Challenge Day 7 - We are off the blocks

It looks as though a number of the participants have made transaction over the weekend; there has been a hive of activity at boot fairs, flea markets and eBay. Also a potentially controversial lucky street find of £5.

Please make sure you record all transactions buying and selling with the form created for the challenge, see Record a Transaction

Team Ganapathiraman and Ramesh are off and have got this on eBay, see 1999 US State Quater - PENNSYLVANIA

Stew and Thomas have both sourced products and also either have got listings or are planning to put up listings in the near future, happy to link to the items from here.

I had very little time over the weekend, but did manage two attempts to source some items,

1.      A shopping trip to Tesco’s where I was keeping an eye out for low cost items, I was previously thinking about a child’s cake or cookie mix, but unfortunately most of these are more than the initial £1 stake, cookie mix ~£1.29, and most cake mixes £1.79 to £1.99. Though I did spot 2 items that caught my eye – more to follow shortly.

2.      A trip to a Cancer Research Charity shop in Bromley, they seemed to be a lot more clued up around the pricing of items; than the fun day 20p books stall, with only Videos at £1 – I suspect very difficult to sell, most items were above £1, tapes £1.50, DVD’s £3 - £4. So no real options there and no moral dilemma.

It’s interesting to see how people are approaching the challenge some using part of the £1 seed, others going 100% of the seed on 1 item. I wonder if people would use the split/approach if the seed was larger; would you buy a single item at 2k to make 4k, maybe that is a very reasonable thing to do.

I think I am going to play it safe, spending around 30p on some Tesco’s items to be repackaged and sold at a different marketplace, and maybe around 50p betting on English premiership football matches, 10p bets on favourites, I expect to make the first target with the 30p items.

So I have formed 2 risk categories.

·         “Sure thing” or trade risk.

·         “High” or gambling risk.

It’s interesting how people are naturally finding inefficient markets to source products, and taking the products to a different market to realise a better value (market of choice appears to be eBay), maybe that’s going to have to be a common theme.

Also, most people seem to be trading there way to profit. Trade - as in buy low, sell high. Rather than using any other strategy, which may change as the seed amount increases and other options become more viable.