Does anyone feel like they want to set prices everywhere? Looking on digitec for a component and reviewing price trend, I see something priced above the long term average and now I want to set a limit order to buy it at a lower price! 
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Yes, I kind of do this with price alerts (on digitec or toppreise).
Also helps to avoid unnecessary/spontaneous purchases.
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No, I buy what I need when I need it (or when I foresee Iâll need it) and the use I am making of it when I do justifies the price Iâm paying for it.
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Needs more regulation though. I recently watched a Digitec price jump on a weekend, and on Monday the graph was completely smooth again.
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Really, I sometimes buy stuff ahead of when I need it. I guess none of us run JIT inventory for toilet roll. But I bought RAM and NVME storage a few months ago when it looked like prices were going to skyrocket (they went up 200% and 25% on the items I bought in the 6 months afterwards).
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Same I am often planning ahead. A nice optimisation is to renew your clothes for winter during January -February discount period and summer outfit in June-July with seasonal discounts.
If you havenât done so, you will need to buy your winter outfits full price in November-December.
I am doing the same for sport gear.
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I recently got to look up the prices for an iPad with accessories (case, keyboard, stylus, etc.) for my grandmother. I then shared the prices, with my relatives, because some of them would like to contribute. Two weeks later, everything was more expensive. The protective cover with integrated keyboard was even up to CHF 80 more expensive.
I then also thought: That would have been ideal for a forward purchase or an option⊠Pay a premium of CHF 10 now, and the price for two months is fixed. Or something along those lines.
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Full disclosure, I donât have high IT hardware needs. However, I consider it the same as cars: new and better models can enter the market quickly and buying them early isnât likely to give me a good price.
That being said, I do have a buffer of things for those I consider important and I can pre-buy things in bulk if I have the storage space and will need them in the short to medium term (make that a year). With the current AI craze, I can understand wanting to upgrade/renew the stuff that will need being updated, that could fall into that.
I would not short the price of RAM and I would not care about a +/-10% price move. If the product I was trying to buy was RAM, which, for most of us, I consider a convenience item, then Iâd probably be willing to rethink my need or wait for a bit before buying it if I thought the price was both outrageous and volatile.
Doing that, I would take into account the value of my mental space that will be spent tracking prices and reminding myself of it. Unless finding the best price is a hobby, like a lot of the unproductive time I spend doing spreadsheets or on this board, in which case, Iâd do all the goods market timing optimisation I could afford. 
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kind of like Amazon locks in the exchange rate for a fee
I do use few price alerts for stuff I want, but donât need urgently.
Think of additional cutlery or plates of a specific set. These might have an RSP of 400, typically go for 250 online, but once in a while drop below 200.
For some stuff, itâs likely just an anchor point in your ahead, i.e. I would happily buy for 250 if I hadnât seen the 200 before.
Just an example, I know you could also buy a cutlery set for 1/10 of that. 
Either way, itâs not a limit price with automatic buy, but you actually do get it out of your head until you get some mail notification.
With hardware, itâs supposed to get cheaper over time, whatâs still wrong with those supply chains?
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AI and politics. AI is gobbling up a ton of AI specific memory, so everything went expensive. Then normal memory went up in price too. Now they talk of building accelerators based on using mobile phone RAM so now mobile phone prices are expected to go up too.
Then there is storage shortage, all the data they scoop up is stored on fast NVME drives. capacity has sold out and NAND prices have gone up. large capacity spinning rust HDD have gone up too.
Then politics: DDR4 is old technology and should be a low priced commodity. then china ordered its biggest DRAM manufacturer to stop making DDR4 cash cow chips and invest in next generation AI chips which created a shortfall in DDR4 production and massive spike in prices.
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Interesting, I only read-up on prices when itâs time to replace or upgrade.
Last time I did, RAM and storage were dirt cheap. Ok, still DDR4, DDR5 was rather new and didnât seem worth it. GPUs were crazy, though.
Reminds of some random thriller or series, where the smart-ass investigator said âthe suspect must be older, because they use outdated terms like âhard-diskâ.
Anyway, still got one of those flat NVME hard-disks for a reasonable price 
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Yeah. Iâm glad I built my NAS before the run up in prices!
Yes, I too just sold a put option on my 3 dining chairs on Fb marketplace.
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Well the chart has a daily resolution, intra-day changes are not displayed. It what way was that chart misleading, during the spike as well as after?
I was checking the Switch 2 price on a Friday, and it was 449 or 450.-. Then all weekend long it was 469.- (I know I checked multiple times) and the graph looked like this:
Then on Monday it looked like this:
With the daily data points of SA/SU clearly having wrong data:
Youâre right, if they adjusted the price 5â before âclosingâ of the day, they can argue that the chart is technically correct. In any case I didnât like it. Gives me CFD-broker vibes.
PS I love Digitec and their price graphs (just this experience bothered me a lot).
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You know, black friday and cyber monday are coming up, for years companies have been raising prices a few months/weeks before black friday to then advertise it as a sale on black friday, even tough a few months earlier you would have paid the same or even lower price.
Tracking prices is interesting if you get complimentary price protection insurance with your credit cards.
The price protection from US Citibank credit cards went a step further with a service that tracks prices published online and automatically refunds you for the difference. At least they had that 10 years + ago. I donât know of anything like that in Switzerland though.
I buy so few consumer goods, and when I do itâs because I need them immediately, so I just find the best deal at the time and go with that. But getting automatic refunds would be just fine by me.