can sell it all to make a good profit.

problem here is that you may lose money if it doesn't go as you thought and the MM won't move up but further down


4.2 DAYTRADING
here you don't get gold or currency and then hope to sell it later. here the aim is to trade back and forth on the same day or even at the same login time to have your save profit - because you can never know what will happened on the MM while you log out or while you sleep in RL (if you still do that). so now: how do you daytrade?

if you watch the MM you will see that the offers on page 1 and 2 ('all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page) are quite the same (see fig.6 and 7). you see that the save low is 388cc and that the offers won't go higher than 389cc per gold. moreover you see that there is quite some amount of gold involved with offers of up to 50g. this indicates that it is save and if you sell for 1g:388cc now the MM won't jump to 1g:400cc in the next minutes or hours - and then you sit there and just got 388cc instead of 400 per gold. we don't want that so we check if it is safe to bit as low as the offers are on the first page.

so what to do?
you can make profit if you wait for someone to go even lower than the 388 on the first page. so if you see someone selling for 384 you just buy his gold and sell it again at the save mark of 388. it is only a small profit of 4cc per gold but it is a save way to make some money. if you bought 10g and resold them this way you just made 40cc. if you are lucky you can get higher profit (especially in the erepublik evening after 15:00). this way you can buy multiple low offers and sell the gold for more currency than you paid. (of course you can also sell gold at the save mark of 1g:388cc to buy the gold back at a lower rate in the second step. but here you have a risk that the lower rate may not come.)

problem here is that the profit is low. but the risk is low too!


fig.6: buy gold page1


fig.7: buy gold page2



4.3 HOP ON THE TRAIN
this one is a special form of daytrading. because it is a form of daytrading with the possibility of higher profit. the name is a bit stupid but i can't come up with a better one and don't know the probably existing right term in english so i just call it 'hop on the train'. you can see it sometimes in the late evening [~17:00 ereptime and later - but thats just my observation...]: there are some guys who really seem to be needing currency and they have tons of gold - i just call them goldbuyers but probably it's not just these guys (you can see government-orgs doing this too for example). so sometimes around 17:00+ of the erepublik-day you see some guys with 100 to 300gold and they want it all in currency and give a very good offer. and because there will always come a guy who needs his currency faster they will be underbid and will go even lower with their offer. this can go quite low as i have seen 2 goldbuyers and some other guys driving their MM-offers more than 100cc below the usual mark of the MM (last time i saw this the usual rate at the MM was ~1g:650cc so at the moment with 1g:380cc the equivalent would be a drop of at least 60cc). if you buy gold from them at a low point and the market 'recovers' after all their gold is bought you can sell the gold you bought cheap from them for the higher 'usual price' we have now (at the moment 1g:388cc) and make a good profit. so if you have now the normal price at 1g:388cc it is not impossible that some of these guys will drive it down to at least 1g:370cc. if you buy gold then for 370 and re-sell it for 388cc again you make a profit of 18cc per gold!

in fig.8 you can see what could be the beginning of something good: in red you see the 'goldbuyer' with >400g he needs in currency and in green you see the other guy who can't wait. in between there are some very low offers - some are trying to get the goldbuyer to lower his offer so that it doesn't 'vanish' on the 2nd page of the MM. the top offer for 380 is one you could buy and then re-sell for 386.5cc without any risk. if you do that with 10g you get easy profit of 65cc. you could wait a while longer too and hope that the goldbuyer will set his offer on the top of the list again to get rid of all his gold faster - making the gold you buy from the MM cheaper. but don't wait too long! to find these offers you don't really have to lurk on the MM all the day (it does help though). just take a little detour to the MM everytime you login and before you log out. just by doing this you will not just find your friend the goldbuyer from time to time but you also get a feeling of the MM-movements and the influence of some special events.


fig.8: the goldbuyer is your friend



and trust me: when i tell you to look at the MM from time to time it is not just something i say - it is something i do myself. so what do my sleep-deprived eyes catch later this day? well in fig.9 you can see the real action ~18:00 erepublik time. involved here are two big players in red and the very nice offer from the other guy in green. you will get offers like this often when there are more players involved because in cases like this the MM is moving down constantly - mostly in very small steps but constantly. and offers like the one in green happen either because the offerer really can't wait and doesn't want to be underbid again and again by some 0.01cc or because he just made a mistake (here it could be that the guy in green offered for 370 but wanted to offer for 380 instead). whatever the reason -impatience or a mistake- this is what you are looking for! and when you come to the MM and you see a goldbuyer (or even better more than one) then it is propably a good idea to stay for a while.

problem here is that you can not just 'hop' at the wrong time (= too early or to late, meaning you make lower profit than you could have by buying gold at higher rate than the 'goldbuyers lowest'). no it is even possible to hop on the wrong train. so what if the MM goes down from 1g:388cc to 1g:368cc? thats cheaper gold than before! but check the 2nd and the 3rd page of the MM, please! because if not just some strange cash cows are loading their new gold on the market BUT the whole MM is moving down you may have a problem if you buy the offers. if you think it won't go much lower and buy at one point when the MM is moving down (for example at 1g:368cc) but then the MM is moving even more down (to 1g:310cc) you have bought quite expensive gold. you can hope that the MM will go up again but there are times when this doesn't happen.

big changes of the value of gold and currency and therefore big changes of the MM are often triggered by the admins when they are trying to 'improve' the game again. and these big movements of the MM because of game-changes can go up AND down. but every big movement has its good: if the MM goes down and currency has more worth than before (for example from now 1g:388cc to 1g:300cc) you are lucky if you have most stuff in currency. you get more gold for the currency you have = more booster-training or upgrades! if the MM goes up (for example from 1g:388cc to 1g:2000cc) you are lucky to have much gold. now you get much currency for a few gold coins = with just a few gold in your pockets you may be able to buy a q4-raw-company!


fig.9: two goldbuyers are even better than one



4.4 OFFER CURRENCY
yeah we had this one already in 3.2 OFFER CURRENCY. but in the long run you can make money by offering currency too! now this is possible if you sell 3334cc at the rate of 1cc:0.003g. if someone buys your offer this will get you 10g (thats the simple math-part). the next step is to offer these 10g for currency on the MM (see 2.2 OFFER GOLD) and you will get 3880cc (at a rate of 1g:388cc) at the moment. this is more than 500cc profit!

for this to work you just need to make an offer of currency and wait 10 days (and don't change the offer!). after these 10 days your offer will automatically go to the top of the first page of all currency offers – and with some luck somebody will buy it!

in fig.10 you can see how it may look like when you get your currency-offer back after 10days. in green you see the currency that was bought by somebody. sometimes your currency-offer is bought all at once, sometimes it is bought in parts like here... well and sometimes you sell just a small amount or even nothing. in fig.10 you can see in red that i haven't sold all either - 300cc are coming back unsold. the amount of sold currency equals 9.3g meaning i didn't reach the limit of 10g. btw the unsold 300cc i got back are worth 0.9g and not just the 0.7g left for the limit. thats because my currency offer was a big more than the 3334cc you need for the 10g-limit. moreover the offer got deleted before the end of the erepublik day. so it seems the offer is deleted to the minute 10days after you made it.

problems here are that sometimes you will not sell all currency (if you have bad luck not even 1cc). in addition if the MM changes you can lose money. so at the current rate of 1cc:0.003g this point is when the MM goes below 1g:333.33cc ('all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page). because at this point you get more gold for just buying it directly. if the MM is moving to this point you need to delete your offer and make a new one at 0.004.

when the MM goes higher than 1g:500cc ('all offers buy gold ↔ sell currency'-page) your offer gets too pricy and you again need to change your offer – this time to 1cc:0.002g.

moreover you shouldn't forget the 10g-limit. remember i said it will take 10 days for you offer to get to the top of the offer-list? so on the last of the 10 days you shouldn't daytrade. because if you already reached the limit of 10g for that day your offer will just be deleted automatically and all your currency will come back to you.


fig.10: currency-offer coming back after 10days



now you may think 'but i am a noob! what can i do?'
well, i think the 3 last ones -hop on the train or normal daytrading and currency offers- can be used by newbies too. these are not too risky. the profit may be a bit low for daytrading but with wages ~30cc a profit of 40 or more is not that bad either. first you should use 3334cc for the currency offer (if you know some people maybe you can borrow the money if you don't have it yourself) and then you can use the profits for daytrading. doing this for some weeks and you will have enough money for one or two investments. but please think before you do something. even if you just do what others recommend: YOU still have to live with the consequences and YOU are at fault if you follow bad advice. and don't forget to always check your input twice.

well then have fun on the MM!


regards
eisenmutter2




abbreviations
cc - currency
CS - citizenship
g - gold
MM - monetary market


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