Market Discussions

I would suggest a new EVE career.

Are you open to strongly implied indentured servitude? If yes, convo me in-game. If no, set destination to Amamake and check out the market for new implants.

Because you fail at finding trade routes. Not a very helpful comment. But some take it for granted that it should be easy to trade.

You mention you do your trade in Gallente space. It is hard to find trade routes unless you working between trade hubs.
In that case try to find a mission hub, place buy orders on common dropped loot and wait a while before transporting it to a trade hub. But you will hardly be alone in that practice. And often a good mission hubs and trade hub are the same :-)

Often in trade you need to have a bit of patients, it is hardly ever worth it to buy on direct buy and then try to sell it to a sell order.
Also you don't mention at what % of profit you are trying to get. Maybe you have to high expectations, often in trade you only get a few % of profit. Often we trade in volume and try to diversify. If it is something that is very lucrative there will always be some other that pick up the slack and pretty soon the competition have eroded the really good profit items.

Station trading most often refer to a person who place buy orders on items and the try to resell them at a higher price with their own sell orders. Earning their profit on the spread. Works best in trade hubs ofc..

Station trading;
1) Put up a buy order for an item.
2) When some are sold to you put it up on a sell order.

The profit you make is the difference between the two prices (less taxes), a populated system and popular items are desirable.

You buy items at a low price, then sell them at a higher price, and you do this from the same station.

Good trade routes are most easily find when you are station trading in each trade hub. And haul goods in profitable manner or use eve central.

Stable trade route is imho nonexistant. Because trade route oportuninty is created by price impallance and that imballance is eliminated by hauling goods. So if you want to haul for profit you have to get used to finding new trade routes all the time and have reasonable capital at hand (bill or few of them).

Otherwise you are much better doing missions or afk mining.

Great sources of information are greedy goblins blog (he is one sick trader) and trying to google eve trading guide ;-) .

Look at market prices of random or not so random stuff.
Highest buy order is almost always always LOWER than the lowest sell order in any particular station - especially in trade hubs like Jita - and it's usually lower by at least 5% or thereabouts (when it's not lower, something fishy might be going on, and you'd best stay clear either way).

Practical example, let's say we look at Ballistic Control System II in The Forge in general, and Jita in particular.
Let's say most sell orders are at 905k ISK or over that, and most buy orders are at 835k and under that.

Now, if you yourself place a buy order at 840k ISK (cost in broker fees depends on skills and standings, but usually under 9k ISK), then eventually get one sold to you, it means you paid a total of 850k ISK to get one.
Then you turn around and place the item for sale with a sell order of your own at 900k ISK.
It costs you roughly at most 9k ISK to place that order too (reduced by skills and standings), and then when it sells, you also automatically pay a sales tax (another 9k without skill bonuses), so you get a bit over 880k for it.
Yet you only paid 850k for it in the first place.
You just pocket the ~880k - ~850k = 30+k difference AS PROFIT.
And that's per item, without any skills nor standings. With skills and standings, you can reduce all those fees you paid so far (around 27k) to less than half of that, even just a third of that, meaning you make an even bigger profit per item that passes through your hands (almost double in this particular case).
Now look at how many of those items are bought and sold each day (thousands), and imagine what if even a tenth of that passed through your hands instead of anybody else's hands... you'd be making dozens of millions of ISK for just having the best orders in place, not even logged in.

The total tax burden on a complete newbie with no skills and neutral standings is roughly 3% (2x 1% broker fees, 1x 1% sales tax ; EDIT - might be different this day since I don't exactly recall how they recently changed market taxes - END EDIT), which means that even a complete newbie can make a profit even if the difference between buy and sell is barely over 3% - although you generally want to only bother with items that have at least 5% difference, and even then, only if the total volume is high.


Of course, it's not quite that simple, since people WILL overbid your buy orders and underbid your sell orders quite fast in a place like Jita, so you'd have to either stick around to keep updating prices, or accept a much smaller total volume of items for whatever happens to reach back to whatever prices you have set before logging out.
However, go into a more quiet area (not ac ompletely quiet one, of course, just a bit more "out of the way" of the classic trade hubs), and all of a sudden, competition is rather lax, and the differences between buy and sell can be huge. The downside is that volume is low.

All in all, it's a matter of taste and playstyle which one you prefer to do, station-trade in a busy hub (slim profit per item but high volume and high competition meaning you can make a lot of ISK but you need to be active) or in an out-of-the-way system (huge profit per item and low or even no competition, but very low volume, meaning you still make a halfway decent amount of ISK and you don't really need to be very active).

You never actually have to leave the station for any of that.

You're not going to make much money buying an item from a sell order in one station, and then selling it off in another for a profit. You're doing it backwards. You want to setup orders to buy items, and then set those items up as sell orders.

Basically what you want to do is find items that have sold in your region, but are not seeded. Buy these items (though setting up your own buy orders if you can) normally in a different region and set them up as sell orders for a descent profit.


Another example of what you can do. check your region for a specific item that has no sell orders setup (or are not 10X the price). Look at the average sale/buy price in the region. Next go onto eve-central.com and look up how much the item is being sold for, and where. Then its a simple mater of flying out and buying up the item, and then seeding it in the new region.

The key here is to try to buy items though setting up your own buy orders up, and then selling them though your own sell orders. it takes time.

Quite infrequently. But yeah, technically still around

There are many Station Trading Tutorials on YouTube.

Also Eve University has a nice selection of Audio and Written Material on the subject.

http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/EVE_University_Class_Library#Trading

It can be a fun profession, but cut-throat at times.