Tick sizes are already prescribed. Two decimal places. It’s already an arbitrary limit that is variable depending on how expensive an item is.
My own objective knowledge from this being my career for the last decade about this exact topic, I’ve provided objective data supporting my conclusions about how this is incorrect. Spreads are tighter, liquidity is more evenly distributed, a market is healthier. The stock market has rules and regulations about how a stock must be priced and to what precision it is priced at for precisely these reasons.
These players sometimes list their items to sell, but they also sell to the best bid to get instant cash now. Because many times, they don’t have time to wait.
And this same logic also means that the bids will be similarly higher. So they will get a better price.
More economic activity will trade in a tighter spread closer to the “true value”, and less economic activity will trade further out bouncing between two clusters of orders far apart.
People already as it is don’t place multiple sell orders. They already do the “one big order to sell”. I’m not sure what changing the tick size does to affect the ability or willingness to someone to list an item they otherwise already have sitting around.
Unclear about private contract usage. That is a very different market. Focused on locality, where shipment is not an option and many are pre-arranged trades (using CONTD). I am far less confident on this than I am on other matters - but I suspect there will be no meaningful impact to CX vs. LM usage directly as a result of the tick size changes. They have such wildly different usages I don’t think changes to one will affect the usage of the other.
But I like volatility. It makes the game more interesting. I fail to see why that should be something that everyone is against. Especially the relatively minor impact to volatility (if any) that scaled tick sizes would theoretically have. If you post at the same price as an existing order because “the tick size is too large”, that would reduce volatility.
As for the reduced liquidity argument, I’m not yet convinced it would be a problem. Scaling tick sizes up or down slightly depending on the market is (by definition) selecting an ideal, meaningful difference in price. If we pretend that the tick sizes would be poorly selected if they scaled, yeah maybe they’d cause some problems, but that’s not what anyone is suggesting.
Besides that, people seem to forget that you don’t HAVE to place an order that is higher or lower than existing ones. You can always place an order at the same price and wait your place in line–the one with the existing order did beat you to it, after all.
Also as the risk of sounding like a broken record having used this point in a recent thread… Are we really arguing that we should be able to place a BSE order that’s only .01 better than the person who beat you to the market with effectively the same price you’re posting at? (A .01 difference in that market is effectively the same price if we’re being reasonable.) That’s essentially cutting in line with an offer that isn’t meaningfully different, and it wasn’t even the first offer made.
If you pay for a product first, any reasonable person would expect to get that product before someone who paid the same price but did so at a later date.
Funnily enough, the way I see it, if tick sizes are set too insignificant to have a negative impact, they will also be too insignificant to have a positive impact.
People will have their 1380$ BSE orders underbid at 1370$. They will have their 87.6$ DW orders underbid at 87.5$. That’s why I don’t care that much. Barely anything will change.
In principle these listed effects are the negative effects of tick sizes. In practice, though, 3-sig ticks are most likely irrelevant because our PrUn markets aren’t that liquid to begin with. I’m against tick sizes within this context. I will say I am against it, but I see no reason to rise up in arms about it.
Regarding “I like volatility”, there are many more effective ways to achieve volatility than setting tick sizes. You yourself said that tick sizes won’t do much for volatility, anyway, so I doubt I’ll need to list unnecessary examples
Yeah that is a valid point about the significance I suppose. But it’s significant enough to matter to many people because the topic keeps coming up over and over. Clearly it’s something bothering a lot of us for whatever reasons. Whether it’s “penny wars are annoying” or “order books are cluttered” or “cutting in line should incur some cost”.
But yes we’re not talking about a huge change to the game’s finances here, it’s more of a quality of life change for me, which is one reason I find it baffling that some seem so opposed to what seems like a common sense way to determine price granularity in markets which have very different price ranges.
For me one reason to have “scaled tick sizes” (which I think is a better term, we really do have tick sizes, they’re just arbitrary and unscaled) is to clean up visual clutter in order books and give price differences at least some meaning. With the UI as complex as it is, anything to keep things more compact and reduce visual clutter is helpful. All the extra 0’s and decimal points don’t help. Additionally, there should be at least some cost for going to the head of the line and currently it’s often insignificant.
One area I think I probably depart from most is this argument that “it’s not worth the developer effort”. Maybe it’s because I’m a dev myself so I think in these terms a lot more, but I would say it definitely is worth doing small quality of life changes IF the effort is also small; and much more so if it can’t be done by a 3rd party (ex. plugin), which this can’t. I expect the effort to do this on the client side (which should be good enough) is not significant.
Prices entered when creating orders on commodity exchanges are now converted into an “effective price” that is shown right below the price you put in. The effective price is the one that will actually be posted with the order and is always rounded o 3 significant figures . This means for prices above 10 the minimum increment is 0.1, for prices above 100 the minimum increment is 1, and so on.
Yes. As per my original suggestion & lobbying efforts dating back nearly year (seen here: POPI and Taxation going forward), “scaled” tick sizes to 3 sig figs was implemented. My campaign was a success!
Congratulations. Now you’ve made buying items on the CX more expensive for everyone. So instead of paying a cent or a couple cents to buy into the next order on the orderbook… I have to pay .10 & .50 or more.
Yes, but not if there is little liquidity because of lack of participants as in most markets except for SF/FF and consumables and those were fine because of sufficient liquidity.
You aren’t forced into any price just because there’s an existing order. I’m not sure why that keeps getting repeated. You can post at the same price and wait a bit more for the player who beat you to posting at that same price. Assuming there’s any wait at all.
Oh no not this again! Our market consultant needs a post compiling all of this info and past discussion around it, to direct people to and for the devs
