The poor Leu last second sniper ...

[Greekcoin21]

My experience is left bid off up to 300 CHF got coin for 200 CHF. Never has any suspicious activity on my bids I only bid on RPC bronze normally.

[Molag Bal]

I don't think there's anything strange about winning near your max bid usually. We are all looking at the same current offering and past auction results to inform our bids aren't we? If you make what you think it a fair and competitive bid someone else probably had about the same number in mind. And on the other side of things, I'm the underbidder on a pretty big number of my targets.

Edited July 23 by Molag Bal

[Heliodromus]

6 hours ago, Molag Bal said:

I don't think there's anything strange about winning near your max bid usually.

No - but that's not the suspicious pattern I am talking about.

It goes more like this.

1) All other bids except top 2 (winner and underbidder) are below some level CHF X. The top two bidders are substantially (minimally multiple bid increments) above X

2) The underbidder, who only bids once in the auction, bids last, but loses

3) The unbderbidder bids in extreme last few seconds of auction (e.g. 1-3 seconds in some case)

4) In many cases, as verified by the winner, the underbidder has pushed the winner to their maximum

Individually none of these factors would be a concern (unless they were happening all the time), but the combination is highly unlikely to happen naturally very often, and we would certainly expect the bidder who gets the final bid in to win as often as they lose.

Factor 4) is the real kicker here, when seen in combination with 1). Think of it like this - the pack stop bidding at CHF 100, but a specialist bidder snipes at a hidden maximum of CHF 250, and 2 seconds before end of auction a CHF 240 losing bid comes in. If the specialist had bid CHF 190, then the last second bid would be CHF 180. We're NOT talking about commodity coins where there's common perception about value and hence it's not surprising the underbidder is close to the winner - we're talking about situations where a specialist bids essentially a high random number to "ensure a win", and the underbidder comes in one bid increment below this (supposedly private) "random number".

It'd be useful if people thinking this isn't happening can show some examples to support their case. I've shown 5 examples here (and there are more) where conditions 1-3 are met. In previous auctions, where I had bid and won, all four conditions 1-4 were met. Can anyone offer some (preferably more than 1) counter-examples from the recent Leu auction where conditions 1) & 3) are met, but the last 1-3 seconds bidder WINS the auction?

 

Edited July 23 by Heliodromus

[Heliodromus]

7 hours ago, Aleph said:

Has anyone done the analysis of the hit rate of the Phantom of Leu?  Last minute snipes should be successful a fairly consistent amount of the time.  If last second snipes consistently fail, this is a real red flag.

It'd require an analysis of all bids to be meaningful, so would need to be automated. I've looked at the page source, and it is possible, but only if you are a web developer.

For myself I've seen enough and adapted my Leu bidding technique accordingly.

[Postvmvs]

Most auction houses have moved to anonymizing bidder identities, showing Bidder1, Bidder2 etc. instead of usernames, ostensibly for customer privacy, but doing so makes it far harder to detect shill bidding. Regardless of whether it was the an auction employee, the consignor, a confederate, or even an automated cheating system inside the system, they would all stick out eventually if the bidding behavior was tied to a username or other ID that uniquely identifies the bidder. I am on the fence whether this activity is happening, but I could certainly see how easy it would be to do, get away with, and profit from, if the auction house is running the bidding platform themselves.

[Limes]

No idea whats going on, and we'll probably will never know. 

But, in the mail just received, Leu proudly states: "New Record Prices

Review of Leu Web Auction 30

Starting: 406,638 CHF | Hammer: 2,326,124 CHF | 100% sold
44,827 bids | 1,873 bidders from 71 countries"

A record, really....

Edited July 24 by Limes

[Sulla80]

30 minutes ago, Limes said:

1,873 bidders from 71 countries"

Currency anxieties, asset inflation, growing interest in ancient history?  A CNBC article reports that  America's millionaire population grew 7.3% in 2023 to 7.43 million people.  I wonder what would happen if 4000 people were interested in ancient coins at a Leu auction (we have about 8.1 Billion people in the world).  I am surprised that I found coins that I considered “bargains” at this sale.

I have about a 2000 unique visitors per month to SullaCoins.Com - is that a sizable portion of the whole market for ancients?  Traffic is concentrated on a subset of entries from 300.  The RR 2nd triumvirate and Ottoman Empire are currently most popular.

I think the Leu results highlight the extreme obscurity of our peculiar interest in this forum 😀 I guess I will continue to enjoy my hobby and see what happens.

[Restitutor]

Leu is the only auction house I engage with where my default MO is to approach auctions like shill bidding occurs. 

With that said, whenever I start feeling that way, I’ll win a coin significantly below my max bid and am left scratching my head.

I do believe more transparency around bidder IDs would help. CNG gives you a paddle # so it’s easy to see who is winning each lot. But then I ask myself: if I knew that all lots where I thought shill bidding occurred were won by the same paddle, what does that prove?

I just wonder if Leu attracts a certain clientele with deeper pockets and so the feeling of shill bidding occurring is the natural outcome. Unless hammered coins show up re-listed in subsequent auctions, I don’t see how shill bidding could be proven outright. Even if the person bidding you up was the same for each coin, you yourself are also bidding on all those coins, so maybe it’s just your doppelgänger? 🙂 

So, all this head scratching does is guarantee that I’ll never place a bid in a Leu auction with more than 10-15 seconds left on the timer. That’s the best safety precaution I can think of. And it’s worked out pretty well; about half of my collection is from Leu at this point and nearly all of them I’d say I won for a fair price. 

[Heliodromus]

IMO what Leu should do is switch from fixed ending time to extended time auctions where each bid extends the auction for an additional 10-30 sec. Normally I wouldn't be in favor of this (it reduces the power of the snipe), but in this case ... Extended time auctions in theory (absent any shenanigans) should bring higher prices, and seem to be popular with customers who dislike sniping. Of course, in removing the need to max-bid snipe, extended time auctions also remove the possibility of exploiting this max-bid knowledge ...

 

[KenDorney]

2 hours ago, Sulla80 said:

Currency anxieties, asset inflation, growing interest in ancient history?  A CNBC article reports that  America's millionaire population grew 7.3% in 2023 to 7.43 million people.  I wonder what would happen if 4000 people were interested in ancient coins at a Leu auction (we have about 8.1 Billion people in the world).  I am surprised that I found coins that I considered “bargains” at this sale.

I have about a 2000 unique visitors per month to SullaCoins.Com - is that a sizable portion of the whole market for ancients?  Traffic is concentrated on a subset of entries from 300.  The RR 2nd triumvirate and Ottoman Empire are currently most popular.

I think the Leu results highlight the extreme obscurity of our peculiar interest in this forum 😀 I guess I will continue to enjoy my hobby and see what happens.

This is an excellent observation.  While there are plenty of government numbers out there and hard statistics, it is very easy to see the vast amounts of money that are in the world these days.  Just watch what people are buying when you are in a shopping environment and how much they spend and on what.  Ancient coins have become very popular and there are lots of new collectors competing with us, and a lot of them dont care about how much they spend.  And guess what?  Most of them believe auctions are the only place to buy, so there are there right along side us, often bidding entirely too much.

Anyway, I dont know about Leu and neither does anyone else (with regards to shilling).  I suspect its not as common with the bigger houses but is completely endemic within the lower tier auction houses.  One simply has to deal with the situation as well as possible, and be prepared to let a lot of coins go to someone else.