I think your point at looking long term vision instead of short term gain is great. You touched on it that you spend money in ensuring you maintain your integrity will eventually see you come up on top. Too often we get distracted by valuing just what is in front of us rather than considering the bigger picture.

Hey Matthew, my last article was about ”Thankfullness” which you can find here: http://www.quietspeculation.com/2012/10/insider-t… . The next time I will provide URLs in my article when referring to other online sources

To be quite frank the issue with the EDH player is still going on. We meet on a weekly basis so I probably will encounter him tonight. I think I will bring up the topic again and go from there. I probably will bring some boosters as well as he can use that for our local Cube draft entry fee.

From a Marketing Point of View; we should mostly avoid cognitive dissonance when trading, selling. The amount of trades we can make is limited by the amount of Magic the Gathering players around. Therefore it is inevitable one has a lot of trades with a specific person (repeat trades/sales) so focusing on the long-term and keep in touch with your partners is quintessential.

I see most sellers going for the short-term; quickly processed with no personalization. When something goes wrong, they lag in response & can be acting as if it is not their fault.

That’s a very interesting thing I omitted from my thoughts from the age of 7-9 where Pokemon cards were hot. We mostly traded amongst each other saying ”as soon as the trade is made, it is irreversible”. It stuck with me up till now

I mean it is a good gesture to do it, no one expects it but as the same time it can also be perceived as a bit shady if you know what I mean. It sounds pessimistic but if people don’t expect something they are going to ask themselves ”now why did he actually wanted to revert the trade?”. We both know the real reason and probably will say it to our trading partner but if unanswered it can be perceived as a ”missed hit&run attempt”

it’s pretty hard to get this thought on paper so I probably have to explain it in a different way but thanks for showing me the options you use :)!

i think he rationalized sharking the guy by writing an article to ease his conflicted conscious. i kid, i kid…

i have a couple of tricks to avoid regret while trading and at least diminish it in others.

i don’t trade my collection. i trade an inventory. if i meet resistance i walk away. too much risk of someone walking away with a bad taste.

if, during a FNM night, someone that’s traded with me thinks they can get a better deal or is voicing some regret i offer to retract the deal, taking my cards back and returning theirs. alternatively, if they feel they mispriced something but decide to keep the trade intact i insist on giving them value. because i try and know what my partners like this value ranges from bulk rares, playable uncommons or the occasional spec play.

let them go with “i got so much” in the trade and not “he trades for profit” thought if they can’t maintain both and be happy.

Cognitive Dissonance is the exact reason I took 5-6 weeks off before getting back to the game after my collection was stolen. I didn’t want to be emotional.

Emotional Control is they corner stone of a great floor trader.

Hello Tim, thank you for mentioning that the article is not so clear. I hope with this comment to enlighten you.

Cognitive Dissonance is the psychological conflict from holding two or more incompatible beliefs simultaneously.

A well known example is that You know smoking is bad for your health. But you keep on smoking! It is very inconsistent behaviour because why would you keep on smoking when you know it is very bad for your health?

Festinger ( http://goo.gl/OcC2l ; page 2 ) argues that the mind can rationalize this dissonance. As he puts it ”the smoker also feel (a) he enjoys smoking so much it is worth it; (b) the chances of his health suffering are not as serious as some would make out; ___ (d) perhaps even if he stopped smoking he would put on weight which is equally bad for his health. So, continuining to smoke is, after all, consistent with his ideas about smoking”

To put it back in Magic Context; Let’s say you buy a card at StarCityGames at 20 units. Now upon receiving your order from StarCity, you noticed that on one of the smaller cardsites this same card is for sale for just 15 units. I am fairly certain we all are not happy to see that we could have bought this particular card for much cheaper. So the purchase we made at SCG went from satisfying to being dissatisfying.

We bought (action) from SCG because at time they were the cheapest (knowledge/belief). Now since that is not the case, we feel bad about our decision. Now we can either email SCG for a full refund which is one form of reducing our Cognitive Dissonance in post-purchasing.

Another alternative would be rationalizing that SCG actually provides better service to its customers when ordering than the other shop. So we rationalize that this 5 units we paid too much is justified because we get better customer service, faster delivery times etc.

Since we as speculators serve both the ”Sell” & ”Buy” part, I found it interesting to write an article about this to minimize our losses and/or maximize our winnings by understanding this phenomenon in Psychology & Marketing. Especially in Sales , they are out there to get repeat sales from customers by ensuring their purchases were the right purchases and matches their needs.

We can easily replace sales with trades and customers with trading partners and we instantly talk about trading cards with players in our community.

I hope it makes sense, I am very willing to enlighten you more if anything is unclear please reply! Thanks

Your other example when you trade away Fetches ( an interesting subject because I am also quite conservative when trading these away 🙂 ). I think we can use this example with the Dissonance created:

We belief that these are safe to hold and destined for a price increase. On top of that they are very liquid.

So what do we do? We are very conservative, reluctant to trade them away.

We have created a harmony/consonance in our consistency.

Now suddenly we get a great deal on something we belief are safe to hold, will increase in price and are quite reluctant to trade away.

We can rationalize this by telling ourselves that we have made a good trade on this one (external factor) so we try to eliminate the dissonance and feeling regretful about the trade.

We can also alter our belief of ”I do not like to trade away my Zendikar fetches because they are safe to hold, destined for a price increase” to something like ”I am willing to trade away my Zendikar fetches if I can make a direct 50% in profit by trading or else I will hold the Zendikar fetch because they are safe to hold and destined for a price increase”.

This way you prevent yourself from becoming emotionally overwhelmed and protect your feelings from being agitated by making a good trade with cards you are reluctant to trade in the first place. That way you prevent yourself from immediately refilling your stock at a higher premium price.

I hope it makes sense, thanks again for your comment :)!

Hey Sigmund, thank you for giving me some examples of your own. Festinger (1957) wrote his hypothesis in his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance ( http://goo.gl/OcC2l ) that:

1. The existence of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate the person to try to reduce the dissonance.

2. When dissonance is present, in addition to trying to reduce it (1.), the person will actively avoid situations and informations which would likely to increase the dissonance

Simply put there is a Consistency between what a person knows and believes and what he/she does (behaves). If you believe college education is good, most likely you will pass it to your children and/or other people.

I think the first example you provided has mostly to do that your Emotions (excited , cheated, dissatisfied, chasing losses, hope) take over your Mind ( your excellent speculation on a particular card based on empiric information etc. ). This is another form of ”tilt”. Most people think ”tilt” is very aggressive which in certain degree is. But tilt is also something that makes us do things that are in retrospect quite unexplainable ( what was I thinking? ). Remind yourself that when doing an auction, you do NOT own the product yet hence one should NOT think about already owning it and especially NOT think about the things you can do with the product or the potential profit generated. Rationalizing yourself that you did not make any perceived loss is important for you

In terms of chasing losses, if time is in your favour, I would take your time before acquiring the actual product when you missed an auction. There is for sure another opportunity at a later date to acquire it at an even lower price especially when you think this auction just triggered a price war. That mostly means that the auction ended on 25 for simplicity sake, the ”cheapest” Buy it now option is 22 , that seems to be a good deal?

But what if Auctions in average just end around 20 units and the sole auction you participated in ended on 25, now suddenly the Buy it Now option seems not so favourable any more.

What was your last article about? (Adding a link to the previous article would be helpful.) Maybe I missed it, but in the end, what did you do with your fellow EDH player who felt like they got a bad deal? Are you suggesting that avoiding cognitive dissonance in trading relationships is a good thing? Overall it feels like this article needs a clearer focus.

After that it looks like french to me!

The same thing happens when I trade away something I am speculating on. Last week I traded away a couple Arid Mesas. I always like having some [non-blue] Zendikar fetches in my binder because I know they are safe to hold and destined for a price increase. So when I trade a couple copies away, even if I get a great deal, I feel like I immediately need to go home and buy a couple back to refill my stock. This dissonance may lead me to paying slightly more than I’d need to otherwise in order to fill the gap in my binder.

Do these seem like consistent examples with your article?