The Art of the Deal: Psychological Profiling of Traders
By Rick Speciale - Feature Writer
06/26/2005
Good trading is critical to building a successful team in Strat-O-Matic. Trading involves the ability to negotiate, compromise, assess talent, acquire talent, and build a strong club. Those who are good at this also have the ability to maintain relations that encourage trading partners to deal with them again.
To be successful, a trader must know not only the tendencies of those they deal with, but also their own.
[NOTE: This article focuses on psychology, but another factor to look at includes the state of one's team. Your team may be a contender, a middle of the road club, or one where the average age is 40+ (time to throw a lit match down the gas tank). This plays an important role in deciding what path to take in trading and will be covered in another article.]
If you know where your team is at and are ready to deal, the following guide will offer a series of trading partner profiles in order to:
- Assist you in picking an approach for your team
- Identify partners to deal with and those to avoid
- Suggest when a deal is going somewhere and when it is not
- Show when a deal makes sense and when it does not
Trading partner psychological profiles:
Black Holes - You make an offer that includes a solid sales pitch and get a 'NO' back without any explanation. As one might find in an Agatha Christie novel, you have a case of the missing feedback. Two things to look at are:
- Your offer was pretty bad
- Your trading partner learned his interpersonal skills from Fred Flintstone
- You need to call the person as e-mail may not be their preferred communications format
Ebay sellers - These traders deliberately solicit deals in order to create an auction frenzy that plays trading partners against each other. This approach, made successful by Ebay, draws the best possible offer. However, habitually using this tactic will turn people away. Leagues with friends are best served by not partaking in an auction. A way to deal with this trader is when they are having trade discussions with a friend of yours. Once the clever Ebay seller comes your way to ‘compare shop’, tell him/her that you want to wait until they are finished negotiating with your friend before jumping in. Two benefits here are that you maintain friendships and keep the price a bit lower.
Trading blocks (cliques) - Sometimes you find a group of friends in the league who tend to deal with each other exclusively. The positives are that they prevent the 'Ebay Seller' auction phenomena, thus lowering asset prices. The bad part is that a clique limits its options by not going outside. The bad cliques do fair deals with themselves but try to hoodwink outsiders in trades. This alienates other dealers, making them look for better trade partners and perhaps form their own cliques. In the good blocks, individuals take advantage of tactics such as auction protection (preventing other dealers from bidding up their assets), but make the effort to cultivate deals outside the block. Trading blocks are part of a natural phenomenon that evolves in the early stages, but settles over time. I have seen cases where it takes new managers to break up stagnating cliques and promote trading flow. Therefore, it can be a good thing to have new managers occasionally join a league (or for managers to rotate).
Fishers (Bait and switch) - These traders are some of the most annoying to deal with. They often start a trade discussion with one of the following quotes:
- "Would you do this? [You say yes, but then they say...] Oh, that wasn't an offer but I will do this"
- "How close in value is my 2nd round pick to your player X?” You say close, but would like innings back as well. They come back with “Oh, I think a 2 is too much, how about a 3"
What to do about these types of traders? Fellow Strat Czar Michael San Clemente says to apply the following quote, "I don't comment on deals unless it is a formal offer -- is that an offer?"
Consolidators - These traders want to reduce assets and tend to maintain this dealing strategy for the long term. Many of them always seek the best player in a deal. There are times when not getting the best player is ok, especially if you acquire two quality assets for one. However, more often than not, the consolidation-trading tactic works well.
Special note: Smart consolidators offer what I call 'placebo' players in a trade up deal. In order to advance from a late 2 up into the early parts of the round, someone may offer Ramiro Mendoza, a player who is not that bad, but not particularly great. His innings this year are useable, but he barely gets carded. As a perfectly uninspiring yet inoffensive player, acquiring him gives you the feeling of eating a ‘rice cake’. You feel like you got something, but don't really feel appetized. Beware these players. Their greatest impact is to burn a roster spot for you. For these assets, make sure you don't give away many draft spots (maybe a few) and not in a meaningful round. If that extra player can be had in round 5/6, look elsewhere. But if you are the consolidator, by all means pawn your rice cakes on those who will bite!
Multipliers - These traders are either rebuilding or find themselves short of assets. This strategy does not tend to sustain itself over the long term like consolidation, but serves its purpose well in rebuilding. A likely example would be an aging team that finishes last in the league but has Barry Bonds. This type of trader is best served getting multiple quality assets for Bonds to help speed up the rebuilding process. Not doing so could lead to protracted roster decay and a much more difficult rebuilding task later on. For non-rebuilders, this trading tactic is less prone to success than consolidation unless one is very careful in getting MULTIPLE QUALITY ASSETS in a trade down.
Swindlers - These traders never do a deal unless the trade is one sided in their favour. This type of dealer falls into two sub categories:
Type 1 - This dealer has poor negotiating skills and feels insecure about dealing. Worried about making a huge mistake, they need to eliminate all risk in order to feel comfortable with a swap – hence a one sided offer in their favour.
Type 2 - This dealer is highly informed and calculating. They know exactly what they are doing and why - to win at all costs at the expense of other teams. Any league with proper oversight reverses unfair trades and reprimands these players. The downside for this tactic is that the approach alienates dealing partners and turns one into a league pariah.
Skimmers - These traders tend to be the most savvy dealing partners you will find. They will only do a deal if they get the better of it, but, unlike the swindlers, they are satisfied with marginal advantages. This type of trader offers Esteban Loaiza's career year card for the top pick in the draft (Estaban is great short term, but selecting Mark Prior is the better overall move.) This type of trader will offer Mark Grudzielanek for Marcus Giles (Better stats this year, but a big mistake long term). Skimmers maintain this trading tactic as a long-term strategy and these traders tend to have strong teams. If one is not careful with this approach and does too well, the league will catch on and trading partners may shy away from even fair offers. If you are smart, tread carefully with skimmers and deal seldom with them if at all.
Callers - There are traders who never seem to respond to e-mails. They could be indecisive or they could simply be busy. They could also be low tech…ie. they don't have E-Mail. If you want to make a deal happen, you have to call them and reason. Otherwise, a deal is not likely to happen.
Hem and Haws - These traders are very deliberate in their approach. They have to analyze every angle of a deal before making the plunge. They also buy themselves time to shop deals around and bounce ideas off of friends. This analytical and careful approach reduces mistakes but has its drawbacks. These traders often analyze themselves out of a deal by making the process excruciatingly slow (depending on how fast they analyze). The best way to deal with them is to talk in terms of offers. Feel free to make one. However, put a time limit on an offer so as not to give them bargaining power to bid you up auction style.
Armed with this intelligence, you know your trading partners better as well as yourself. Now go out and deal!