Quote Originally Posted by Dan Turner View Post
Had an interesting discussion at our kitchen table game last night.

How much damage could a single person and $100k do to the magic card market?

I was thinking with the right buy and sell policy a person could maybe double their original investment once per year by manipulating card prices.

A large part of the discussion is I have a friend who is a commodities trader and very good at it, and she was saying that most of what players do with cards based investments/market manipulation would be multiple years of prison time on the commodities market.

She went on to say that with cards the behavior is not only completely legal but with the short run of older stuff could be very profitable to say buy 2000 zendikar fetch lands at avg. $50 each make the price spike by $10 each and flip for a $20k profit.

i went a step further and suggested a mix of legacy staples as a portfolio. Duals, fetches fow led etc. Stuff that if it started disappearing in the market place would cause a panic buy.
If I had an investment portfolio of $100K+ in free capital (unattached to other investments, sitting in a bank account) I would bet I could easily double it in the Magic card market within a year. If you have any sort of sense of what is really going on in the #mtgfinance market (aka a handful of people saying things, and then lots of people on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook lapping up every word and trying to make a buck on the speculative rise of something once it starts moving), backed with a large amount of capital, it should be very easy to reap massive rewards, not even taking into account true market manipulation and attempting to "corner the market" on specific items. The problem is not many people have that much liquid capital sitting around they can use. I really hate most 'finance' articles, but I should probably write one on this very subject, because most people (even many 'speculators' themselves) don't realize how the trajectory of these economics really works.