Third Parties Rush to Fill the DVD to AppleTV Gap

/ Adam Nash / 2 Comments

Wow.  That was fast.

I’ve previously written about the AppleTV, and how there was significant potential for the idea to work if there were simple ways for people to convert their existing DVD libraries to iTunes.

The problem is, due to legal liability, Apple likely has no intention to integrate DVD-ripping into iTunes.  So much for Rip. Mix. Burn.

Well, it’s the day after the AppleTV shipped, and already there is a third party application available specifically to rip DVDs to AppleTV supported formats.

DVD to Apple TV Ripper by WonderShare

Ironically, it’s Windows-only.  🙂

Books: The Little Book That Beats The Market, by Joel Greenblatt

/ Adam Nash


One of the great things about travel is that it usually offers me free time to catch up on some reading. On my recent trips to Orange County and Berlin (not in the same weekend), I’ve managed to knock a few more off my reading list. As a result, I’m going to try another book review here on the blog for good measure. Let me know what you think.

The Little Book That Beats The Market by Joel Greenblatt

Overall Rating: Definitely worth the quick read. While the schtick got tiring after a while, the author is clearly intelligent and educated, and the content well thought out. Surprisingly, I found the most interesting part of the book not the “magic formula” itself, but the implicit structure the author put in place to try and help the average investor be successful with the strategy over the long term.

Synoposis: This book is an extremely quick read.  Joel Greenblatt is the founder and managing partner of Gotham Capital and currently teaches at Columbia Business School, so he’s definitely educated in both theoretical and practical aspects of finance.  This book is written in extremely simple and plain language, and he clearly goes out of his way to make it folksy and fun.  I think I finished it in under an hour, appendix included.

Greenblatt’s points are pretty simple:

  • The idea that the market is truly efficient is something that only makes sense in theory.  In practice, you can definitely beat the market.
  • The key to beating the market is to buy above-average companies at below-average prices.  Rinse, wash, repeat.
  • The “magic formula” is an updated method, similar in concept to those outlined by Benjamin Graham (one of my must-read investing books).  The formula is as follows:
    1. Every year, begin with a list of the 3500 largest companies that are publicly traded
    2. Rank them 1-3500 based on their return on invested capital (ROIC).  This tells you how good a business they are, as defined by taking invested money and turning it into more money.
    3. Rank them a second time based on their earnings yield, basically the percent of their stock price you get back every year in their earnings.  This tells you roughly how expensive they are per-dollar of earnings
    4. Add the scores from the two lists together, and then invest in the top 20-30 companies based on the combined score.  Voila, a list of “above average” companies at “below average” prices.
  • This formula will not outperform the market every year.  You have to stick to this formula for at least three years if you want a high probability of beating the market average.

Greenblatt has done his homework, using a detailed 17-year history of stock prices to ensure that this formula, based on information actually available at the time, would have outperformed the market handily.  In fact, he goes to some trouble to explain some other variants of the formula.  The one I outlined above returned an average of 30.8% per year.  That’s compared to a 12.4% return for the S&P 500 over the same period, and a 12.3% return for an even investment in all 3500 companies.

I’m guessing that part got your attention.

When I began investing in the mid-1990s, there was a lot of excitement about the Dogs of the Dow strategy.  It basically said, take the Dow 30 stocks, rank them by dividend yield, and buy the 10 cheapest every year.  The Motley Fool took this one step further, and published their own variant called the Foolish Four, based on a similar concept, with some more gaming around the picks.  I actually bought two of those books – I still have them on my shelf, and I actually invested an IRA according to the Foolish Four for 5 years.  (It beat the market during that period, by the way).

If you think about it, all these strategies say: “buy great companies at cheap prices”.  Now, I think Greenblatt’s formula is much more compelling:  ROIC is a much better measure of a “great company” than being in the Dow 30.  And earnings yield is more compelling to me than dividend yield, since a lot of great growth companies don’t pay out dividends proportionally to slow-growth companies.

However, I stopped investing according to the Foolish Four in 2001 largely because of an insight into a common flaw with all of these strategies – data mining.  It turns out that statistically, if you data mine enough for a “winning formula”, odds are that you’ll find some.  I won’t go into the details here, but it is possible using advanced statistics to estimate the likelihood of finding a “winning formula” through data mining.  So, even when you find one, you have to evaluate it’s results against the fundamental odds that if you look at any pattern of data, there will be “winning”  patterns to a certain degree.

In the case of the Foolish Four, to their credit, the Motley Fool published this analysis, and stopped recommending this approach in late 2000.

So, what makes this magic formula different?

First, Greenblatt is clearly more deeply educated about finance than the Motley Fool, thank goodness.  In his appendix, he runs through six or seven of the common flaws with strategies like these, and explains why this approach is still valid.

One of the most compelling pieces of additional analysis he provides is the fact that this formula seems to actually generate linearly predictive results.  In other words, if you take the top 10% of companies ranked by this formula, then the next 10%, then the next, each decile of companies outperforms the groups below it.

That type of consistency is rare for most quantitative approaches to ranking stocks, and is a good sign that this formula may be useful.

In fact, Greenblatt runs through almost all of the critiques I would expect in his appendix.  The only one he doesn’t address, which to me is extremely important, is the time period bias.  Greenblatt has only tested this approach over 17 years of data.  That means he basically just looked at 1988+.  Given that he includes the longest bull market in history, and then a period of outperformance by value over growth, my guess is that there is significant bias in these results.

Still, my guess is that this formula will still generate outperformance over time.  The best thing about this book is that Greenblatt spends a lot of time explaining that in any one year, this formula can and will underperform the market from time to time.  In fact, he advocates a minimum of a three-year window to evaluate its performance.

I think this is great advice, but likely doesn’t even go far enough.  The stock market, in general, is a long term investment.  Investors consistently buy high and sell low, not because they are stupid, but because in the short term, we rationalize investing in the winners (which are bid up because they are popular), and we rationalize selling the losers (which are low because they are not popular).

Buying high and selling low is a very bad investment strategy.

I’m going to check out Greenblatt’s website, and investigate the analysis for this approach further.  In the meantime, I do recommend this book to people who like value investing, or who are thinking about investing in individual stocks.

eBay Express & Half.com: Half Listings on eBay Express

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

In the interest of full disclosure, please note that as a member of the eBay Express team, I am unabashedly biased.

I don’t normally post about eBay Express here on my personal blog, but I’m just too excited about this launch not to say something here.

That’s right, starting this week, Half.com sellers can easily sign up to have their qualifying listings show up on eBay Express, for free.  All they have to do is click a checkbox and fill in the PayPal account that they want eBay Express sales to be paid into, and they are done.  eBay does the rest.

For more detailed information about the program, and the special promotion of 50% off all final value fees for Half listing sales on eBay Express from April 1 – June 30, visit this page.

This effort has been more than a year in the making, and I want to give special kudos to the team that has worked tirelessly to help bring this great new opportunity to Half.com sellers and eBay Express buyers.

I personally buy & sell on both Half.com and eBay Express, so it’s particularly exciting for me to see this launch.

Battlestar Galactica: Final Five Spoilers (Season 3 Finale)

/ Adam Nash / 59 Comments

Interest on my blog is off the charts for Battlestar Galactica lately, so I just had to put a post up as we count down the next five days until the season three finale.

First, if you are not caught up, a couple posts you should read:

  1. My post on the Death of Starbuck. (this is currently the most viewed post on my blog)
  2. This great summary of the Crossroads, Part 1 episode from this Sunday, March 17th.

Now, onto the spoilers. If you don’t want to know what’s going to happen, or more accurately, what I think is going to happen, then stop reading already. No one is forcing you.

Most of my good material is from BuddyTV, which has the best spoilers post on the season finale that I’ve been able to find.

First, Starbuck. She is not dead. Rumors abound that attempt to prove that she is not dead. Current spoiler sites are saying that she will be back in the season finale, claiming to have visited Earth, and ready to guide the fleet to the planet.

Second, who are the final five cylons? Here is a quick shout out to Elliot, who seems to have correctly commented that Anders, Tory, Tigh, and Tyrol are all Cylons… or are they? The spoiler just says that they are hearing the music, and they meet and decide that they think they are Cylons. But does that make sense?

To me, it would make more sense if they actually were not Cylons, but have been tampered with somehow to “hear the music”. Thus, like Baltar before them, they think they are Cylons, but actually aren’t.

It’s also possible that some are, and some aren’t. Tigh would be hard to explain, given his long history with Adama. After all, the war with the mechanical Cylons was only 40 years ago. They didn’t have humanoid models back then.

Anders, on the other hand, is easy to see as a Cylon. First, Starbuck just “found” him as a rebel on Caprica. Second, all of Starbuck’s hallucination about being married to a Cylon could reflect a subconscious realization that actually her husband was a Cylon. Tory is also easy to see.

Personally, I will be disappointed if the Final Five Cylons end up being just other individuals on the crew. I think the show has set up a very interesting question with the Final Five:

  • Why don’t the other Cylons want to speak about them? Did the Final Five leave because they disagreed with the path taken by the other Cylons? Did they do something unspeakable?
  • Are there many versions of the Final Five? Are they functionally like the other seven, or do they have special abilities? Are they more human? Do they resurrect?
  • Why did Number 3 react the Final Five the way she did? She clearly had see the one she apologized to before.

Lastly, what is up with the virtual Baltar in Caprica Six’s head, and the virtual Six in Baltar’s head?

Very excited for the season finale, but I hope they don’t short-change these issues with a “quick fix”.

Please comment below – let’s use the next few days to assemble as many guesses as possible about the finale and Season 4. We’ll then see who’s right after March 24th.

Update (3/26/2006): See my final post on the Season Finale and the Wait for 2008, now available.

Update (1/8/2007): Possible spoilers for the fifth & last cylon, as we approach Season 4.

Update (4/22/2008): New post on Episode 3 of the 4th Season: Ties That Bind.

eBay Express Germany Trip Wrap-Up

/ Adam Nash

I’m back from my trip to Berlin to visit eBay Germany.  It was a great week meeting with the teams responsible for eBay Express in the UK & DE.

I have a few more pictures that didn’t make the original post, so I thought it was worth a quick wrap-up post to capture them.  In case you missed the original, here is my first post on my trip to Berlin, and here is a second post about the eBay DE offices.

Here are a few pictures of the eBay Germany office.  Notice the volleyball court, the small pond & bridge, and the extremely large customer support building.  It was a really nice environment, and with nice weather, we were able to take a quick walk around the water after lunch each day.

DE4 DE3 DE2 

Here is an impromptu shot of the eBay Express leadership team, with the heads of the US, DE & UK sites.

DE1

Lastly, just a few quick shots from the gym at our hotel.  The Grand Hyatt in Berlin has a spa on the top floor which is apparently fairly well known.  The gym overlooks the whole city, and you look out from the room when running on the treadmills.  I took a couple shots at dusk (hence the poor focus) because the views were really great.

DE7 DE6 DE5 

Otherwise, that’s it from Berlin.  I seem to have avoided jet lag on the trip back, and got to enjoy a really great weekend with Carolyn & the boys.

I now have about 5-6 hours of absolutely crucial television to catch up on, including the last two episodes of Battlestar Galactica, 24, and Rome.  The Tivo is a stern task-master.

It’s nice to be home.

Betting Odds on Winner of American Idol, Season 6

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

BuddyTV has a great article handicapping odds for the winner of American Idol, based on their betting community. Since I posted Jim’s prediction here previously, only fair to post this list as well.

  1. Melinda Doolittle. 1.24:1
  2. Lakisha Jones. 3.4:1
  3. Blake Lewis. 9:1
  4. Chris Sligh. 11:1
  5. Jordin Sparks. 14:1

More detail here. It seems like this would be a perfect place for a futures market – I wonder if someone has already set one up, like the markets set up for the 2008 presidential race, etc.

Now that I know about the whole “Vote for the Worst” campaign online, my big question is really how far can they take Sanjaya? How far will the American Idol team allow it to go? How can they fix it?

Update:  Simon says he’ll quit if Sanjaya wins American Idol…

Microsoft Acquires TellMe

/ Adam Nash / 3 Comments

The big news today – the rumors are true.

Microsoft acquires TellMe

Congratulations to GS & JS, and the rest of the TellMe team. No financial details were disclosed, but rumors are for a price around $800 million. The company raised over $230M in capital, and employs 320 people (approximately).

There is a nice write-up on the acquisition from Don Dodge.

Here is a funny piece from Jason Steinhorn’s blog on the Microsoft “rumor” from a few weeks ago…

The lady doth protest too much, methinks
— William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet

eBay Express DE Has a Blog!

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

I didn’t know this, but the eBay Express team here in Germany has their own blog.

eBay Express Germany Blog

Pretty neat. For those of you, like me, who don’t speak German, here is the website through Google Translate.

eBay Express Germany Blog in English (Google Translate)

For those of you unfamiliar with eBay Express in Germany, the site is similar to the US version, but is even more retail oriented.  For example, here is the merchandising from today’s homepage on eBayExpress.de:

I love to see the teams in each country trying new things and adapting to the unique needs of each local market.  The eBay Germany site has very strict requirements for merchants who appear on the site, so having a blog to communicate outwards openly and freely makes a lot of sense.

Very cool.

New George Washington Dollar Coin Error Found: Faceless Coin

/ Adam Nash / 30 Comments

I’ve written a lot about the new Presidential Dollar Coin series, and the recent mint errors found with the coins. Some of my previous posts can be found on my Coins page, but the best ones are:

Well, a second significant error has been found, and it is much more substantial than the first. A Colorado couple has found a dollar coin that is missing it’s face. That’s right, move over “Godless” dollar, here comes the “Faceless” dollar.

Faceless2

This coin is a true rarity, and will likely be worth thousands of dollars. Unlike the thousands of coins missing edge lettering, this type of error involves missing a large number of mint quality checkpoints, and may be unique. From the Conservative Voice:

U.S. Mint spokesman Michael White said officials had not confirmed the Smiths’ find. But Ron Guth, a coin authenticator with Professional Coin Grading Service of Newport Beach, Calif., said he is certain the coin is authentic.

“It’s really pretty rare,” Guth said. “It somehow slipped through several steps and inspections.”

It could be worth thousands of dollars, maybe more, he said. The value will depend on how many similar misprints are found, but the Smiths’ will always be worth more because it will be the first one to be independently authenitcated, Guth said.

When you manufacture 300,000,000 of anything, you expect a few errors. Still, this one is very impressive, and will no doubt lead to further excitement about this new dollar coin in collecting circles.

As a public service announcement, let me just close again with the known errors that exist.

  • Missing Edge Lettering. These are the “Godless” dollars, called that because they are missing all the lettering on the edge of the coin, including the mint mark, the year, E Pluribus Unum, and In God We Trust. This error seems to have been sourced to a mint bag of 140,000 coins that may have missed edge printing in Philadelphia.
  • Missing Reverse Face. These are the “Faceless” dollars, only one verified to date. These coins are missing the Statue of Liberty on the back of the dollar coin.

There is no such thing as an Upside Down Lettering Error. The mint process for these coins is random, the lettering will be rotated on various coins, and is not guaranteed to be facing up or down.

Don’t be fooled into paying good money for a fake error.

Update (3/17/2007): If you are looking to buy original, unsearched bank rolls of the new George Washington dollar coins, I have procured a box of 40 rolls, in a box certified as wrapped on December 7, 2006. They are available here on eBay Express.  Sold out!  Will get more soon!

Update (5/24/2007): For a limited time only, I am now carrying unopened, original John Adams Presidential Dollar coin rolls in my eBay Store. Click here to buy them on eBay Express. I also have a few more original bank rolls of the George Washington dollar coins.  Click here to buy them on eBay Express.

If you are interested in the other rolls I am carrying, click here for all the coins I am currently selling on eBay Express.

8-Core Mac Pro Leak on Macworld UK (Quad Core Xeon)

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

In November, on the eve of the launch of the new Quad-core Xeon from Intel, I posted a wish for a gift of an 8-core Mac Pro. The new chip has 4 cores on a single die, making each chip the equivalent of a 4 processor module by itself. Since the Mac Pro has room for 2, that would give you an incredible machine, and naturally I want one.

Well, check out this graphic, snapped from MacWorld UK, before they could pull it down (courtesy of Mac Rumors):

8corer_300.png

Looks like Apple is going to move to either a single 4-core processor or a double 4-core (8-core) monster very soon.

Some details on the specs of the chips available on Jason O’Grady’s blog today on the “Octo-Core” Mac Pro:

Rumors have been swirling since October 2006 that Apple would introduce an 8-core Mac Pro using dual Intel Quad-Core Xeon 53xx family processors (code-named Clovertown). Current Mac Pros use Intel Woodcrest cores that are in the Xeon 51xx family.

According to reports “Clovertown” will ship in two configurations (X5355 and E5345) with the same 1333MHz bus found in the Mac Pro running at 2.66 and 2.33GHz respectively. Two slower configurations (E5320 and E5310) aren’t expected to be used by Apple.

The Intel Xeon 53xx series will reportedly use Intel’s LGA771 socket, the same socket that ships in today’s Xeon 51xx series (a.k.a. Woodcrest) Mac Pros. Therefore it’s conceivable that current Mac Pro users could upgrade to 8-core machines – depending on chip availability of course.

So, although my birthday has come and gone, if you’d like to make my week, feel free to send me one of these when they do launch.

Just plain awesome.

Update (4/4/2007):  It launched today.  Check it out. 4.9 million configurations available at the Apple Store.  The price is nothing to sneeze at – that’s a very expensive upgrade!

Welcome to eBay.de

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

We’ve arrived here at the eBay Germany offices. Everything in this building looks cool, including the ultra-modern open cubes and the eBay-colored futuristic furniture.   Note the cool German advertisements for eBay on the wall.

chairs    pict1105.jpg    DE Cubes

We’re getting all set up for a day of meetings, but I thought I’d post a quick picture. It’s Lara Housser & myself, in front of the eBay sign.

pict1091.jpg

Most everything in Germany is more expensive than in the US, but I’ve found one exception.  A latte in the small cafe in the eBay building is only 0.30 € !

pict1106.jpg

Also worth noting, the superior European education in math & science has clearly led to a more logical elevator button design.  You walk in the entry floor (E), and if you want to the first floor above you, you press (1).  If you want go to the first floor below you, you press (-1).

pict1107.jpg

After a full day of meetings about eBay Express, what better way to wrap up the day than with a group photo of the eBay Express DE team in front of the eBay sign.

Express DE Team

Ich bin ein Berliner

/ Adam Nash / 6 Comments

It’s a famous John F. Kennedy quote, from his West Berlin speech in 1963.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And therefore as a free man, I take pride in the words: “Ich bin ein Berliner”

pict1083.jpg

I am in Berlin this week, after taking a direct flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt, and then a quick hop over to Berlin. I’ll be at eBay Germany all this week, meeting with our German team responsible for eBay Express.

What they don’t know yet is that I have also brought them See’s chocolate truffles from home.

pict1086.jpg

So far, AT&T has totally failed me, as my cell phone isn’t picking up service. However, Skype is awesome, and I’m set up with Skype-Out and Skype-In, including voicemail. Makes me wonder why I have a normal landline at home, really…

The MacBook Pro also seems quite happy here. In fact, a lot of the furniture in my hotel room looks like it was designed with the MacBook in mind.

Blogging Update: Big Day for Psychohistory, and Updated Stats

/ Adam Nash / 4 Comments

So, let me just be blunt here.  If you find my posts about the statistics for this blog boring, you’re not going to find this post very interesting.

However, I am writing this blog for a reason, and that reason was to learn  about the medium.  I’m a big believer in learning about technology through experimentation, and this blog was originally meant to be a 30-day test.

Of course, that was about 7 months ago.  Look where we are now.

Anyway, today happened to be the biggest day, from a page view standpoint, in the history of this blog.  1953 page views in one day, nearly half of them going to a single post.  The post was my first one on the mint errors for the new dollar coins, from March 2nd, about 5 days before the major news coverage began.

Makes the rest of my days look puny, although I’ve been hovering around 300-500 page views per day this past month.  Amazing when I think about the first month, when I thought 10 page views was a big day.  Right now, my run rate is likely 250,000 page views a year.  Not a small number.

More and more people seem to be reading me through RSS Feed Readers, programs or websites that let you get my posts directly, rather than visiting the website.  I was surprised to see that roughly 100 people seem to be reading my posts that way.

If you are interested, here is the breakdown of the types of readers people are using.  An awful lot are using websites, but there are some common names in there.  A lot of people using Google.

Not surprisingly, my top posts are now skewed towards coins.  Here is yesterday’s top 10 posts:

Until recently, however, my top traffic driver was still the Harry Potter posts, with American Idol, Battlestar Galactica, and Coins all bringing in significant visits as well.  Personal Finance has been a steady performer for me, and the most requested.  However, it’s not generating the page views.  Here are the top posts from the last 30 days.

Finally, my favorite little insight, the search engine terms that people are using to find my blog.  It looks like I no longer get much traffic from people looking for Seema Shah… they seem to find her own blog directly now.  Yesterday was all about the dollar coins.  Look at the search terms.

Over the last 7 days, it has been a little more balanced.

Right now, I’m finding that I don’t have enough time to post on all the topics I’d like to.  I’m going to likely have to start focusing a bit more on certain topics, like personal finance, and indulge a little less in the “news of the day”.

Easier said than done.

I hope this information is somewhat interesting for the other newbie bloggers out there.

Looking at Prices for George Washington Dollar Coins, and How to Search eBay Like a Champ

/ Adam Nash / 1 Comment

I’m not sure, but I think the storm of interest in George Washington Dollar Coins peaked yesterday. At least, based on sales on my rolls, and looking at prices, it seems like today was not a bigger day than yesterday.

One of the most common questions I get about eBay is how to use the site to research what the “fair price” is for an item. There are a lot of reasons people ask this question:

  • They are looking to buy something, and they want to know what a fair price is
  • They are looking to sell something on eBay, and they want to know what to expect
  • They are looking to sell something off eBay, but they still want to know what a fair price would be.

I was looking over the prices tonight for dollar coins, and I realized it’s a pretty good example to work from.

The first magic trick to figuring out prices on eBay is a good search. Yes, you read that right.

The hardest thing about figuring out pricing on eBay is the fact that it is just incredibly big. There are millions of different types of products sold on the site, and there isn’t a catalog in the world big enough to hold them all. If you go to the Apple Store, you would see all the current products that Apple sells, in all the configurations they currently offer. On eBay, you might likely see every model that Apple has ever has sold, in every possible configuration that Apple ever offered, and even configurations they didn’t!

The key to good price research is a good result set, and that means getting good at eBay search.

eBay search is actually incredibly powerful. There is a syntax to it that is very easy to learn, and can take your use of the site to a new level. eBay has a help page on the topic, but here are some of my tips:

  • Start with basic keywords. It may sound counter-intuitive, but don’t start with categories. Start with simple keywords from the homepage. Sometimes sellers put your product in categories that you might not expect. It’s best to start with some keywords that fit what you are looking for, and then only using categories to filter if you are seeing unrelated items from other categories.
  • Look at the result set. There is no magic right answer to the perfect query – a big part of the process is doing a search, looking at the items, and learning from them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done a search for something, like a piece of computer equipment, and then seen result titles that include the part number. I then do a search on the part number, and I find items that didn’t show up before. The marketplace represents the aggregated human intelligence of millions of people – learn from the keywords in their titles, and your searching will reach a new level.
  • “Or” is your friend. Sometimes, there are multiple words that represent what you are looking for. Laptop or Notebook. Roll or Rolls. PowerMac or Power Macintosh. If you enter a search on eBay for “Laptop Notebook”, you’ll get very few listings – only the ones that actually put both words in the title. But if you put the two words in parentheses, separated by a comma, like this: (Laptop, Notebook) – eBay know to look for listings with either “Laptop” or “Notebook” in the title. This is the most powerful trick for truly exploring the marketplace, especially as you learn new words from the item titles of the listings you find first.
  • Don’t like some results? Remove them! eBay search has another great operator, the minus sign. Just put it before a word, and eBay automatically removes any item with that word in the title. Incredibly powerful for “cleaning” your results. For example, let’s say you do a search for “Apple” hoping for computers, but you get a bunch of apple-scented lotion and candles in your results. Changing your search to: Apple -lotion -candle will all of a sudden clean your results to remove all lotion and candle listings.

So, when I wanted to explore the pricing of George Washing Dollar Coins, I ended up starting with this search:

Washington Dollar

Yikes. Too many individual coins. I’m selling rolls. So I added two good words for roll:

Washington Dollar (roll, rolls)

Much better, but I was still seeing some junk. So I minused out some of the worst offenders:

Washington Dollar (roll, rolls) -single -1982 -quarter

Much cleaner. Almost every listing was for a George Washington Dollar Coin Roll. Now to be picky, I could have refined it further for mint mark and for mint vs. bank roll, but this was good enough for my purposes. There is a always a trade-off between precision and recall. The more you sharpen your query, the more likely you are excluding some good listings with the bad. There is somewhat of an art to saying, “it’s good enough”.

Now, for the second magic trick: searching completed items.

That’s right. eBay allows you to search roughly the last two weeks of closed listings. You can see if they sold or didn’t sell, which format they were in, and what price.

All you have to do is click the little checkbox in the lower left, and sign in. eBay restricts this feature to registered users. However, registering is free, so I recommend it highly.

Now, a few years ago, this was the best you could do. These days, there are a number of third parties who sell tools to help you price different items using eBay data. eBay also has a tool which is available for a very low fee ($2.99 for two days, or $9.99 per month for the basic version) that lets you use advanced, user-friendly tools to go through data.

Here is a screenshot of the prices from tonight for my search, using eBay Marketplace Research Pro, the $24.99/month professional version of the tool. Notice that it lets me save my search, so I can easily check back on the prices for it with one click (awesome).

ebay-research-pro.png

How cool is that? It uses flash to show you the breakdown of prices day by day, format by format. Super cool. You can also see volume numbers – almost 3,000 listings sold in the eBay core marketplace, and about 200 sold from Stores. Not surprising for a popular product like this. You’ll also note the prices between the two differ. Some people think you pay more when you shop in an eBay Store than bidding on an auction, but when products are hot, that isn’t always the case. Here, the average price for a winning auction is over $52. The average price in an eBay Store is just $40.

Looking at the charts, there has been quite a ramp in the last two days in volume and price. Not surprising given the press coverage.

Now, these type of searches aren’t perfect. For example, this search includes all types of sellers, some with good reputations, some not. Some who accept PayPal, and some who don’t. Some who charge fair shipping, and some who don’t. Lately, I’ve been using eBay Express to also get a sense for what more professional sellers are charging for item. There is no completed items search on eBay Express, but since it is all fixed-price, it’s easy to see what the “going rate” is for a product.

In any case, with some of the tricks outlined above, pricing a product using eBay does not have to be black magic. Knowledge is power, and being able to search eBay well is definitely a skill worth having.

Update (3/17/2007): If you are looking to buy original, unsearched bank rolls of the new George Washington dollar coins, I have procured a box of 40 rolls, in a box certified as wrapped on December 7, 2006. They are availablehere on eBay Express.  Sold out!  Will get more soon!
Update (5/24/2007): For a limited time only, I am now carrying unopened, original John Adams Presidential Dollar coin rolls in my eBay Store. Click here to buy them on eBay Express. I also have a few more original bank rolls of the George Washington dollar coins.  Click here to buy them on eBay Express.

If you are interested in the other rolls I am carrying, click here for all the coins I am currently selling on eBay Express.

Who Is Voting For Sanjaya? (American Idol, Season 6, Top Twelve)

/ Adam Nash / 65 Comments

Funniest thing about today. It was a record day for my blog, almost 2,000 page views. I’m going to write a separate post about the metrics because they were pretty interesting.

The funny part is when I checked the #1 search term from outside search engines to my blog before watching the Americal Idol, Season 6, Top 12 announcements today, I found this phrase:

“who is voting for sanjaya”

Number 1 search term! Hilarious. All the hits went to this post.

Well, I don’t know who is voting for Sanjaya, but he’s now in the top twelve. Wow.

Really, I don’t know what to say. Maybe someone has actually figured out how to “crack” American Idol, kind of like the Google bombing from a few years ago. I can see some clever hackers laughing about it:

“Hey, what if we bring American Idol down?”

“How can we do that?”

“We’ll rig it so that Sanjaya wins”

Well, whatever Sanjaya has, I’m going to have to watch him sing at least one more time. Ouch.

Update (3/9/2007): The answer was found on Blogging Stocks. Apparently, there is a growing movement (as I suspected) to damage these shows by voting for the worst contestant! There are actually sites that are encouraging people to “Vote for the Worst”. And I was just kidding when I wrote this post originally!

Update (4/7/2007): All of a sudden, this blog post is getting thousands of hits a day again. I guess it is because we still have Sanjaya to kick around! The comment trail has become hilarious, so I’m approving them as fast as I can. Just for the record, it’s now well known that Vote For the Worst isn’t the only contributor here. Howard Stern on Sirius Radio has been stumping for Sanjaya with his millions of fans. Also, there definitely does seem to be a very real Sanjaya fan base, as embarrassing as that might be for those people.

Update (4/11/2007):  Nice coverage of the Sanjaya phenomenon on Newsvine, including a link to this post as one of five primary points outlining the causes.  Special kudos in the post to the elaborate comments here on Psychohistory…