Bidding Strategies for Emovie: Early, Late, Anytime

[ATLfun]

 T posted this query in another thread:

Hey Brian... since you're here, I have a question for you too.  I checked Bruce's auctions and saw your name attached to a few items.  If you don't mind me asking, why do you bid so early?  I'm trying to understand how early bidders function, and their reasoning, because so far, no one, not even Bruce, has been able to explain it to me.

T

[ATLfun]

  My response:


Yeah, I am not sure I have a good answer for you. On one hand, I am like does it really matter when you bid? Sometimes, I forget to bid or get tied up and cannot bid.

  Then part of me is like we all know what it is worth. Like that lucky stripe pf, why should it sit at $60. Is my bid really going to draw attention to a rare poster that would not have been there otherwise?

  If I could snipe, then I would never bid early. But with Bruce's system, there is no real advantage to waiting until the last second.  If anything, I think a sub-2 minute bidding war is more intense and more mano y mano than early bidding wars.

   I guess my question to you would be what it is the great advantage to waiting? Bruce run's around like a chicken with his head cut-off letting people know which items have no bids or low bids.        

   So one could argue that a low bid or no bid draws more attention to an item.


   Any other thoughts?

   Brian



  

[Tob]

Early bids can be quite effective as a strategy, if I see a load of bids on an item, I sometimes just walk away as I think it won't go for a nice low price. Conversely, it's annoying when I think "great! I must be the only person watching on this poster with my last minute snipe!" and 5 other people all snipe at the same time and beat me to it. Ha ha!

[holiday]

At the same time, waiting until the last minute, you have the benefit of the chance that those who placed early bids forgot about the auction.  How many times have we heard someone the blues that they forgot and lost the item that they would have bid higher.

I bid early and low in order to get the items to show up on my bids list.  I have to balance what I want and what I don't want, so the watch list is less useful to me than what I want to actually bid on.  It's easier to track.

I don't bid an item high in the early stages.  That will just drive the price up as soon as there is one other interested bidder, if that bidder also bids early.  Also, driving the price up early can confirm for novices that an item is real.  For instance, a $20 bid on a Lucky Strikes Pulp Fiction up to the closing day of an auction may lead a novice to conclude it's not real because no one is bidding it up.  Conversely, if it's already up to $450 3 days before the auction, that shores up the belief that it's real, for why would they bid it that high if it was not?

There's a lot that goes into it.  Even on ebay, I bid early, but then mostly to try and keep the seller from taking the listing off.  I've seen a few listings that got yanked that may not have had I bid. Then, I put my snipe in and let it be.

[ATLfun]

 For instance, a $20 bid on a Lucky Strikes Pulp Fiction up to the closing day of an auction may lead a novice to conclude it's not real because no one is bidding it up.  Conversely, if it's already up to $450 3 days before the auction, that shores up the belief that it's real, for why would they bid it that high if it was not?

 On ebay, I agree 110% on this point.  Like a Star Wars teaser from a non poster dealer with $400 in bids, I would assume it was legit.  But with Bruce, I think even newbies such as myself recognize his stellar reputation for selling originals.  I mean it is at the bottom of his home page, so it must be true, right.  ;Dt

Brian

[Bruce]

All good points so far.

There ARE tons of people who absolutely positively are going to bid solely at the end, and they somehow forget, and sometimes those items go high anyway, but sometimes they go under (a few times WAY under) what those people were planning on bidding, and often it is an early bidder who ends up with it, so THIS is indeed the biggest advantage to bidding early.

The biggest disadvantage? You may give someone else valuable information about how high to bid. Say a $300 item was at $50 with a day to go, The novice might bid $100, thinking he was doubling the bid, not knowing there are several people planning on bidding $200 or more. His $100 bid is blown away, and he loses, whereas if the other bidder had bid $200 early, then the newb might have seen his $100 outbid, and then kept on chipping away until he got to $205.

But this means far more on eBay! There, you can bid with seconds to go, and the newb never knows what hit him. But in our auctions, even if you wait until 5 minutes to go to bid, then he stills gets to see if he is outbid, but of course ONLY if he too is at his computer with 5 minutes to go, which is a big IF. If he is not there, he gets outbid.

I will write more when I have more time, but the optimum strategy (in a perfect world, where you never forget, and where you have two hours to watch the auctions end, and where you can juggle multiple windows if there are more than one item that interests you) is this:

Be available when the items that interest you close, and have each one open in a separate window.
When the first item has exactly 5 minutes left, outbid your opponent by the least needed (you can make many small raises if need be).
Once you have the high bid, then if 5 minutes goes by without a bid, it's yours. If you are outbid, YOU have five minutes to get another bid in.

The advantage of this is that the other bidders MUST be at their computers too (or have left high bids that outbid your best bid) to outbid you, and since you are always just barely beating your opposition, you never need worry about someone "running you up".

I will wait to see what else is posted here and then post more later.

Bruce

[ATLfun]

  Gosh, just a few more minutes before the Thurs. M/M auction is loaded onto Bruce's site and I cannot wait!!!!!!!

[Bruce]

It's there!

 

Bruce

[tstatum]

I'm all over the place.  Early I bid mostly as place holders unless it's something I plan on really going after it, then I will put close to my max bid.  I only bid mid auction if certain bidder take the top spot from me.  And I try to not bid towards the last 10 minutes so I can take the emotional aspect out of it as I will tend to overbid. Of course on any given week on any given item all of these rules can go out the window.

[ATLfun]

  Well tonight, my bid strategy was 50/50.  I used the Bruce method on my first and last immunization poster.  I took the top spot with 5:10 to go and no one overtook me.  But then on the Thurs. M/M,  I could not resist putting a bid on the 6sh SW within the first five minutes of being "live."


  Brian

[Bruce]

tstatum, you make a really good point. The strategy I outlined only works if you follow it perfectly (which means you can't forget, can't get overwhelmed by several items closing near each other, and can't get emotional when you are outbid at the end and bid more than you really wanted to!).

I know that many people wonder why some people bid so much (or so high) so early, and if they had unlimited money, they would likely wait for the very end. But by doing a bunch of bidding early, they are able to see what items are "within their reach" and what items are not, and that way they can focus on the ones they have the best chance at.

The only person I know on this forum who remains cool and calm and collected ALL the time, and never loses his head and bids more than he intended to is Thierry! Everyone else would surely admit to some (or many) times where they ended up bidding far more than they would have liked to, but that's just something that happens to most every collector when they are bidding right at the end!

And Brian, we sold three of those six-sheets before, so it is not like it is one of a kind. If you have a place to display it, I say go for it (within reason) but if it would just sit in a closet until you sold it, then what's the point? But if it were on your wall, I guarantee every guest to your house would comment on it, far more than would comment on many far more valuable posters!

Bruce

[theartofmovieposters]

And I try to not bid towards the last 10 minutes so I can take the emotional aspect out of it as I will tend to overbid.

Completely agree with you.

[holiday]

  Well tonight, my bid strategy was 50/50.  I used the Bruce method on my first and last immunization poster.  I took the top spot with 5:10 to go and no one overtook me.  But then on the Thurs. M/M,  I could not resist putting a bid on the 6sh SW within the first five minutes of being "live."


  Brian

Looks like you've already been outbid by the dually feared and loathed anonymouse!

[eatbrie]

I bid 3 seconds before the end of an Ebay item, and 4:50 on emovie.  I usually watch 20 or so items.  When it goes under 5 minutes, I know what people think it's worth and decide to drop it all together or bid on it.  If I really want it, I go very high, sometimes 3 times the amount.  If I don't, if it's only a collection filler, I bid a little above and hope no one overbids me.  I have a pretty good idea of what I can find something for on Ebay, and there are so many posters I want, I go on to the next best thing if an item goes above what I think is the right price.  No time to cry.

T

[Louie D.]

I like to get nude, pour a glass of a nice Bordeaux, and bid whenever I feel like it.

[MoviePosterBid.com]

I like to get nude, pour a glass of a nice Bordeaux, and bid whenever I feel like it.

Louie having fun on Weds nights:

[Louie D.]

Louie having fun on Weds nights:

Awwwwww, c'mon Rich, really???  WTF.

[MoviePosterBid.com]

Awwwwww, c'mon Rich, really???  WTF.

it was the best picture I could find.. is it the wrong profile?

 

[MoviePosterBid.com]

is this better

[Louie D.]

is this better

HAHAHAHAHA!  Fucking YES!

[MoviePosterBid.com]

HAHAHAHAHA!  Fucking YES!

it just took a while to go through the photo album
 

[kovacs01]

My strategy is to bid when my max bid is 30% more than the current bid.  So if my max bid is $250, I try to get my bid in when its around $190.  If it doesn't get there, anytime during the last 6 hours or so works for me.  Hopefully, that is enough to make the competition go away.  I just try to avoid giving someone else hope by throwing a small increase and outbidding me.  The thinking is that most of the time the max bid shown is at or near the max for that bidder.  In order to outbid me, they will need either a LOT of min level increases or a very large bet increase.  So I call my strategy the "hope crusher".

Oh, and I am pretty sure that fat guy's ass is eating his office chair.

[MoviePosterBid.com]

my bidding strategy is simple: I bid what I want to. I win or I lose
when I lose, I go to the winning bidder's home with a baseball bat and get the item for free

[Charlie]

I bid late and up to what I think I can get away with from the wife...

[ATLfun]

   I hear you brother. I had to do some negotiation this past weekend at the designer outlet mall.  I negotiated three poster purchases over the next two weeks in exchange for a leather jacket from Tommy for my wife.  And, I had to toss in a romantic dinner this weekend. 

   Brian