Walther's Expensive 108mm SAK

[Thunderpants]

Yeah, the last minute sniping only works if you think seriously about how high your madly high bid should be.
If you keep it sensible you should be OK. Typing 9999999 euros on every bid will make you a winner every time, but unless you're Warren Buffet it's a dangerous strategy!

[glenfiddich1983]

I've never used a 108mm before so out of curiosity I've just ordered one from Bonds of London.
I chose the Safari Hunter.
Including postage it was more than I probably should have paid for a SAK with a stupendously ugly saw on it which I will never use. But I'm curious to see how that main blade feels, vs a Pioneer, and I'll see if I can't find a use for that hunting blade. (I'm not a hunter.)
Interestingly, or not, I saw one of these red 108mms a few years ago and thought it was the ugliest SAK ever made. I swore I'd never purchase one... who knows, in a few months time maybe I'll be the silly billy bidding 600 bucks for a Walther...

+1 on all accounts.
Both the saw and the blade are beefier and stronger than the Farmer ones. Ugly knife, but really strong and well made.

The problem is not that I missed the auction, I simply don't bid enough i'm affraid. Don't think the Sniper app helps with that?

Well.. sort of... you don't bid, you don't drive price up. you think of a limit, add 1,1 Euros on it then you watch and wait...

It works like a charm when you have few bidders... the guy thinks: "this is such a deal I'm getting 20 USD for this... I could go up to 200 Euros but noone else is bidding so I'll stay on my 20... then you swoop in with 101,1 USD in the last second and he can't go any higher... even if he has a maxbid it would probably 100, so you'll still win).

I will add some observations as Game Theory relates to sniping a Vickrey Auction (with price discovery) like ePray's in which the second highest bidder determines the closing sale price (2nd highest bid + one bid increment). It's in all buyers' interest to bid once, and only once, at the last possible moment, to prevent the price discovery feature from being of use to anyone. It's in the sellers' interest, and ePrey's as they take a percentage commission from the transaction, for bidders to submit bids as soon as they find something they would like, and to continuously check on it. eBay's strategy is the psychological effect of price discovery on active bidders, and the psychology of "winning." If you get outbid they send you an "You've been outbid!" email that's worded as if it's a catastrophe, urging you to immediately place another bid, lest it "get away." They even have cell phone apps to send you notices when someone else puts a bid in on an auction in which you've submitted a bid. I also get notices urging me to get a bid in on auctions I'm only watching. The mantra they're pushing is "bid early and bid often", and "bid like you mean it." I've seen bidders in auctions pull all sorts of stuff to try to discourage other bidders. One example is submitting a dozen bids in minimum increments to make it appear as if there's a large mob trying to win the auction. One look at the bid history shows what's going on. There's other silliness that goes on with bidders thinking they can somehow outwit everyone else bidding.

Active bidding by a number of bidders on an auction of this type only serves to drive the final closing price up. It's why I bid once on an auction, within seconds of it closing. I bid exactly what I'm willing to pay plus some weird fraction of a dollar, and no more than that, manually at some point during the last 20 seconds or less. Never used a sniping program or service and don't plan to.

About Sniping:
One pitfall in sniping an auction - and I've seen this happen - is the tempting strategy to submit an astronomically high bid to guarantee winning, thinking nobody else in their right mind would bid that high. The bidder doing that assumes they're the only one using that strategy and therefore it will be the only bid like that; the rest will be reasonably sane bids. All it takes is two bidders using that strategy, and the auction will close at an astronomically high price, entire orders of magnitude higher than it should. Some years ago I saw a relatively hard (but not impossible) to find metal lens hood for a pro grade SLR OEM lens close at about $5000; even $50 would have been high. One look at the bid history showed two snipers who tried the astronomical bid strategy. The guy who was #2 that put in the not quite as astronomical bid as the winner did was the lucky one. I've seen a few others that weren't quite as dramatic, but still closed for significantly more than they should have, including for new items that could be bought on Amazon or from NewEgg for less.

Some rambling thoughts on it all.

John

I completely agree.

This is what I always do. If the auction ends on a time when i'm awake I place one bid + fraction of a dollar (in the case of the Walther: 192.07) in the last 5 seconds. There are two reasons for this:
- best possible element of surprise for other buyers, they have very little time to add an extra bid,
- make it impossible for myself to get pulled into the psychological game of outbidding and bidding more than what you're willing to pay; I make 1 bid the last 5 seconds and if it is not enough, I don't have time to increase it.

If the auction ends when I sleep or at a time i'm unable to be online, I place my bid at the last possible moment i'm still online and hope for the best. But most of the time those are the auctions I lose.