*Snip*
We expected that, come the BGS update cycle, we'd have made a nice fat negative effect, or no effect at all. If we had no effect at all, it might indicate that 'tills ringing' (i.e. quantity of buy/sell button pushes) is NOT the primary catalyst, and that it probably WAS something to do with either volume or profit or price-per-ton. If we got that negative effect, it proved that the 'till ringing' philosophy had merit, after all. Throughout all of this, we still believed the common view that 'imports in, hurt'.
What actually happened, we never expected at all!
The damned station's influence went up by 2% overnight - the most 'action' we'd ever seen from that place in one hit.
As far as we're concerned, it proved (not beyond all doubt, but reasonably well enough to keep testing the theory elsewhere, which we're still doing) that profit, value, quantity AND DIRECTION (import/export) of trade has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER. It's just 'tills ringing' that matters. Doesn't matter whether you sell in, or buy out. Doesn't matter whether it's mega-tons per transaction, or million-CR profits per transaction, or fantastic turnover per transaction. It's just... transactions. Sell a million tons by a million SELL clicks, and you'll add a million 'trade' chips into the trade-pool for influence reckoning later. I believe it's that simple.
And this does actually make some logical sense, if you think about it - and not just from the POV of the developers keeping the tracking and data management realistically small to be able to process it all in one nightly script. It makes sense from market POV, too. As someone who's played a fair bit of real-life stock market and been a successful day trader in the past, I'm familiar with the concept of 'market-makers' - perhaps you are too. They're the guys who 'make' the stock market run. When trading volume is low, they lower their offer price on a stock to make it look 'cheap' - and to attract buyers. The buyers they generate, feed the market. The market-makers will change their bid price too, to help influence, and indirectly control, the pressure of sellers against them, if the volume is great and they are running out of stock to be able to sell. They do not give a tuppeny hoot about the actual VALUE of the stock. They live for the spread - the bid-vs-offer price difference. What they care about is CHURN. Sales-volume. Tills ringing. Every ounce of stock they buy at price 'n' will be sold later at greater price 'n'+x - if the market is slow and volume is down, then x will be small. If business is booming and till are ringing, x doesn't matter, but it will be larger most likely, to capitalise on the volume. If the market gets really bad they will vary 'n' price, and offer to buy stock lower, causing the market to feed off its own fears and 'shake the tree' making the less-confident weaker ones sell up and run - but still, they will be selling that same lower-cost stock back to the market (if there are takers) at 'reduced-n' plus 'some-x-or-other'... i.e, always at a profit.
That is what market makers do. And imho, that is what Elite's Commodity Markets do, too. Prices alter (albeit slowly and in fits and starts) based on volume of transactions, demand and supply. Station markets don't lose money - they merely sit on stock for long periods when the market goes cold. The stock they buy in, they will sell again later, usually at a profit; sometimes healthy, sometimes not. On average, they always win, because they don't 'own' the stock; it's stock; they trade it. They churn it. Goods in, money out; goods out, money in - usually more. A ringing till is a happy till. Everything on the shelf has an asset value, and if it's lower today than it was yesterday, it doesn't matter, because tomorrow we will be buying it back for less than today, and although we're selling it for less than yesterday, it's still being sold for more than we paid for it - or it doesn't get sold.
Hence, I believe, that 'TRADE' in ED means just that. Tills ringing. Churn. Individual presses of the BUY or SELL button. That's all that matters.
Please test it. Please prove me wrong - I'd be happy to have supporting evidence, because we've spent a helluva long time working this through. But that's what we're seeing (more than the one example given above).
My other gut feeling is that all the observations about influence increases and decreases when exporting versus importing, value, profit, etc, is confabulation. We are cavemen in a spring storm, watching the lightning, hearing the thunder, feeling the rain, seeing frogs on the ground, heading for ponds and pools. Pretty soon, we reach the conclusion that lightning causes frogs, and frogs must come down from the sky when it rains. We don't know that it's because it's springtime, and the frogs are just coming out of their winter hibernation under piles of damp rocks, and heading for a pond to look for a mate - that's far too advanced a concept for the caveman, and unless he's in the habit of turning over the right rocks, all through winter, he'll just put his two-and-two together and get five. Frogs come down from the clouds via the lightning. Simple. Aren't we?
To be fair, we aren't. But you get the analogy, I hope. I believe it's actually the underlying trade calculation mechanic that is simple - but being human, we always look for a more complex, rounded, convincing and elegant explanation, sometimes because we can't see the simplicity, or can't imagine that it would really be allowed to be that simple. But just ask
Occam. He's usually right. And he's very, very sharp.
TL;DR - buy, and most importantly, SELL one tonne at a time, loads and loads of times. See what happens to influence. Then tell us.
