What is the best trademe user name for buyers?

The advice for people buying a house at auction is to project confidence with the intention of intimidating or psyching out more inexperienced bidders so that they don't bid. This can be achieved by wearing dark clothes and glasses, bidding assertively and hiding any worry or stress you might be experiencing.

Online auctions may feel completely different from a physical auction, but a lot of the principles remain the same. In theory there is much more bidder info on an auction site than you can discover by observation at a physical auction - with a few clicks you can view their complete trade history. But in practice, you can't guarantee that other bidders will be impressed by your extensive trade history, either because they can't be bothered viewing it or don't know how to.

So the key place to try and stamp your authority is within the auction itself.

On the face of it, intelligent questions to the seller could be thought to achieve this. However my experience is that questioners are not viewed as a threat because they're often just kicking the tyres and aren't serious bidders.

Perhaps a confident bidding pattern would help? Without the body language, I seriously doubt it.

This leaves the user name as your only weapon. I think the name is worth a bit of thought. You want to use it to convince others that you are a serious buyer, won't let others take advantage by being distracted from the auction, and are sufficiently web savvy to avoid screwing up.

This rules out names such as tyrekicker4life, harriedmumof3, newbiegrandad, etc. On the other hand, there is very little to fault with names such as topgun, trading247 and webwhiz.

I wouldn't put too much effort into naming. Consider that once you have done a few physical auctions then your body language will be on a par with the other experienced bidders and their advantage will be cancelled out. There is no point in hamming up the body language to try and outdo them - they will not be fooled.

Similarly, a good online name brings you up to the same level as other experienced bidders, but the world's greatest name ever is unlikely to give you any meaningful advantage over them. The goal is merely to minimise entanglement in bidding wars with beginners.