Cattle.com

Rise of Non-Standard Winning Bid Amounts

Those of you who remember the old days back when cattle used to be sold in live auctions with actual auctioneers remember them.  They were the guys that tried to bid $3,050 when the auction had been going in $250 increments all day long.

Most auctioneers would just ignore the bid but some would make a lesson out of him by slowing everything down to a crawl and proceeding the call the bids on that animal in $50 all the while mocking the guy who started the foolishness.

Then came online sales where you could bid do a $3,001 proxy bid and nobody would bat an eye.

Well, maybe the guy who bid $3,000 would while he’s looking at his computer screen….but it doesn’t matter because you’ll never meet that guy.

How frequently does that work in online steer sales?

The following chart is the percentage of steers sold online that year that sold for a final bid amount that was not divisible by $10 or $25.  For example, a calf that sells for $30,003.

There are 23,289 individual sale lots over the course of seven years in this data…


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