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Resolving based on this comment: https://manifold.markets/akhil/is-the-current-value-of-my-manifold#gdd1U0hVnCI8enwBcYaK

I just changed the label from "Current value" to "Expected value" — which is more precise.

Moving to sale value makes no sense. Will send most holdings to zero and make portfolio tracking impossible.

While the current version is “optimistic” and shows fake profits, it’s much better than pure fire sale prices.

Arguably 90% ev, 10% liquidity based wouldn’t be bad, but no reason to fix what’s not broken. (And especially to eliminate what’s working.)

@Gigacasting I agree with most of this reasoning. Given slippage in the market, the sale value is potentially very misleading to users about the value of their position.

@SG I find slippage creates confusion in both directions (buying moves the prob in my direction). Easy to forget how much liquidity and slippage affects prices.

One option might be to not show the sale price at all - since that assumes you always want to dump your shares regardless of how much the price slips. Now that you have limit orders, hitting sell on a lot could have an option for selling at market vs. at a limit (default can be dump at market).

Tangentially related, showing each individual lot rather than the aggregated position (avg price, total quantity) I have taken on a market also makes it harder to parse what my current bet looks like (see screenshot)

As-is, it's about 90% confusing and 10% useful. If the label was changed to "expected value" it'd be 50/50. What would really be nice is if the sale value (if you sold all shares now) was displayed somewhere, but I suspect that would be too much to calculate for every single market in the portfolio every time the user visits it, since it requires having the full limit book for all of those markets.

@MattP Yeah, I think we should change it to "expected value" — which is more precise and less confusing.

😅

If it's supposed to be expected value, it's very confusing that it's called "current value" instead of "expected value."

The explanation I always give for current value: it's the expected value of your shares if the market resolves YES with the current probability and NO otherwise. In other words, it's the value if you hold to resolution and the market probability is correct. This is useful, but also confusing!

Sale value is sometimes useful but oftentimes even more confusing, because as you accumulate a large position your sale value will be far lower than the investment you put in.

@jack As @FutureOwl said, calling it as expected value would shift it to partially useful. Having a field called profit makes it even more confusing.

I'll grant that this information is not completely useless, so as it stands I'd resolve this at 70/30 in favour of confusing; both because it's badly labelled, and because expected values on individual markets is inherently confusing (makes a lot more sense for my portfolio as a whole).

@akhil I definitely agree that the naming could be improved. I'm not sure whether expected value is actually better though, because it's not the "true" expected value, just the value according to market price, which for various reasons can be different from the market's true belief of the probability.

Perhaps "Value at current market price" would be better.

I think value on a individual market is certainly a concept that makes sense and that I use frequently. Some examples are that it does essentially reflect your profit if you hold to resolution, and it also roughly reflects how much you could sell them for if you were wiling to sell gradually at close to the current price instead of dumping them all in one big sale.

Also while I've complained about the naming many times, I think this is the most reasonable interpretation of "current value" you could give. It's the same one used for startups (and illiquid private companies in general) - how many shares you hold times the latest market price, even though if you actually tried to sell you can't sell at the market price, you'd probably have to sell for a substantial discount and it would also take a long time to find a buyer.

I think it would make more sense to show the sales price where the current value is displayed and vice versa. It's odd to see "profit" immediately after betting in a market simply because my bet made the probability change—I can't actually realise any of the profit.