System Time: 15:05 17 May 2008 - 11 Players Online
Bond Market
This is one huge area to find all assortments of ideas you may never have an opportunity to see on the open Ideas Market. When you first load up the page it will default to only showing you the bonds created within the last 48 hours and it will sort them by the lowest profit margin first. It does this because for the site to list all bonds available at all times would take an immense amount of bandwidth.
The first few things you will see on this page are a set of four drop boxes:
Industry: This drop box allows you to only see bonds that are for specific industries. This is very helpful if you are trying to find a rare industry to complete a full collection, or just need some ideas to complete an artefact. You can also use this feature to compare bond prices that way when you create your own bonds you can price them competitively.
Max. Profit: This allows you to set the maximum profit percentage that you want to buy bonds for. The profit percentage is how much over market price that the seller is going to make should you buy the bond.
Created Within: Here you can set how far back you want to display bonds for, ranging from bonds created within the last hour to all bonds ever created and available for purchase. This is set to '48 hours' by default. There are several reasons for this: 1) There are an immense number of bonds available at any given time, 2) Generally you will find the best deals on bonds that are less than 48 hours old because people are constantly creating new bonds to try and beat the prices of others, and 3) Do you really need better reasons?
Term Restriction: Bonds can be created so that they are not available to be claimed for a specific period of time after they are purchased. There is any number of reasons for this. Some people sell bonds they do not have ideas for because they need the cash now and think they may be able to get the ideas to cover it before it comes to term. Others set a term date because bonds can truly look more appealing when you look to the future earnings of the ideas you are going to buy.
You will also see a link to the Player to Player Deals forum. This is the perfect place to go if you cannot find ideas that you need. Simply create a post specifying what it is that you want and either state what you are willing to offer in return or ask people to make an offer themselves. Successful trades for ideas have occurred with chips, cash, and other ideas.
There is also a counter of the Bond Groups Found under your current filters. If you turn all filters off and set it to see all bonds created for all time, this number can reach into the thousands easily. This brings us to the main portion of the Bond Market, the Bond Chart.
Bond Chart
The first row across the Bond Chart has the column headings including: Industry, Quantity, Price/Price Per Idea/Profit, Term, and Issuer/Issued. Unlike the Idea Market, you can sort by every column available.
Industry: Just like the Industry column in the Idea Market, this column lists the Industry for the bond (very important obviously). Directly below the industry name is the current market price per idea. That number allows you to compare the current price on market with the price here in the bond market without having to keep multiple pages open or switch between. You can sort the bonds matching your filters alphabetically (right arrow), or in reverse alphabetic order (left arrow).
Quantity: This column holds either one or two pieces of information. The first number you will see is the amount of ideas in each bond. The second number the total number of bonds. Boxes that contain only one number mean that there is only one bond with xxx amount of ideas. This column can be sorted by the lowest quantity (lowest possible is ten) of ideas within each bond (left arrow) or the highest number of ideas available (which is currently 100K - right arrow).
Price/Price per Idea/Profit: There are three bits of info contained within this column. The top number is the total price of each bond in the group. This number is important to look at so you know how much you are going to be charged and can make sure that it won't take you to the cleaners when you buy it. You can sort this by lowest cost per bond (left arrow) or the highest (right arrow).
The second number is the Price per Idea. This is very important as it gives you a better idea of the cost than any other item on the page, even the profit percentage. Seeing an absolute value placed per idea has convinced many people they either needed to run away fast, or gobble everything up. You can sort by the lowest price per idea (left arrow) or the highest (right arrow).
The third and last number in this group is the profit margin the seller will make. This takes the price per idea attributed by the bond and divides by the current market price. A bond selling at 24% profit means that every dollar you spend is 24 cents extra money over the current market value. The seller will thank you. This can also be sorted by least amount of profit (left arrow) and most amount of profit (right arrow).
Term: Amount of time before you can cash out your bond. Most bonds are called 'zero-day' bonds because as soon as you buy them you can cash them out and get the ideas. Other bonds may be set to 5, 10, even 30 days from purchase. This allows the seller time to either acquire ideas to cover the bond, or simply hold them in their portfolio a little longer. As with every other column on this page you can sort it by the shortest term rate (left arrow) or the longest term (right arrow).
Issuer/Issued: Here you will find the final two pieces of information. The seller's name will appear here in link form. The link will take you to their profile where you can find their entire portfolio, including any other bonds they may have available. Very useful for buying large groups of bonds from someone who sells them at very low profit margins. The second piece of information is the date the bond was issued.
The last column has no name; this is where you buy your bonds. Simply click the "Buy Bond" link and it will buy one bond of that group. Be careful when buying bonds. There currently is no confirmation window before completing a purchase so there is no turning back once you click "Buy". This can cause you billions of dollars if you click the wrong link. So pay attention.