CP BIDS: Let's Get This Right

It looks like this did pick up some $30 bids, so it is even closer to setting a $30 peak. If you haven't bid on this, why not just go ahead and place a $30 bid? That's the best current possible bid and a handful of bids at that price point will bring a flood of interest. Don't wait for it to reach that point...MAKE IT HAPPEN!!

Doc B said:

Someone who knows, and isn't simply speculating, tell me: If I bid below the expected closing price, does it help the thing close?

Well, it could, if what I am describing takes place. This doesn't apply to what you are addressing in terms of "helping out", but bidding low could speed up the process under the following scenario.

It is what happened with the BW3 mEd course on John that ultimately closed at $40. I was campaigning for lower bids when others were piling on at $90. Fortunately, Bob commented that $50 was possible as a cost-covering price point if a certain number of people bid. But that was never going to happen by whittling away at the top. There was a slight bump at $60 and so I become rather obnoxious about encouraging people to bid at that price...and it worked. The price never would have dropped to $60 by trimming down from $90, but once it crossed at $60, tons of new bids poured in. Then Logos took the unusual step of pushing the close date back an extra week. Once that happened, I declared $45 to be easily achievable, and it closed at $40.

I keep harping on this point because every indication is that people refuse to let it sink into their skulls, but HIGH-PRICED BIDS DAMPEN FUTURE BIDS and slows the process down. Yes, eventually things cross the line at inflated price points, but that's because a tiny handful of deep-pocket types are willing to pay nose-bleed prices...and that's kinda my point. ONLY A HANDFUL of people get to participate and take advantage of the CPs that get stuck on prices in the middle or right-side of the chart. MJ's bid mantra of "bid the highest you are willing to pay" encourages high closing prices. George's insistence that no one can have any effect on a CP by bidding lower than the peak is wrong on two points, because he is only thinking about the peak and whittling it down from the top. As we saw with the BW3 CP, that would have ultimately cost everyone who had bid at $90 about $40-50 more than they paid. The DIFFERENCE was that people ignored that advice and bid BELOW THE PEAK and CREATED A NEW PEAK. On that chart, $65, $70, $75, $80 and maybe $85 never crossed the line. The new peak encouraged a slew of additional bidders that pushed the price down even more. CP is nothing if not an exercise in momentum building.

This is a point I think needs to be acknowledged by everyone who plays the CP game. IT IS A GAME! I have heard people say, "I just set my bid at a level I'm comfortable with and wait to see what happens. I don't try to game the system." BUT CP IS DESIGNED AS A SYSTEM TO BE GAMED!! Bob said when he started CP that with a figurative $1000 cost of production, he doesn't care if one person bids $1000 or a thousand people bid $1. He has also said that if everyone who own Logos software bid on every CP, the cost per user would be about $1 each, and that was years ago. Bob doesn't care if we "play the game" to get lower final costs.

The way CP is set up, it is a groupthink exercise--in other words, it is subject to raging fits of illogic. When most participants have completely different perspectives on what they want and how to go about getting it, the result is pretty often chaotic. And, of course, lots of people don't have any clue about how it works and make a point of telling others how to play. There are a couple of things we should all acknowledge. By nature, CPs work best as quantity purchases. I suspect that most who are in the CP game have a large number of them in the hopper. I have $3500+ right now "gathering interest". If I could get that reduced by 1/3, that would give me enough to get a big ticket item like NIC OT/NT or Hermeneia/Continental or something similar. My point is, when the CP community WORKS TOGETHER, we can turn groupthink illogic into a logical approach that ends up saving all of us hefty percentages and hundreds or even thousands of dollars over time. But one thing is ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN: "set it and forget it" is NOT that plan.

As it looks right now, $30 appears very close to setting a new peak. Just watch what happens if it does...and then contemplate the fact that that's over 50% LESS than we would pay if the current $65 peak crossed the line. Also, if it crosses the line at $30, it will probably go to $25 or lower...maybe as low as $20. Imagine if we could do that with EVERY CP! The only thing keeping all of us from saving HUGE $$ are those who are too lazy to bother. And here's one last thought. If two people bid $500 on a CP and it closes, those two people just shut out every other Logos user from getting a decent CP deal on that resource. Sure, that's how the game is played...they wanted it bad enough and they got it into production. But there's something about taking that approach that's (every appropriate word is "inapproriate"). Every single time a small handful of bidders bid up a CP at a high price point, they are shutting out a huge number of bidders who would like to get the CP but can't afford that price. The adding insult to injury part comes when that high price causes the CP to close long after it would have if the price had been 1/2 or 1/3 of the closing price and had excited much more interest and participation. In a nut shell, making high bids on CPs is just plain rude. Yeah, there's nothing technically "wrong" about it...but it is very bad form.

If you haven't bid $30 yet, do it now and be the force that makes the difference. Thanks.

Bump. These are very, very close.

Bid $30...or if you already bid $65, drop your bid to $30 to help set a new peak at the lower price. It will increase the interest and momentum of the CP.