advice Proxy Bid Vs Active Bidding

Placing a proxy bid hours or days in advance is like exploding the auction in advance. The final price of the auction can go to the roof, while alerting a lot of bidders that may had not noticed the domain until you placed the proxy bid.
Two proxy bids on the same auction, and you can forget about the domain, unless you place a proxy bid of $5,000 for a not so premium domain.
If you are serious about acquiring a domain at an auction, never place a proxy bid in advance.
In my opinion...

@Sutruk Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Agree with what you've said. With the kind of competition going on in the aftermarket - proxy bids should not be the option to catch a domain name.

i hate Proxy bidding : ( Automatic “match” ..

Active bidding feels more real; not against AFK

The human element, feels safer prevent fraud. All fine dandy GD reports sales; but,, credible?

Feel live Bidding require presence;prev. frauds when have make split decision developing bids

I agree with Sutruk above...it is best not to proxy bid unless there is no other option. There are many out there, myself inclued, that watch for the most active names in case I missed one that is superior.

Too many proxy bids and the bots take notice...with the bottom auto bid looking like it is in the 250+/- range once a bot locks in, a 40 proxy placed early on will likely not win.

The trick is not to bid and hope it goes into closeout...but the problem with that is (insert name of company(s) we don't like here) and those with special access and/or multiple bidding bots will get the name a fraction of a second before it can fully drop to closeout status. We sit there waiting for the 'domain will be available soon' phrase to go away and the closeout availability to appear...it never, or rarely, does if it is a decent name.

@Mister Funsky - well-explained. An average bidder is against several odds. This is the reason why more and more investors are trying to acquire domain names privately.