Learning from mistakes

I was working through my large list of mission loot today, putting everything up for sale on the market. As I'm doing this, I'm looking at the prices, to try and understand how other traders think, how they work (trading isn't just about buy and sell price, it's about your competition). That's when I fell on this little situation:

I spotted this item yesterday, because I had one in my mission loot inventory. When I put it up for sale, I saw the huge discrepancy between the buy and sell prices. I had no plans to start buying yet, since I want to get rid of my current inventory. But I took note of it for later.

This morning I came back to it, and saw the above situation. Clearly, a bunch of sellers aren't paying attention. What I suspect happened is that the person selling at 17,000 ISK came in, opened the Market window, saw the lowest price, and immediately posted without looking where the lowest price was posted. The seller is likely giving up big profits by not posting at 107,000 ISK or so. But then, the next several sellers show up and do the same thing. So now the price in Jita for this item dropped from 108,999 ISK to 14,000 in one fell swoop.

This looks like a great opportunity, no? Just buy all the items in the system selling between 14,000-17,000, then resell them at 107,000. Easy money!

Well, hold on a sec. When something looks too good to be true, it probably is. So I did a bit more research. I checked two things. Does this item actually sell a lot? The price history says this sells between 50-100 units per day during the week, hovers around 100 units per day on weekends, and can spike to well over 200 units every once in a while (once every 3-4 weeks or so). That's not bad volume. If you buy up all the units priced at 14,000-17,000, you'd only have to worry about selling 9 units.

What about historical prices? Here's where the picture muddles a bit. Generally, this item sells for 6,000-7,000 ISK. Every once in a while, the price spikes to 20k-30k. But never 100k+. So the units priced at 14k-17k are actually still a little high.

Unfortunately for me, I did this research AFTER I bought the low-priced units. I'm fortunate, the price I paid for being hasty was less than 150k, and it will be far less than that once these items are sold. But this is a good lesson in looking at all the factors before making a purchase.