Market Discussions

I've been thinking about how the Eve-Markets work in relationship to the broad number of users out there. As the overall Eve economy grows the worth of isk goes down. So how can a person make isk through investing? Well, I've been thinking the best bets would be something that is relatively stable and something that a very large number of users utilize. For example, basically when a miner raises their price on their goods a chain reaction occurs in that everybody has to raise their price to afford the ore. The ship builder has to raise their price to be able to buy the ore and sell their ships for a profit and so on and so forth as every ripple happens everything is trying to re-balance itself out. So how can a person profit from this knowledge? Well a PLEX bought today will definitely worth more in the long term just because the worth of isk will inevitably go down. Unless CCP decides to take isk out of the system faster than it is created. Which is highly unlikely just because asteroids spawn out of thin air and miners will mine these.

What do other people think? Please share your ideas.

Ok disregarding some of the wrong statements in the OP, I would agree that PLEX was a safe investment option for a long time.
But now PLEX prices are decreasing. This is due to PLEX coming down from the spike due to PLEX for GTX 560 and I have a suspicion that bots use a lot of PLEX so banning bots lessen demand which lower the price. Incursion nerf may have the affect of people dropping some alts that were paid by PLEX as well but that may only be a drop in the bucket.

So as PLEX is somewhat decreasing (saw some at 475m compared to 500m a week ago) it's a bad time to invest. Normally PLEX is a great item to invest in, just wait until we find a bottom first.

ccp put plex on sale and the price has fallen so i doubt you will see a permenant increase in their price lasting forever.

People argue, you pay more because they are a commodity in game. My mindset was always like yours. Why would I do that? Even in my case where I pay for 4 accounts, suppose I wanted to get the 2 for sale and 4 for myself. 15 x 4 + 35 is still cheaper than $100 for 6. Not to mention there has been a plex deal of one sort or another for the past 4 months. I don't know what is pushing them down but at 20 mill on 500 unless you are trying to extract that glorious EVE market 1% profit, its not a big tumble. When they are at 350 again I will consider the market to have crashed.

Inaccurate assumption. It has a decent chance of being true for particular stretches of time, but not guaranteed to be true regardless of duration.


They don't need to take ISK out of the system faster than it is created for ISK value to go up. There are scenarios where the overall "normal" ISK faucet-sink balance can actually go up but still the ISK value could go down.
For instance, large subscriber growth spurts can diminish the "ISK per capita" number even if the ISK amounts on older characters keep going up.
Also, rich characters "hoarding ISK", while not an ISK sink per se, it's practically just as good as an ISK sink. Same for characters that go inactive, or even just idle.
Those are just two counter-examples, but there's many more.


Simple - stay on the ball and watch out for stuff that's likely to increase in either the long term or even medium term, heck, even short term, then sell as soon as you have good reason to believe that increase will stop.
Technetium was one of the best long-term investment possibilities in the past 2 and a half years, might still be the case for a short while extra, but in the long enough term, it's likely to drop heavily due to changes CCP almost certainly needs to implement. We're talking a nearly 70-fold increase in price in around 3 years.
PLEX/GTC were a relatively decent investment opportunity, but nowhere near the benefits of Technetium, and not guaranteed to remain a decent investment for long. The best increase PLEX/GTC managed to made was about 4-fold in half a decade. That's more than one order of magnitude less compared to the best performance of Technetium in a shorter timespan.
Many other items have had even better medium term or even short term performances.

There will always be items that go up in price much faster than the average, and eventually, they will almost certainly go down in price faster than the average.
The trick is buying stuff BEFORE it goes up in price too much and selling it BEFORE it drops in price too much.
NO SINGLE ITEM IS IMMUNE from price decrease if you give it enough time.

there is risk that plex will hit 450, most likelly for a short while, there is also risk PLEX will hit 500 again for a short while.

My conclusion:
Plex market is very volatile and recommended HOLD and find other means, for small merchants.