Buying a few to balance out my Value-Spent to zero

stonk markets are weird.

Almost like there’s a reason they soft-disabled them…

@jbca In what way are they weird?

@CharlesLien the price movement is pretty baffling to me, though maybe I just need to review the formula you linked in the other discussion.

But currently, the UI shows me that you SHORTed the price down then bought the price back up with a much larger number of BUYs earlier today… but your position is still very SHORT. I’d assume you’d be in BUY now. Maybe if I looked at the underlying “probability” it would make more sense, or if I summed up the actual mana spend…

@CharlesLien If there were an option to N/A these markets I’d propose that to see if you’d agree to just clear our positions but since that doesn’t exist, I’m confused such that I have no idea how we could even cooperatively exit our positions without one of us taking a big loss so I’m committed, planning to buy one for more day to take my total investment up to 3kM and then just leave it alone, maybe take a break from the platform, and hope loans give me back liquidity long term by the time I come back.

The fact that listed “stock price” is so non linearly connected to the actual price we pay to BUY and SHORT is probably the crux of my confusion about my position.

@jbca Yeah, I guess it's very confusing if you don't know about the formulas. I just mainly think about it as the underlying probability. (https://manifold.markets/jacksonpolack/stock-test-market-will-resolve-na#XZLWyBwSalbSOhTCNN9i for reference)

There are a few markers you can keep in mind to be able to quickly estimate the probability.

Below 300:

• The probability is just price/500. e.g. 250 -> 50%, 100 -> 20%, etc.

Above 300:

• 310 -> 65%

• 424 -> 70%

• 550 -> 75%

• 693 -> 80%

• 867 -> 85%

• 1099 -> 90%

• 1472 -> 95%

• 2297 -> 99%

So spending 9 mana on BUY at around 1099 (90%) is counteracted by spending 1 mana on SHORT. That explains the weirdness you were seeing where I was spending a lot of mana on BUY and not as much mana on SHORT, but still ending up with more SHORT shares.

I don't really know why they chose to not display the percentage, and instead chose this very weird metric.

@jbca As for the "exiting", I knew all this going in to the market. So it's fine for me.

But for you (or anyone else), if you wait around 2 months of ignoring this market, you'll get back more than 90% of your mana invested (as loans). 4 months of waiting returns more than 99% of the invested mana.

The danger of not waiting and attempting to exit early is that you will actually potentially lose the mana you invested.

And since the market never resolves, you never have to pay back the loan.

There is one "ugly" side effect in just waiting for your loans in that your profits on your profile will fluctuate depending on the price of this market. But that's just a number that has no effect on your actual mana (except for league rankings).

@CharlesLien Thanks for the explanations, they’re very helpful. I knew I was throwing my mana into a deprecated weirdly behaved part of the site so it is what it is, not the end of the world.

I used to see a "stock" option in the question creator but it's absent now.

Not sure where else to ask but if anyone knows what might be going on I'd appreciate some info.

Assumed it was just removed before now.

EDIT: this is also true of numeric response questions fwiw

@Tetra I think you can still make stocks by duplicating old stock markets? Same with numeric ones. Not 100% sure though

@evergreenemily You're correct, that's what I did. I also assumed these market types were fully disabled, until I saw someone else create a new stock-style market a few days ago. You can find an existing market to duplicate, or use these links:

• New "STONK" market: https://manifold.markets/create?params={%22outcomeType%22:%22STONK%22}

• New "PSEUDO_NUMERIC" market: https://manifold.markets/create?params={%22outcomeType%22:%22PSEUDO_NUMERIC%22}

@jbca hmm