The Strategy of Bidding at 4:30 AM?

[glchen]

I'm on the West Coast, so it's "only" 1-1:30am for me. For auctions where all lots end at one time, I do this frequently. The usual strategy is to put placeholder bids on any lot that you are interested in on the first day of the auction. Then during the late hours (e.g., 1am PST), you go through your list of items, and see if any of them seem undervalued, and put bids on them. Also, any items that you really want usually because they are really rare, where you are prepared to overpay, you also put bids. This strategy hinges on that many bidders don't put their max bids on the item. For example, if the item is rare, they are really not sure what the value is. For example, you have this rare Cobb card, and you think a $3000 max bid is a good price. You go to bed at 1am EST with the current price at $2500, and think you have a decent chance to win that item. The late night bidder thinks that $3250 what he wants to pay, and puts this bid down at 4am EST. You are asleep, so you never counter it. However, if that bidder put that $3250 bid down at midnight EST, and you were awake when you saw it, then you would have time to think about it. And you might think, "ehhh, you know, I don't see this card very often, this is more than I thought I'd want to pay, but what the heck, let's bid $3500." This is what the late night bidder is trying to prevent, giving other bidders the time to consider whether the max bid that they originally put down was truly their real max bid.

The drawback to this strategy is that sometimes the price of this card is fairly well known. That is, this card in this grade is sold relatively frequently, so you see the average selling price on VCP. Then what you might want to do early is to place your max bid at that level where if you win, your bid will be below VCP, but the next increment up would place the final price of the card above VCP. Or you put your max bid at the point just before the bid increments jump from a lower increment to a higher one. (e.g, up to $5000, the bid increment is $250, but after that, it's $500.) This is also a common strategy where bidders try to stake out these certain bid points.