I agree with this in general. Most of the auction prices just don't make sense as investors.
The rise in reseller prices in extensions like .CO and .IO for anything decent feels like a bubble to me. It reminds me of the bubble in Chinese quad premium LLLL a few years ago.
Brad
It is not a chinese quad premium bubble because it was caused by investing buying it in hopes of reselling for higher profit to resellers only with leveraged money by the Chinese.
The rise is .co and .io is simply a reflection of the overall auction market in general. Everything is going up and it is spreading over to alternate extensions.
And there are lot of end user sales in .co and .io and people are talking about it as well thus attracting more and more investors homing in on .co and io.
Take you for an example. There are lots of people like you who didn't see value in co and io and they see this amazing end user sales and start to want a piece of the Pie. You are still not interested, but there were people like you who recently entered, and it takes just a couple of new investors to drive up comp.
In that Stellar auction, there were at least 3 very very Big Dot com investors.
This has become a classic game theory case study. You know you don't want to pay more than 500 for a name, and. but you don't want bidder 2 to have it for 500 instead of you, yet you don't know what Bidder 2 is willing to pay, and it is mostly 2-3 bidders outbidding each other.
I go in with a budget of 500 and then do micro increments till 1500 easy.
If everyone start having a proper budget that they are not going to go beyond, then it should rationalise.