Playing & Trading Strategy

Average YTD Gains by start of year category

Average Gain, Top 15%, Top 1% and Top Trader divisions are shown by the bar graph below.

Standard Deviation by Category followed by the number of traders used to collate this data. Some clearly non-active traders were included, but about 2.5k traders were excluded from data to try and stop it from skewing averages downward. As expected, the spread of data was broader in the lower categories due to not only more people but far, far many more casual players than in higher categories.

If you made more than the mean plus the standard deviation this last year then were in the top 15% of traders in your category.

The top 1% of traders made 3 or more standard deviations above the mean and puts them in a class with only as few as 100 of the sites top traders for 2017. This is basically the list of people who have figured out how to do the most with whatever money they have.

How to read this graph - below average players will have made a 2017 YTD H$ gain within the blue bar, above average players will be in the green bar, top 15% players are in the yellow bar, top 1% players are in the red bar and the end of the red bar indicates the gain of the best player from that category.

Data is presented from over 9000 traders across the year. Traders have all been categorised into groups by the old PVL categories that they would have started the year within. There is an obvious lacking of some data in some places because it is easier or harder to get certain types of information.

Traders in the first four categories (up to 200M) are traders that were in leader boards throughout the year or entered Kaigee’s Top10K at some stage throughout the year. Thus these categories are stacked with active traders skewing the averages upwards relative to the other categories which also contain a number of inactive players. Due to noticing a significant number of traders seem to play seasonally or only very occasionally I decided this year to not exclude very many players from the top 10K.

Comparing this data back to 2016 data (Link http://imgur.com/a/ANTML) shows that there was a significant reduction in average returns this year compared to last. All categories performed to only 40% to 70% of 2016 returns. There could be several reasons for this however it is hard to ignore the fact that the adjust mechanism of the game was removed in late 2016.

In 2016 there were 147 traders who made more than H$1B, in 2017 this number was 32. 199 made half a billion or more down from 699.  

2017 Top Traders

The following several images present the top traders within each category for 2017. The graphs show the distribution of traders within the category for both the H$ made and % gain.

Congrats to each and every one of these category winners! Also big congrats to Roto for the highest YTD H$ Gain, dethroning Oleg after four years straight and to TomAsta who topped the YTD % Gain. The other significant milestones of the year was Oleg Max hitting number 1 LTD on 10Jun17 – dethroning grory after 3741 to 3748 days at number 1 (~10 year 90 days).

I have failed to get the images to paste into the post today. I will try again later. Please follow the link below.

https://imgur.com/a/7SAPp

The site’s best day of the year was 10Jan17, day after SW16 delist. Nearly twice as good as the next best day – 05Oct17. Worst day of the year was 15Dec17, STAR8 OW. The most meh day of the year was 27Aug17 – pretty much a net effect zero on the market that day.

There was no change to which days of the week were best for traders from last year with Tuesday (Starbond adjust day) and Monday (Delist Day) being the best and Saturday being the worst.

Whilst on average Tuesday’s were better on average, it was often Monday’s that took records for best grossing day in each week.