These forums have been archived and are now read-only.

The new forums are live and can be found at https://forums.eveonline.com/

Market Discussions

 
  • Topic is locked indefinitely.
 

Some advice for new traders
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Whandall
Brotherhood Cartel
#1 - 2013-08-07 05:54:00 UTC
Recently I got an email from a player experienced in EVE, but inexperienced in the market, asking for advice on where to start. I was extremely flattered. Basically the only thing I like more than praise is sex, and I prefer to be praised during that as well. I wrote up a long rant about how to start your trading career, and I liked it enough to share it. Hopefully it will be useful for someone new out there.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, where to start.

To begin with, a successful trading strategy is not automatically the most efficient way to make money. There are a lot of things I could do as a trader to make more ISK like becoming a station trader, doing hourly check-ins, casting a wide net of contract hauling to move my product. All of these things are smart things to do, and traders who are into them, and do them right do very, very well.

However, all of the above things severely bore my nipples off, so I don't do them. Oh, I'll do some for my corp, but that's the JOB, man. For me, I like getting my hands a little more dirty, and I like reducing the math. So yes, I could become a station trader, and I might do well at it, I have some of the skills from RL. But I'd hate it, I'd hate logging in, my performance would suffer, and next thing you know I'm losing money.

I'm over explaining again. Here are some thoughts that I hope will help:

1) FIrst, for any in depth understanding of how to trade, lurk the forum, and check out the guides. There are some great links stickied to the top of this section.

2) You are an expert on something. Work it! I know precisely Dickensian about Minmatar ships. Every single one of them looks to me like something a child would make out of a junk box with a few coat hangers. I would never get into the ship/fitting market for Minmatar, because the only things I know about them are how they look, and the sounds they make when they blow me up. But if you know your ships and fittings for a particular type you can work that knowledge.

3) Look for patterns. If you are a missioner..you probably know where some good mission locations are. Consider placing buy orders for salvage there. If you're a miner, and find a system full of miners...well, that's probably a great place to buy ore or minerals. If you gank miners....hey, I bet you have a good idea of where to sell some mining ships, right? Use your other activities to deepen the sophistication of your trading choices. Its an advantage that a station trader doesn't have.

4) Time and money are equally important, given limited cash. Market PVP does not mean "I never want anyone to make money off my behavior." It means maximizing YOUR cash flow. If I place an order, and somebody buys it all, and puts it right back on the market, that is a win for me. That means I have my cash back for the next venture. Don't obsess. Just keep churning that cash.

5) Related items will sell as a group. If you are selling energized thermic plates.....making sure energized EM plates are in that station too will help your sale. Its true of just about everything, ammo, mining crystals, drones....more variety vastly increases your sale. So you can of course go to a market hub to sell, that's a good choice. Or, you can go out into the boonies and set up a convenience store. Make your choices, and run with it.

6) Finally only do what you are willing to do. I used to overcommit to the market end of things. I got burnt out. 2 hours a day of price checking deeply sucks, in my opinion. 15 minutes a day? I can do that, and do it daily without going insane. If you try and launch into uber daytrader all at once....well a lot of people fail, and they often fail because they overcommit and stop caring halfway through the process.

That's what I have. Hope it helps someone.
Thur Barbek
Republic University
Minmatar Republic
#2 - 2013-08-07 06:34:53 UTC
The stocking like items is a great tip. Easy way to start is go look at kill mails and see what the locals like to lose, then stock that whole fit.

Other advice:

A big problem a lot of starting trades have is they rate themselves on raw isk profit rather than what percent profit they make. Making 5m a day is amazing if you have 50-100m invested. Making 25m a day when you have a billion invested is bad.

Also it's like learning to pvp; you don't go start with expensive and shiny battleships. You use cheap frigates to learn the basics. Same applies to trading. Don't make your first project stocking or managing 200 items. Don't try out manufacturing by building a carrier. Start with the small stuff so when you make mistakes (you will) it doesn't bankrupt you.

As always: Buy low, Sell high.
Marsan
#3 - 2013-08-07 17:45:26 UTC
Also remember that you can make a profit buying and selling things while doing something else.

If you are hauling ore to the market hub. Don't come back empty grab a few mining ships, gank ships, some fittings, drones, and the like for your return trip.

Going to pick up a few skill books because the prices at the trade hub are too high. Buy a bunch of extras and sell them with a 10% markup at the trade hub.

Flying from place to place check the market for that item you know is going to skyrocket due to a patch in a couple weeks. I made a lot of isk this way last major patch buying I Scorps, and relisting them with marked up 20% with 3 month sell order as I did the sister's of eve arc. Admittedly in retrospect I might have made more isk marking them up more, but I wanted sure profit.

Former forum cheerleader CCP, now just a grumpy small portion of the community.
Careby
#4 - 2013-08-07 19:35:22 UTC
Thur Barbek wrote:
...Making 25m a day when you have a billion invested is bad...



From my perspective, 25m a day per billion doesn't sound bad at all, especially if you can make it without much bother.

By any performance or efficiency metric, my trading and manufacturing operation is a dismal failure. I spend way too much buying BPO's that sit unused most of the time. My labs often have empty research slots, and I'm not using half of my market orders. If this was a real job, I'd get fired. But it isn't a real job, and I can be quite lazy. I dabble in whatever I'm in the mood to do, whenever I want. My total worth is growing slowly, but it's growing. I'm sure my returns are only a fraction of what lots of other players make. It isn't that I don't care about profits - I do. I just don't care enough to work any harder to get them.
Carrelle Rouppon
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#5 - 2013-08-08 14:13:12 UTC
Null-sec Alliance, better yet Coalition trade hubs, or staging points.

Small mark-up, but bulk sales.

Start small with a Transport ship stocking implants, ammo, drones etc.

Work your way up to four or five jump freighters.

Without operations like mine it would be impossible for certain Alliances to conduct a respectable war. There are three basic types of arms deal: white, being legal, black, being illegal, and my personal favorite, gray.

Akita T
Caldari Navy Volunteer Task Force
#6 - 2013-08-08 22:25:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Akita T
I'll just leave this slightly modified copypasta of mine in here, just in case...

Akita T wrote:

[...]when I try to "eyeball" an item's trade worth, I generally go through these paces:

#0. Calculate your (approximate) total tax burden for a whole buy-sell cycle (say, 2*0.35% broker plus 0.6% sales tax equals about 1.3% total) and set a minimum acceptable profit margin (like, say, 1.2%) to get your "not worth bothering with" order gap (in this example, about 2.5%)

1. Look at market graph of as many items you can stand to look at (WHAT they are is irrelevant, only the graph matters), eyeball recent average volume and min/med/max unit trade value

2. Disregard all items where the average median is too close to either the average min or average max, since those won't trade well ; your best bets are items where the average median hovers around the average midpoint of min/max prices
(this eliminates quite a few items with just a glance, regardless of trader age and experience, so it's quite efficient)

3. Disregard all items where the average gap between average min and average max is lower than your acceptable gap from point 0 (i.e. for this example 2.5%) since they won't satisfy you anyway
(this can also be a fairly "eyeball level" maneouver, especially for newbie traders with limited funds which have high overhead, low total funding, and therefore desire a high profit margin... so potentially also quite an efficient initial filtering method)

4. For all remaining items, in turn, for each
4a. Divide average daily trade volume by TWO (under ideal circumstances, two trades - one buy and one sell - going through you constitute one "transaction" from your side) to get the "best case average volume"
4b. Gutstimate a "competitiveness index" for the item (say, if you think there's about 5 competitors of your expected activity level, or 10 competitors with about half your expected activity level, or so on, make it a "5") and further divide the number from 4a with it to get "your own realistic average volume" from it
4c. Calculate your most likely average profit per unit, then multiply it with realistic volume from step 4b to get a realistic average profit per day from that item
4d. Think about how large your orders will be (take note of volume from 4c) depending on how often you expect to refresh them, and multiply that with average min price to determine initial investment needed (modify directly with your margin trading skill if feeling a bit reckless, or do it at the very end otherwise)

5. Make a table of remaining item names, realistic daily profits from 4c, and likely investment needs from 4d.
5b. Add a (daily profits / investment amount) column.
5c. Sort by this last column in descending order
(this gives you the list of items sorted by best profit percentage, while also maintaining the view of the absolute level of profit you're likely to attain from this item type)

6. See how many of those remaining items could be "doable" given your existing funds TIMES TWO (or even more, optionally after taking into account margin trading if you haven't already), and depending on how many order pairs you can handle, decide which ones to use (you could be giving up some of the more percentage lucrative ones if the investment value is too low compared to available funds)

7. Set your EXPLORATORY buy orders at about HALF (or even less) of the realistic volume from 4c and at a price that is NOT quite the best at the time, but close enough to it (not above the average min though) for much more than just the items that looked good at first.
7b. Wait. Wait some more. Wait even longer. Wait until your orders gets filled. DO NOT fiddle with the price at all.
7c. Do the above steps for sell orders with the items you just got, whenever you notice you got them all.
7d. Take note of how long it took for your orders to process and the type of transactions made to them (single large, multiple small, other)
7e. Adjust volumes from 4c according to your observations above
7f. Reassess items you wish to actually engage in trading with based on the updated table

8. Set your PROPER orders at actual desired volumes and repeat steps from 7 for as long as you want.

9. PROFIT!


Hope it helps.

...

P.S. The OP does make a point though : what I describe above is "best practices" for a fairly stable market, not for patch-day-speculation.
You may want to be extra careful close to "patch days" (or around days devs make some posts regarding future changes), especially if you're not personally familiar with the items being traded, or if you can't understand what the implication of possible upcoming changes on item prices might be.
On those days, if you want to play it safe, put a large emphasis on sale orders and don't put any new buy orders (or even cancel some you have put up).
Of course, if you are fairly sure the price will go up (be it due to actual long-term trends you understand by being familiar with the item and the upcoming changes, or be it due to being sure somebody is trying to up-manipulate the items for a while), then you may want to do the opposite... just very, very carefully.

Akita T evewiki profile | | | Build your own EVE-ready PC
Sabriz Adoudel
Move along there is nothing here
#7 - 2013-08-09 03:43:04 UTC
One of my tips.

If something is falling hard and you have a lot of stock in it, spend ten minutes trying to find out why. Based on that, decide whether or not to panic sell, but make that decision fast and act quickly and decisively, or not at all.

Example: I'd been trading a lot in ~3-6m ISK tech 2 modules and had perhaps 2000m invested total. I noticed nothing was selling and my buy orders were being filled in large numbers.
Ten minutes of thinking led me to conclude this was the decryptor change in Odyssey leading to material costs falling an effective 20%.
As such, I concluded this was semi-permanent and sold everything. Got rid of the tech 2 1600mm plates I'd been buying for 3100k at 2900k each, the Neutron Blaster Cannons I'd been paying 4600k for at 4300, and so on.

Had I not figured that out, I'd have lost 20-25% instead of 7-8%.


On the flip side, if you see something rising in price, ask 'why' before buying in. It might be a short-term spike, or it might be more ongoing.

I support the New Order and CODE. alliance. www.minerbumping.com
Andraea Sarstae
Circle of Steel Inc.
#8 - 2013-08-09 09:00:41 UTC
Here's a simple one:

You can adjust your market order prices using the mouse wheel.

7 years playing Eve, and I just learned that a couple of weeks ago.
Vaurio
Fistful of Finns
#9 - 2013-08-12 06:32:10 UTC
I just noticed that little spot in market settings that says "mark my orders"

If you are trading in daily basis, this setting will make your life much easier apparently :)