Need STICKERS to complete your albums, but are you tired of the game’s overpriced sticker packs?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.

Need STICKERS to complete your albums, but are you tired of the game’s overpriced sticker packs?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.

Need STICKERS to complete your albums, but are you tired of the game’s overpriced sticker packs?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.

Hope you enjoy!

I built a shop mechanic, similar to Moonlighter's but without the popularity mechanism, and a Bayesian bandits agent to choose/price items in Python!
It uses perfect price data from the Official Moonlighter Wiki to simulate customer reactions to items/prices the algorithm chooses for different shelf positions.
Originally, I was hoping to create a web app to price data while playing the game. However, since I couldn't figure out how popularity worked, the app would require constantly updating the popularity of items ... for every single customer reaction. That sounded like too much work so, I decided to not include popularity or any other factors that affect prices customers accept (e.g. customer type).
Does anyone know if there are exact rules for when popularity changes? I'm aware that customer reactions to prices just below that where a customer does not buy lowers popularity. How is popularity restored to normal? Is it just by not placing that item on a shelf for a day maybe? Additionally, how does an item become popular? ... maybe not being placed on a shelf and/or not having a customer reaction to it for a whole day or days? If I could nail down answers to these questions, maybe I could build that app ;)
The Bayesian bandits algorithm is neat. For this simulation, I kept track of the range of prices that I thought might be the ideal price (i.e. highest but the customer is sad) for each item. To choose an item and price to put on a shelf, I randomly chose a price from the ideal price range for each item and chose the item with the highest price. Customer reactions to the items and their corresponding prices changed my understanding of what those ideal prices could be.
The graph represents those competitions between items to be placed on a shelf for sale.
The dots are prices (y-values) for each item (color) in each competition (x-value).
The highest sampled price, in each contest, won and ended up on a shelf.
Reactions from customers (i.e. angry, sad, content, or ecstatic) to items on the shelves updated the bounds of these distributions, represented by lines of the same color.
The algorithm ended up identifying groups of items with the same ideal prices and selling them off from highest to lowest.
For more information, many more graphs, and the link to the corresponding Github repo containing working code and a Jupyter notebook with Pandas/Matplotlib code to generate the plots, see my write-up: https://cmshymansky.com/MoonlighterBayesianBanditsPricing/?source=rMoonlighter

Need STICKERS to complete your albums, but are you tired of the game’s overpriced sticker packs?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.

For our schedule and links to other discussions, see the Money and Banking 2024 master post.
This is the discussion thread for Economics of Money and Banking Lecture 6: Federal Funds, Final Settlement.

• Lecture Videos
• Lecture Notes
• This lecture corresponds with Stigum Chapter 12: The Federal Funds Market.

This lecture describes how the money market can help allocate reserves among banks to allow them to meet their daily settlement obligations. This works just like in Lecture 5 when the clearinghouse members borrowed from each other to be able to settle at the end of the day. The title of the lecture is a bit strange because you borrow in the money market to delay final settlement.
The "Fed Funds" market is what we call the part of the money market where US banks lend reserves to each other overnight. Since 2008, US banks have enough reserves that they don't regularly borrow reserves from each other anymore. But financial institutions do still use the money market. And the principles of the money market that we explore in this lecture are still valid today.
Through the lens of the money market, this lecture highlights the distinction between dealers and brokers as well as the distinction between payment and funding. These topics will come up again and again throughout the course.
Perry Mehrling says:

The relative importance of the various money markets has changed since the 2008 crisis—Fed Funds is now less important—but the conceptual framework remains valid, indeed not only for dollar money markets but also for non-dollar money markets.

Below is a 2017 article from the Cleveland Fed "Economic Commentary" that describes how the Fed Funds market changed between 2008 and then.

• The Federal Funds Market since the Financial Crisis

In this environment, the institutions willing to lend in the federal funds market are institutions whose reserve accounts at the Fed are not interest-bearing. These include government-sponsored entities (GSEs) such as the Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs). The institutions willing to borrow are institutions that do not face the FDIC’s new capital requirements and do have interest-bearing accounts with the Fed. These include many foreign banks. As such, the federal funds market has evolved into a market in which the FHLBs lend to foreign banks, which then arbitrage the difference between the federal funds rate and the rate on IOER.

Instead of a market that facilitates payments, the Fed Funds market looks more like a market for regulatory arbitrage. If all reserve accounts were interest-bearing and faced the same capital requirements, we might not have a Fed Funds market at all.

Before the financial crisis, the federal funds market was an interbank market in which the largest players on both the demand and supply sides were domestic commercial banks, and in which rates were set bilaterally between the lending and borrowing banks. The main drivers of activity in this market were daily idiosyncratic liquidity shocks, along with the need to fulfill reserve requirements. Rates were set based on the quantity of funds available in the market and the perceived risk of the borrower.

Next is a blog post from 2022 by Daniel Neilson that reflects on the Fed Funds market as the Fed raises interest rates.

• Positive Interest: Federal funds, then and now

For example, Minsky noted that if banks could easily borrow in the fed funds market, they would be less inclined to hold precautionary levels of unborrowed reserves. At a systemic level, the same amount of reserves would support a larger amount of credit, reducing systemic liquidity. The longer the boom has gone on, the more time this process will have had to play out, and so the more fragile financial arrangements will be.

Minsky observed that the money market is a system of "just-in-time" reserves. As long as the money market is functioning, banks don't need to hold any reserves to make the payments system go. But this forces the payments system to become dependent on the money market. The fact that today's banks have lots of excess reserves reinforces the idea that today's Fed Funds market is not the money market that Minsky was describing. It's doing something different.
Also from Perry Mehrling:

The lectures were developed over 15 years and filmed fall 2012, and much has changed since then, in particular strong regulatory shift to secured away from unsecured credit. Still interbank lending is key to creating one big bank, now globally and secured.

Even if domestic US banks no longer need the money market, there remain other institutions that do. Non-bank financial institutions, foreign banks, corporations, and governments all use the money market. Lecture 7 will examine the market for repurchase agreements (repo), which is the modern money market. Repo is a form of money-market lending secured with collateral.

Part 1: FT: European Bank Deleveraging

• FT Article: Europe's banks race to offload property loans

From a balance sheet perspective, capital—in the sense of "net worth"—is just whatever assets are not offset by liabilities. The idea of having a capital buffer to "absorb" losses just means that you have extra assets available to cover your liabilities if some of your assets lose their value. The amount of extra assets you're required to hold is going to depend on the quality of your assets and the likelihood that you'll have to write them down/off.
Here's the set of balance sheets that Perry draws on the board:
https://preview.redd.it/jplmuonskc4d1.png?width=808&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee85cd43e59a0163c25e2007d99a4fab6b59eb5f
These balance sheets are a little confusing because they don't actually show capital increasing. What they show is banks' assets being replaced with cash, which will allow their balance sheets to shrink back down, thereby allowing their existing capital to take up a greater proportion of their balance sheet. They're hoping to deleverage their existing capital.
The next step is to actually shrink the balance sheet on both sides:
https://preview.redd.it/yrlsmonskc4d1.png?width=544&format=png&auto=webp&s=ad3effa95bbcdcf5a9f23cd8c0a8d72017b970c6
Here, banks are allowing previous loans to be repaid without issuing new ones (A), which leads to a shrinkage of both loans and deposits. At the same time, banks are repaying their short-term debt using cash (B). They possibly received the cash from the sale of property loans shown in the previous set of balance sheets.
This part of the lecture also introduces the distinction between three different segments of the money market:

• Fed Funds
• Repo
• Eurodollars

There is really just one money market. These are all different aspects of the same money market. And today's money market largely operates through repo.

Part 2: What are Fed Funds?

The Fed Funds market is a market for banks to borrow reserves (deposits at the Fed) from each other overnight. It does not involve borrowing from the Fed itself. Fed Funds represents an expansion of credit within a single level of the hierarchy.
Before 2008, the Fed indirectly targeted the Fed Funds rate to speed up and slow down the economy. A higher Fed Funds rate would correspond with tighter credit and a lower Fed Funds rate would correspond with easier credit. For a few years after 2008, the Fed Funds rate was stuck at zero. Since then, the Fed Funds rate has risen and fallen, but the mechanism has changed. Instead of adjusting the amount of reserves in the banking system, the Fed just pays interest on the reserves that the banking system holds. You're generally not going to lend reserves at a rate that's lower than what you can get by holding onto them.
Here's a description of Fed Funds and interest on reserves from the New York Fed, frozen in time from 2013:

• Fedpoint: "Federal Funds"

Part 3: Payment settlement versus Required Reserves

According to Stigum, banks use the Fed Funds market to achieve two main objectives: settling with the Fed at the end of the day and meeting reserve requirements.
After 2008 though, banks were so over-stuffed with reserves that there was never any danger of failing to meet reserve requirements. The banks were no longer reserve-constrained.
After Covid hit in March of 2020, the Fed removed reserve requirements altogether.
The lecture suggests that the Fed Funds market is still marginally useful for daily settlement in the payments system. I'm not convinced.

Part 4: Payment elasticity/discipline, Public and Private

During the day, banks make payments to each other through the Fed's Fedwire payments system. This system allows banks to pay via overdraft if they run out of reserves. If Bank A pays Bank B using a daylight overdraft at the Fed, that automatically adds new reserves (actual money) to Bank B's deposit account at the Fed.
https://preview.redd.it/816n4onskc4d1.png?width=815&format=png&auto=webp&s=b693ade5a917acf6eca5fc8d20988b5283e9ceaf
This is called a Real-Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) because the payment happens immediately (real-time), and it can happen through a balance-sheet expansion (gross) when insufficient existing reserves are available. The one-big-bank credit-based payments system from Lecture 5 was another example of an RTGS.
But Fedwire doesn't accept gross settlement forever. The Fed's daytime balance-sheet expansion is meant to automatically collapse back down at the end of the day when all the banks settle with the Fed.
The expansion of overdrafts during the day highlights the credit-based nature of the payment system. This is perhaps closer to how the payment system worked prior to 2008. Since 2008, the part of the payment system that the Fed interfaces with directly has looked less like this.
As you can see in the below chart, the volume of daylight overdrafts tanked after 2008.
https://preview.redd.it/quujronskc4d1.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=422b71c7aef8d81886f71be1c07df0003579e72b

• Federal Reserve Board — Daylight Overdrafts and Fees

We can compare this to bank reserves, which were on the order of $42 billion pre-crisis and were recently closer to $1.5 trillion before starting to blow up even further in March and April of 2020.
https://preview.redd.it/qb92mnnskc4d1.png?width=1318&format=png&auto=webp&s=475c8adbf53ec2da822eb64384b5b3ae605eec06
It seems that US commercial banks aren't coming up against the settlement constraint as much these days. This tension is perhaps being pushed to other parts of the system. US Commercial banks may have plenty of reserves, but perhaps there are other institutions that might not.
The Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS)
CHIPS is a private clearing system run by The Clearing House, which is the modern name for what was originally the New York Clearing House Association we discussed in Lectures 3 and 5. Daytime expansion and contraction of credit happens on the balance sheet of CHIPS as well.
https://preview.redd.it/kjgtapnskc4d1.png?width=1093&format=png&auto=webp&s=50ad640cae1ffb4b3d10bb7100987539b4f5576d
Instead of overdrafts, members post collateral at the beginning of the day and record due to's and due from's throughout the day.
https://preview.redd.it/1wz5jrnskc4d1.png?width=736&format=png&auto=webp&s=6d600e011af72c503574cd2ea11c7e1ddbdee0b4
Unlike reserve deposits at the Fed, banks don't treat the liabilities (due from's) of CHIPS as reserves/money. This means that CHIPS is not an RTGS. Banks wait until the end of the day to clear with CHIPS and settle their remaining cash commitments over Fedwire. That's when the reserves actually flow. The Fed sits above CHIPS in the hierarchy of money and credit.
As of 2017, in addition to CHIPS, the Clearing House also provides an RTGS called Real-Time Payments (RTP). And the Fed launched a 24/7 RTGS called FedNow in July 2023.

• RTP
• FedNow

Part 5: The Function of the Fed Funds Market

In a closed system, the payments surpluses and deficits at the end of the day always net out to zero. The surplus and deficit agents just need to find each other. That's what the money market facilitates.
https://preview.redd.it/7xrc0unskc4d1.png?width=818&format=png&auto=webp&s=2519f8b6efbd1e26261392250b8a22377c8c4417
The creation of a Fed Funds loan moves reserves from a surplus agent to a deficit agent.
https://preview.redd.it/bpdfvnnskc4d1.png?width=339&format=png&auto=webp&s=a59b7b1caab750d6e42df85e0d2f201637fc565a
Below is a set of balance sheets that shows how daylight overdraft payments cause an expansion of the Fed's balance sheet that then contracts back down again after the deficit agent (Bank A) borrows reserves in the Fed Funds market.
https://preview.redd.it/o042lpnskc4d1.png?width=1116&format=png&auto=webp&s=7cdb760b91ad4a754f557365c08bc55fb68006ff
Notice that the Fed Funds loan remains. At the end of the day, the expansion of credit is still there. It's just no longer on the balance sheet of the Fed.
https://preview.redd.it/vykfgtnskc4d1.png?width=722&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e0f2937e93096498750ec5b734625802073962f
From the lecture notes:

To appreciate the importance of this constraint at the end of the day, it is useful to appreciate the way that banks are allowed to relax the survival constraint during the day. Indeed that violation is essential for the smooth working of the payments system because it allows banks to be the “first mover”, to make payments before they receive payments. The institutional form that violation takes is the “daylight overdraft”.

But it's also true that Bank A could have borrowed in the Fed Funds market first instead of paying via overdraft only to borrow Fed Funds to repay the overdraft later.
https://preview.redd.it/g7v57onskc4d1.png?width=1066&format=png&auto=webp&s=3699ca60bf510fa5fb7042478a42fd0f6be0a9d4
In the first case, the Fed's balance sheet expands and then contracts back down. In the second case, the Fed's balance sheet stays the same size throughout.
In either case, Bank A has "paid" Bank B by promising to pay the next day. The asset Bank B receives as payment is a Fed Funds loan instead of reserves.

Stigum makes a point that some banks are natural sellers of funds and others are natural buyers. Put another way, the regular business of some banks causes their daily cash inflow to exceed their daily cash outflow, and for some other banks it is just the reverse. Concretely, it seems that the former are small banks in isolated areas that don’t face much demand for loans, while the latter are large city banks that can lend out all their deposits plus more. So the Fed Funds market channels excess funds from the country banks to the city banks. Viewed in this way, we can think of the Fed Funds market as analogous to the older pattern of correspondent banking. This country-city flow was largely intra-regional in the past, and so it remains today. (The regional character of correspondent banking is reflected in the location of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks.)

Part 6: Payment versus Funding: an example

Here are the balance sheets from the mortgage example in the lecture.
https://preview.redd.it/h27lpsnskc4d1.png?width=1157&format=png&auto=webp&s=47f42f3c4c4480db3fa4bf9efb29bbb0171f0faf
These balance sheets show HSBC starting with reserves. But all of this can still work if nobody starts with any reserves. The necessary reserves can be created through daylight overdrafts to be eliminated at the end of the day.
https://preview.redd.it/7oh8conskc4d1.png?width=1154&format=png&auto=webp&s=8253d5d06b9e40d4568d81446243d417114254a0
part6-1b-x1-mortgage-overdrafts.png
I've left out the balance sheet of the Fed. In the background, the Fed acts as an intermediary, expanding and contracting reserves and overdrafts by expanding and contracting its balance sheet on both sides.

After all this is done, Citibank has a mortgage loan asset that is funded by overnight money. Clearly this is not ideal funding, and the bank has some more work to do, but we leave that aside for the moment to concentrate on the payment rather than the ultimate funding. (The issue of ultimate funding is centrally addressed in Lecture 17.)

Notice that the seller of the house is indirectly funding the mortgage loan to the buyer of the house. This might seem strange. But it's really just an extension of the swap of IOUs. When I borrow from a bank, I am funding my own loan.
https://preview.redd.it/udk23unskc4d1.png?width=783&format=png&auto=webp&s=eac169cd05ee02e0e2f2023f73a6c5bc4ee7ab11
Payments, on their own, can benefit from a temporary expansion of credit that then contracts back down once the payment is complete. Funding is an expansion of credit that remains on the books for a period of time to allow someone to establish and maintain a position on their balance sheet. For example, if I invest in a project that's expected to provide a return over time, I might take out a loan to fund that project.
In this case, from the perspective of the home buyer's balance sheet, the mortgage is a long-term loan that funds ownership of the house. And from the perspective of Citibank, the Fed Funds loan funds the ownership of the mortgage.
Because HSBC is both borrowing and lending Fed Funds, that makes HSBC like a dealer in the Fed Funds market. Dealers are going to continue to come up in this course. The home-buying example shows the mechanics of how HSBC might act as a dealer in the Fed Funds market. The key thing to remember about dealers is that they act as both buyers and sellers in the market. If there are plenty of dealers in a market, then there's always someone to buy from and always someone to sell to (at different prices). In other words, the market is liquid.
If there's nobody to buy from and nobody to sell to, then there is no market. So, in the sense that dealers offer to do both, they're "making markets."
Withdrawing Lots of Cash
Just for fun, let's look at what happens if you withdraw your deposits in cash after selling the house:
https://preview.redd.it/nhpd1tnskc4d1.png?width=1101&format=png&auto=webp&s=718c3327c4ac788141d3f35e3f7f9eb719317eb5
Chase's balance sheet has contracted, and you end up holding liabilities of the Fed (cash) as money.
https://preview.redd.it/pn7mbrnskc4d1.png?width=810&format=png&auto=webp&s=2efb3f20bc0c4b7fa22e4d9dfe70264ae24d496a
This is what we called an "internal drain" in Lecture 5. The Fed can always handle this kind of thing because it can issue the cash that everybody is shifting into. Moreover, the Fed can help out the banks who lose their deposit funding by replacing that funding themselves or by ensuring that those banks can borrow in the money market.

Part 7: Brokers versus Dealers

https://preview.redd.it/62ahxunskc4d1.png?width=813&format=png&auto=webp&s=cef4984c65dc5155d27c3e9735f45b25dac0e9b9
The Fed Funds market was never really a dealer market, in the sense that nobody made a business out of simultaneously borrowing and lending in the Fed Funds market to profit from the interest rate spread. If a bank was both borrowing and lending Fed Funds at the same time, it was usually just a side effect of some other activity.

For present purposes, the important point is that dealing activity expands the balance sheet of the dealer, while simple brokering does not.

Part 8: Payments Imbalances and the Fed Funds Rate

The money market helps the balance sheet of the Fed shrink back down. But it doesn't shrink overall credit. The credit just moves off the balance sheet of the Fed and CHIPS and onto the balance sheets of the private banks and the money-market borrowers and lenders.
Payment imbalances (after netting) in a reserve-constrained system manifest as an expansion of balance sheets in the money market.
Because the Fed Funds market is a market, the Fed Funds rate is a market rate. It is not a single rate but an average of all the rates banks pay in the market.
The Fed participates in the money market in various ways. Primarily, they offer standing borrowing and lending facilities. There are prices at which the market can always borrow from the Fed through, for example, the discount window, or the standing repo facility. There are also prices at which the market can lend to the Fed, such as the overnight reverse repo facility. These facilities are set at fixed rates. If the money-market rate moves away from the Fed's standing rates, nobody will go to the Fed.
The Fed does not technically participate in the Fed Funds market because the Fed Funds market is defined to be a part of the money market that's not on the balance sheet of the Fed. It's also unsecured. The Fed's standing facilities require collateral.
The Fed also participates in the open money market at the market rate to manipulate the quantity of reserves in the system. These actions are called "open-market opertaions," and they normally use repo—i.e. collateralized money-market lending and borrowing.
https://preview.redd.it/2peursnskc4d1.png?width=813&format=png&auto=webp&s=8e6ebd708d033b36f991dee43e9f7e2c946542b0

Part 9: Secured versus Unsecured Interbank Credit

The mortgage loan is secured by the house as collateral. If you fail to pay the mortgage, the bank takes your house. Fed Funds lending, on the other hand, is unsecured. There is no collateral.
While it's true that nobody is pledging (or taking) collateral, the banks are in a network, and they know each other. They're always keeping track of their exposures, and they impose limits on how much they want to lend to any given counterparty. They keep a diversified portfolio of Fed Funds lending.
When people stop trusting each other, they stop lending unsecured.
Repos are a form of secured money-market lending that often has Treasury Bills as collateral.

Part 10: Required Reserves, redux

Mehrling says that reserve requirements are the least important part of how banking works. If there's always a price at which banks can borrow their needed reserves, then what matters is that price, not the reserve requirements. This was true even before 2008. Since 2008, banks don't typically need to borrow reserves anyway. They hold excess reserves well above the requirements.
Not every country even has reserve requirements. And, as of the Covid crisis, neither does the United States. It's not clear to me whether this made much of a difference or whether reserve requirements will ever be coming back.
In a world of modern (and global) finance with shadow banking and market-based credit creation outside of the commercial banking system, it can be a challenge to regulate credit creation/expansion.
Please post any questions and comments below. We will have a one-hour live discussion of Lecture 5 and Lecture 6 on Monday, June 3rd, at 2:00pm EDT.

𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐛𝐮𝐦𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞’𝐬 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.

𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐛𝐮𝐦𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞’𝐬 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.
** DM me if there’s a specific sticker you are looking for that’s not included in the post, and I’ll check my other accounts.

I built a toy shop, modeled after the Moonlighter game's, and a Bayesian bandits agent to choose and price items for sale via Thompson sampling.
Customer reactions (i.e. 'angry', 'sad', 'content', 'ecstactic') to these items at their shelf prices updated ideal (i.e. highest) price probability distributions (i.e. posteriors) as the simulation progressed.
The algorithm explored the ideal prices of items and quickly found groups of items with the highest ideal price at the time, which it then sold off. This process continued until all items were sold.
The graph represents competitions between items to be placed on a shelf for sale.
The dots are prices (y-values) sampled from ideal price distributions (i.e. posteriors) for each item (color) in each competition (x-value).
The highest sampled price, in each Thompson sampling contest, won and ended up on a shelf.
The customer reactions I mentioned to items on the shelves updated bounds of these distributions, represented by lines of the same color.
For more information, many more graphs, and the link to the corresponding Github repo containing working code and a Jupyter notebook with Pandas/Matplotlib code to generate the plots, see my write-up: https://cmshymansky.com/MoonlighterBayesianBanditsPricing/?source=rMachineLearning

Here is the recorded presentation/seminar I held teaching all about Car Hacking by utilizing your FlipperZero. I know many people wanted it uploaded to YouTube so I spent about 3 hours editing and adding to the live stream footage to give you guys the most comprehensive lecture I could.
For those who don't know me, I'm Matthew KuKanich a dev and cybersecurity engineer. I have a degree in Cybersecurity Engineering, I've studied vehicle security extensively, and I currently work as a CAN Bus Specialist. I'm hoping to share some of my knowledge with the community, as well as continue to develop apps for the Flipper and work on the firmware.
For those wanting to know more about the CAN Commander:
It comes with a custom CC1101 (+Antenna) for pairing subghz commands to specific CAN data (letting you know what commands your keyfob causes on the CAN Bus and being able to replay them). A GPS module which syncs GPS coordinates with CAN data, two user programmable NeoPixel LEDs, an ESP32-S3 allowing both Bluetooth and WiFi control, a design that allows it to be used 100% standalone, and more!
RabbitLabs and I will open up preorder sales for the device next week. This has been a year in the making and we are not sacrificing quality by rushing it.
More details will be released soon. The board will come preflashed with the CAN Commander firmware I've developed and will have a dedicated FlipperZero app (showcased in the seminar).
I'm committed to contributing open source and free software. The firmware, CAN Resources, the companion phone app, and instructions on how to use and build it are on my Github. And soon so will the flipper app code. I want this tool to be accessible to as many people as possible, and be able to be built yourself. I'll be updating my repo tomorrow with more detailed instructions. Thank you, and I hope you can learn something from my presentation!
https://github.com/MatthewKuKanich/CAN_Commander
You can also check out the other main project I developed, FindMy Flipper!
https://github.com/MatthewKuKanich/FindMyFlipper
This community has been great to me, so I'm happy to be able to give back!

I implemented a simplified Moonlighter shop mechanic and a Bayesian bandits agent using Python and SQLite to select and price items!
The graph represents competitions between items to be placed on a shelf for sale.
The dots are prices (y-values) sampled from ideal price distributions (i.e. posteriors) for each item (color) in each competition (x-value).
The highest sampled price, in each Thompson sampling contest, won and ended up on a shelf.
Reactions from customers (i.e. angry, sad, content, or ecstatic) to items on the shelves updated bounds of these distributions, represented by lines of the same color.
The algorithm ended up identifying groups of items with the same ideal prices and selling them off from highest to lowest.
For more information, many more graphs, and the link to the corresponding Github repo containing working code and a Jupyter notebook with Pandas/Matplotlib code to generate the plots, see my write-up: https://cmshymansky.com/MoonlighterBayesianBanditsPricing/?source=rDataIsBeautiful

𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐛𝐮𝐦𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞’𝐬 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.
** DM me if there’s a specific sticker you are looking for that’s not included in the post, and I’ll check my other accounts.

𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐊𝐄𝐑𝐒 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐚𝐥𝐛𝐮𝐦𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐭𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐠𝐚𝐦𝐞’𝐬 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐞𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐬?🤔
✅ Guaranteed sticker ✅ No need to hope for getting the right sticker from a pack ✅ A lot of CHEAPER price compared to the game’s offer ✅ Have tons of proofs of past successful transactions.
Note: I’m not forcing anyone to buy, this is just for those willing to pay because they are tired of the game’s sticker packs. If you haven’t spent a dime playing, then good for you.