User blog comment:Fanoftinyvillage/Question - What would a Market analysis need to have?/@comment-5039776-20120613093449

This sounds like excellent information for users. We do need to make it easy to understand the economics of a store.

I am not sure the monthly cost of resources is relevant - as we know, they have been going up over the last 2 months. I tend to work on high-low-average-latest (I also calculate a 14 day moving average but let's not go there).

I suspect the price of a resource is set by a random number generator within a high-low band, so monthly averages probably mean little these days. What does mean something is the profitability of a store at the high price and also at the average price.

Average is also an interesting concept due to discontinuities in the pricing model. Take Stone for example. Up to and including 19 April, to buy 100 stones had averaged 200 and the price had ranged between 149 - 370. Then they started pushing it up big time.

Between 20 April and today, it has averaged 301, ranging between 194 and 409. That's a big hike and a huge discontinuity in prices. So what's the average for stone? Has it settled down? The last 30 days has been 288, again the range is 194-409. I note the mid point of the range is 301. Coincidence?

In any event, so long as the comparison doesn't end up as a mass of numbers in a table, which makes it uninteresting and difficult to comprehend, I think the information will be useful.

Thanks for a really interesting question.