auction pricing · measured
We follow commodity listings until they sell or expire. This is what your price position actually does to your odds — and how to set TradeSkillMaster up for it.
Share of listings that sold rather than expired. 1.31 million listings across 150 commodities, US region, measured 2026-08-31. Every one of the 132 items with enough depth showed the same ordering.
Whether a listing sold or expired is inferred from how it disappeared, not reported by the game. Our confidence in that call is 75% or 92% depending on the evidence.
The collapse happens at the median, and on a typical commodity the median sits only 8–13% above the cheapest listing. So the range where your price barely matters is about a tenth of the price wide — and the moment you leave it, roughly half your sales go with it.
Counted in what you actually take home: at the cheapest listing 0.82, just under the median 0.80 — the same within noise — and above the median 0.47.
TradeSkillMaster has no price source for the median of the live book. It knows the current cheapest buyout and its own smoothed market value, and neither is the number measured above. The operation below is therefore an approximation: one population-wide rule where a per-item number belongs. How loose it is — across four regions the median sits between 1.01 and 1.40 times the cheapest listing, depending on the item.
The rule above is a blunt instrument. Every item page here shows that item's own median, and under it the chance of selling within 24 hours at each position in its book — measured for that item, not for the average one.