nmasami's Early Win Method
This is named after nmasami, the master of the codestone auctions. Do a search for codestones in auctions. Any codestone, it doesn't matter. You'll see her bidding, but only for certain ones. I think this girl doesn't sleep or something, cause she always has like half of the "good" codestones, the ones with high minimum increments. Basically, you win the bid before anyone else does because no one wants to bid again.
Let's say it starts at 2,000. You'll see this:
item Q, value 4,500, increment 1,000, 12 hours left
nmasami 3,700np
and that's it. She bid 3,700, an easy 800 profit, cause no one would bid 4,700. Well, they might, if they're idiots.
You just have to look around, and it can even happen for big ones too. Like say you have a paint brush, with increment of like 20,000. You could pull an nmasami and make out a few thousand points. Hopefully you have friends on neopets, that you can speak to in real time, you can have them help you out. Example:
item V, value 340,000, increment 20,000, 12 hours left
bidderB 290,000np
bidderN 270,000np
bidderL 250,000np
Now you could bid 310,000 and hope no one else bids 330,000, but that's unlikely. I would just tell a friend to bid 310,000, then you bid 330,000, and hopefully no one outbids me. Sometimes they will, cause when you have items this expensive, the actual value is blurred. Works better on things valued at around 100,000 or less
item V, value 340,000, increment 20,000, 11 hours, 59 minutes, 30 seconds left.
Me 330,000np
Friend 310,000np
bidderB 290,000np
bidderN 270,000np
bidderL 250,000np
I've seen others do this too, not just nmasami, but the other people bid on everything, not just the high increments. They'll bid 800np on items worth 850np, even if the increment is only 1np, or 3,650np on items worth 3,800np with an increment of 50np. The reason is that they just hope no one else bids. It sometimes works.
Pros:
Win before it's over.
Cons:
Finding them is the hard part. Plus people might bid and you won't win,
because they don't know the actual value. That's the tricky part, you want
the bid to be low, so you maximize your profit, yet you want your bid to
be high enough to make it obvious that it's not worth bidding on for the other
guy.