Is Insider Trading Against the Steam Subscriber Agreement?

[Dudeguy21]

Just curious.

[76561193857876471]

Wouldn't you need to be a Steam employee to be an insider in the first place? Or at least own stock in the company?

[Dudeguy21]

I meant in the community market. Insider trading is most certainly illegal in the stock market.

[76561193857876471]

Right, but insider trading means that you have information not available to the public due to your position as an employee, is my understanding of it. How would you even get inside information on the community market?

[Dudeguy21]

By collecting massive quanitities of items, and controlling the prices by manipulating the supply to turn a profit.

[76561193857876471]

I don't believe that is against the Steam Subscriber Agreement, no.

[Dudeguy21]

Thanks! I'll probably skim over it again to be safe.

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Dudeguy21:

By collecting massive quanitities of items, and controlling the prices by manipulating the supply to turn a profit.

This is not insider trading.

[Dudeguy21]

Lets say that I buy all of one item, and the average price is 13 cents. I then put up 14 of the items, each at around 28 cents. I then make sure to buy any items that are lower than 28 cents. Then, lets say I want to trade around for a game. If I then traded those items for games, making sure to keep the price of the card steady, I could get a better deal than I would normally, since I almost doubled the value of that item. Having access to private information about the values of these items (like the fact that I planned to resell all of them at 13 cents), would be insider trading, since I didn't publicly announce my plans. In hindsight, I probably could've used a better term to describe this, but eh.

[Satoru]

You can't buy up enough stuff AND cover the 15% margins that stea mtakes to make that worth while.

[ReBoot]

Originally posted by Dudeguy21:

Lets say that I buy all of one item, and the average price is 13 cents. I then put up 14 of the items, each at around 28 cents. I then make sure to buy any items that are lower than 28 cents. Then, lets say I want to trade around for a game. If I then traded those items for games, making sure to keep the price of the card steady, I could get a better deal than I would normally, since I almost doubled the value of that item. Having access to private information about the values of these items (like the fact that I planned to resell all of them at 13 cents), would be insider trading, since I didn't publicly announce my plans. In hindsight, I probably could've used a better term to describe this, but eh.

That's not insider trading.

[Dudeguy21]

The profits would be miniscule. But the described scenario above would turn a profit, although it would be ineffecient. I would use higher priced items (If I were to do this).

[76561197962467768]

Originally posted by ReBoot:

Originally posted by Dudeguy21:

By collecting massive quanitities of items, and controlling the prices by manipulating the supply to turn a profit.

This is not insider trading.

no it is not, it's similar to WoW Auction House playing, which kinda ruins the whole economy, but as far as I know not illegal, I might be wrong tho lol

[Satoru]

Originally posted by Dudeguy21:

The profits would be miniscule. But the described scenario above would turn a profit, although it would be ineffecient. I would use higher priced items (If I were to do this).

You can't do that either because steam limits how much money you can put in your steam wallet. Thus the ability to corner the market on high priced items is limited by the fact that you can't actually buy it fast enough.

[Darren]

Originally posted by Satoru:

Originally posted by Dudeguy21:

The profits would be miniscule. But the described scenario above would turn a profit, although it would be ineffecient. I would use higher priced items (If I were to do this).

You can't do that either because steam limits how much money you can put in your steam wallet. Thus the ability to corner the market on high priced items is limited by the fact that you can't actually buy it fast enough.

Well buying wouldn't be a problem you don't need the money to go into your wallet to do that. But actually getting out of the position would be the hard part, and with expensive items unless there were only a couple of them would limit your ability. Also you are not taking into account that for a lot of these items there is more supply than is visible on the market, if you raise the price lots of other people might list their item for sale.

[On Vacation]

Insider trading is exclusive to the stock market by definition. What you're refering to is cornering the market. As far as can you do it, yes you can attempt such, depending on what you want to do it with and it was certainly easier prior to the 7 day restriction on selling/trading things you buy off the market.

Here's the thing though, there's more competition on the market from people trying to earn profits than one might think. There's also a few other problems. For items that are desired or in demand, people know the current going value, if said value doubles over night, people notice. A lot of people aren't going to trade for what is essentially inflated value when they know 2 days ago the item was half the price. Although you could probably sucker some people into it....considering how many posts about people getting scammed there are.

The other issue is, when values jump rapidly on an item, you'll see an influx of that item being sold. This is especially true of popular games with items like Dota or CS. Naturally the more you have to buy the longer your money is tied up. I also think you're vastly underestimating the capital it will take to actually corner the market on an item that has any real demand. Because there's only 5 items on the market, does not mean you can buy 5 and be done after all.