Being a trader

Trader is not a trade that takes a percentage of races. It is commerce: everything exchanged between players goes through this menu — horses and matings.

And it is, along with breeding, the activity where there is most to gain from understanding the rules before clicking. This page brings them together; the screens are described elsewhere.

The rule that holds for everything: 10% for the game

On every sale concluded, the seller pays 10% of the price. The buyer pays the price announced, the seller collects that price then hands back a tenth. He therefore keeps 90%.

That holds for horses as for matings, at a fixed price as at auction. Two consequences in everyday life: reselling a horse at the price you bought it for loses 10%, and a chain of quick resales ruins both parties. Commerce pays when you bring something between the purchase and the sale — training, earnings, a foal.

Three ways of selling

Fixed price: displayed, payable immediately by whoever wants it. The simplest and the fastest.
Reserved: one price, and one single player allowed to buy it. The recipient gets a message with a direct link. It is the tool for sales negotiated elsewhere — on the forum, in the messages — and for presents between friends.
Auction: a minimum price, and players bid until the deadline. It is the only formula that can push a price beyond what you imagined, and the only one that guarantees nothing.

In all three cases, you choose a deadline of 1 to 7 days. And you need to know it from the start: the deadline cannot be extended. It is set when the sale is put up and is afterwards displayed read-only. To lengthen it, you have to withdraw the sale and do it again — which, for an auction, assumes that no offer has been received.

At the deadline with no buyer, the horse or the mating simply leaves the market. That costs nothing, and nothing prevents putting it up for sale again straight away.

Auctions, in detail

This is the richest mechanism in commerce, and the one where people get caught out most.

One offer per player and per sale. Bidding again replaces your previous offer, it does not add to it.
You have to beat the best offer by 1% — by at least one unit. The game offers you that amount ready-calculated, in fact.
You do not bid on your own sale.
The total of your outstanding offers cannot exceed your balance. Horses and matings together, and the total is displayed at the top of the buying screen. That is what stops you promising the same money twice.
In an open auction, the player you outbid receives a higher bid message with a link to come back. Auctions are therefore often played out in the last few hours.
In a blind auction, offers are not displayed, and nobody is told they have been outbid. It is a sealed-bid auction: you offer what you think fair, once.

The 10% penalty, absolutely to be known

At the deadline, the game ranks the offers from highest to lowest and keeps the first one whose author really has the sulkies. That one takes the sale, at the amount of his own offer.

And the first bidder met who cannot pay is penalised 10% of his offer, taken from his account, with a message to tell him so.

The trap is that the balance is checked when the offer is registered and at the deadline. Between the two, you may have spent your money elsewhere — a purchase, a race entry, a mating. The offer, for its part, stays registered. Bidding and then spending therefore costs 10% of the offer for nothing.

The rule of prudence is simple: only bid on what you really want, and keep aside enough to pay until the deadline. The Outstanding offers counter is there for that.

What follows the horse to the buyer

A horse that is sold changes more than its owner. At the moment the sale is concluded:

the buyer becomes owner, trainer and jockey all at once. The trainer's and jockey's contracts under way are erased, as is a test under way. The training programme, for its part, is not destroyed but stops being applied and becomes invisible: it no longer belongs to the horse's trainer. The buyer sees “None” and has to define one;
the matings of that horse put up for sale are cancelled;
a pending race entry is removed, and its entry fee refunded to the seller;
a mare that is sold takes her unborn foals with her: they become the buyer's property. Buying a mare in foal is buying two horses;
the name of the breeding operation does not change, and the breeder stays the breeder — he will go on getting his 2% of the horse's earnings. Unless the breeder was the game itself: in that case the buyer becomes the breeder and the horse enters his breeding operation.

The seller receives a message confirming the sale and its amount.

What cannot be sold

A horse you created yourself, through Create a horse. It is marked unsellable for life: neither sale nor gift to the clan. That is what prevents manufacturing horses in order to resell them.
A retired horse.
A horse entered in a claiming race: it must stay at auction until after the race. Switching to a fixed price, reserving it or withdrawing the sale are refused — that would empty the claiming race of its meaning.

The game is a seller too

Part of the supply you see on the market belongs to no player: they are the game's horses. They follow an automatic cycle it is useful to know, because it creates opportunities:

a fixed-price sale by the game that reaches its deadline with no buyer sends the horse into retirement — it disappears for good;
a reserved sale by the game that expires switches to an auction, at a minimum of 10,000 sulkies, with a deadline drawn at random in the following days.

In other words, the game's horses do not stay in the window indefinitely. What finds no taker goes away.

The figures you read are at most an hour old

The market lists do not query the horses live: each sale carries a copy of the age, earnings, score and genetics, refreshed once an hour.

In practice that is of no importance most of the time. But for a horse in training, the values displayed may be slightly out of date. Before a big auction, open the horse's card: that one tells the truth of the moment.

The screens

The menu is symmetrical, buying on one side, selling on the other, for horses as for matings:

Buy a horse — the market, with the counter of what is reserved for you;
Sell a horse — your stable, and a good deal more than selling;
Horses bought and Horses sold — your histories.

The two counters in the menu, next to Buy a horse and Buy a mating, count what has been reserved for you and that you have neither accepted nor refused. A figure appearing there deserves a look: somebody is waiting for you.