Common Sense Trading - Contest Entry

**Srman77** · 08-29-2011, 01:07 PM

As I begin to write this article, I felt it necessary to premise this with a word of wisdom for rookie and veteran traders alike. Those words are simply this…Treat the person, or person’s that you are trading with as if they were you on that other side of the trade and, not just another trader with a screen name. I say this in having to have dealt with a couple of minor issues that came a while back with a couple of traders. It was nothing so majorly horrible that I would have to report them to a moderator, in fact it just proved to me that common sense and politeness in trading is becoming a lost art.
Within the last month or so I put a posting on the sportscardforum.com site stating that I had a short trade list, and what exactly I was looking for in return for the items on that trade list. It’s not like I had anything super expensive on that list, and I wasn’t looking for anything big in return. It’s not as if I was saying “Hey I have a Ryan Leaf rookie card and am looking to trade for a Joe Montana game used, autographed, two color patch card”, and by the way if you do know somebody who would do that trade, I also have a beautiful ocean front condo on the plains of Wichita, Kansas I’ll sell them as well. But I digress, as I said my list was nothing major, mainly some rookies from the last couple of years and a few rookie inserts. Most of the cards probably wouldn’t book over five to ten dollars apiece.
About a week or so later I received a message on my posting that another trader was interested in a couple of the cards on my list and asked for me to check his photo bucket to see in if there was anything I could use. I checked the young man’s photo bucket and just didn’t see anything that really caught my interest or that I really needed. Politely I responded to his message after I had checked his bucket and stated “didn’t really see anything I could use, but thanks anyway”. In most cases this would not have been a big deal and this would have been the end of it, however I received a response back from the young man saying that all my cards were worth a buck and I couldn’t find anything in his bucket. Now I could have responded with a sharply worded response, but instead as an adult I just let it go and didn’t waste my time in a response. In saying that, I think back to how many times I’ve offered up potential trades to other members of the website and have been turned down, or gotten no response as all, and in none of those instances have I got insulting, or taken a pot shot with a potential trader.
Sometimes I think the younger the trader the harder it is for them to deal with rejection. Another good example of this was about a year or so ago I was doing some trading and at the time had another list going of a few items I was looking to trade. I had quite a few responses to my postings but, I had one guy who responded to me it seemed every other day, whether it was through the posting or via private message. This gentleman kept trying to offer up trades to me with items that I just had no interest in. Now I can understand that if you get turned down once with a trade offer that you consider coming back with a better counter offer, but if that counter offer is denied then you should just drop the subject and move on to looking for someone else to trade with. This person however didn’t try that, instead he counter offered not once or twice even but as I recall five times trying to push a trade with me that just wasn’t going to happen. You would think that after the first couple of times I politely said that I wasn’t interested this trader would have gotten the hint, but no instead he kept trying to push a trade deal that I had no interest in.
I understand that as traders we’d all like every deal that we make to work out, and that sometimes deals for whatever reason don’t materialize. These things happen and you learn from them and become a better trader and hopefully person as well. The main point I’m trying to make for traders young and old is when a trade doesn’t go your way, don’t get upset or insulted by the other person not wanting to trade with you and don’t try to force a deal that’s not there, but rather walk away and live to trade another day.