Empire Avenue Strategy
Okay. So, I’ve been active on Empire Avenue for almost a month now, and I thought it might be a good time to stop and review some of my reactions and explain my strategy.
I’ll start off by saying that for other reasons, I try to put up at least one blog post a day. It has become more difficult since I started a full time job that trains a lot of my writing energy. In fact, if I had more energy, I would be writing about something political or artistic. Instead, I’m tired, so I’m just writing about a game.
That may be an important part of the strategy for me. It’s just a game; just another way of keeping score. It doesn’t really mean that much. Some friends are playing ti, so I started playing. I’ve met some other interesting people, so all in all its worth it.
When I started, I didn’t have a sense for the game, so I simply bought a lot of shares of a few people that I knew fairly well online. This led me to the first discovery. For some people, it is all about reciprocity. I’ll buy your shares, if you buy mine. As a general rule, I try to buy shares of people that have bought my shares. In some cases, I buy more. In most cases, I try to match on a share by share basis, whether or not their share price is higher or lower than my own.
I also try to keep a bunch of cash on hand so that if something special comes up, like a friend joining, or some interesting challenge, I can participate. For me, I’ve decided to keep around 8,000 Eaves available at any point. If someone buys shares in me, I often buy at least the same cash value of shares, if not the same number of shares. Over time, I try to balance out to the same number of shares.
Right now, I am getting around 1,000 Eaves of dividends and earnings each day. I typically invest that. So, my portfolio value has been growing more than 1,000 eaves a day. There have been a few days that I haven’t grown at least that much. As an average it has been growing by over 2,500 Eaves a day.
I’m still trying to balance out my holdings, with several people owning more of my shares than I own of theirs. So, on a typical day, I look at the people I have shares in and see who has the highest dividends that own more shares of me than I own of them. Typically, I pick up 1,000 Eaves worth of which ever one has the best return. Also, I typically buy and hold. There is one person who had bought me early on and I bought a bunch of shares of them. Then they sold their shares in me, and their stock started to plummet, so I sold out of them.
There was also one person who bought shares in me and when I didn’t immediately buy shares in them, they sold the shares and left a message on my wall complaining. I won’t be buying any shares from them. I buy shares first and foremost because I believe they will provide good solid dividend return.
I’ve also started participating in the communities a bit more. I find all the Please Buy me comments annoying, and generally disregard them. Since I work in health care, I’m starting to post things in the health care community to try and get some discussions going. I’ve also joined a local community, which really doesn’t have much going on, and a few other interest communities. I’ve had some good discussions about Google+ and met some interesting new people through that.
So, if you’re on Empire Avenue, what is your trading approach?