These forums have been archived and are now read-only.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.
Previous page123Next page
 

Is station trading a viable profession?
Author
Previous Topic Next Topic
Chris Carlyle
Doomheim
#21 - 2013-12-23 11:07:05 UTC
I've checked out the websites your recommended, read a lot of blogs and I believe I can make this work. I have modified my settings to only view items in the system I'm currently in and mark my own orders blue.

I've broken down my market quick bar into 3 lists. Surprisingly, the low-volume orders fill up insanely quickly in contrast to the high-volume items.

  • Low volume, high margin
  • High volume
  • Watch list

I've tried Dodixie and Jita. At Dodixie it takes ages to get orders filled up, but the margins are good. Jita has a lot of competition and more 0.01 ISKing, but orders fill up quickly and I like that. What is your favourite trade hub?
Nick Starkey
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#22 - 2013-12-23 15:01:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Nick Starkey
I'll just add that you can easily run missions and trading at once, especially if you start doing missions for caldari navy (they are just 1-3 jumps away from Jita). Train the daytrading skill and you can easily update orders while warping back and forth to mission zones, slowboating to gates or while waiting for your drones to finish off frigates. You'll even raise standings which will reduce your Jita taxes.

I've made a signature. I hope you're enjoying it. www.evetrademaster.com - web based asset manager & profit tracker
Malivain
Artificial Purity
#23 - 2013-12-23 19:55:26 UTC  |  Edited by: Malivain
Hey, when I started station trading, I also couldn't find many concrete examples of profits or, more importantly, ISK per hour. So after a little while I decided to make a record of my transactions over the course of one month. After completing the month of station trading, I put up the spreadsheet of my profits, time spent trading per day, and efficiency (in ISK per hour spent). I had hoped to help others learn about the trade.

First, I am by no means an expert in trading. Also, you should take any numbers posted by players with a grain of salt, including my own (shown below). See the forum post for an explanation of the spreadsheet.

Summary:

  • Total Initial ISK (Billions): 5.483251393
  • Total Final ISK (Billions): 9.23105576
  • Total ISK Earned (Billions): 3.747804367
  • Time Spent Trading (Hours per Month): 28.43
  • Average Time Spent Trading per Day (Minutes per Day): 56.87
  • Average Efficiency (Million ISK per Hour Spent Trading): 131.81


Original EVE University Forum Post - http://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=62987 (copy-paste, the ampersand is broken for some reason)

Spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aoku0r9WeJ-sdE0yN0c4dHJ5Q2JaaXEwLUtyXzFNalE

I hope this helps you and others. Blink

-Malivain
Kate 'on
DevonCorp
#24 - 2013-12-23 20:00:23 UTC
Chris Carlyle wrote:
For the past few months I've been running security missions. I used to think this would be my primary source of income.

Browsing trough my transactions, I found that I've made most of my ISK buying and selling skills, modules, ammunition and ships. Most of it in the same trade hub.

Truth be told. I like crunching numbers and micromanaging trades almost as much as I like blowing stuff up. Is it possible to make a living from station trading alone?


of course. And don`t let naysayers tell you it's more boring than missions, you literally can spend 10m a day on it, while you have your morning coffee, and make enough to plex your account, and pay for pew pew if you want. As soon as you build up enough capital, and pick a decent station/product.

The ony things you shoudl really avoid are tick trading, since it only benefits those who sit there all day, and assuming you have all the answers. As soon as you think you know it all is when the market decides to chip away at your profits until you have none.
LittleTerror
Stygian Systems
#25 - 2013-12-23 23:41:11 UTC
1 billion in a day trading in jita with 2 billion investment if I play the 0.01 isk game for a few hours, but i can comfortable make 200 mill per day updating just a few things once a day on pure lazy mode then that isk is made while i sleep Bear

station trading in jita takes time to learn, I would go with the spreadsheet route and learn what things are trading for at their lowest and highest then work out your prices from that, one tip i will give which is probably important when considering number of orders limit per character. Try to only setup buy orders for items currently being bought at their lowest point in the cycle, and only buy them if they have at least at the minimum (if it is a rare or hardly used item) 5 - 10 units per day total median average volume sold. It is entirely possible to setup a good spreadsheet and pull all the data you need in almost real time and have the data sorted so you can see at a glance what items are worth trading today or next week...

I won't share my exact workflow as i've worked hard to be able to make this much isk per day for very little effort, i typically never break the 3 billion mark since i spend all my isk on funding 2 accounts, toys to fly and wardecs, I always however constantly improve my trading strategy, sometimes those improvements are actually not improvements on my system but destructive. Which is why I want to stress you should make yourself some rules and stick to them, in my early trading days i was constantly changing my mind, setting up like 200 orders and getting frustrated and cancelling them all... There is a lot of competition out there in the trading profession both in eve and in the real world, the only way to win at trading is to rise above the others by raising your own expectations of what you are able to do.

Make your trading rules or system and stick to it and see how it works, then look at it and look to why you lost isk or you made isk, look for ways to avoid the same mistakes, improve your system make new rules and stick to them, soon you be making billions with very little effort. However you can only make more isk if you're willing to put in the effort, because its hard to break the 1 billion mark for a noob trader, then its harder to break the 3 billion mark but that will sustain 2 accounts with plex, 1 main for pvp the other trading in jita, but only if you have a clue.

Ok that was more than one tip but w/e
LittleTerror
Stygian Systems
#26 - 2013-12-24 00:01:03 UTC
One more thing, watching some youtube trading videos can be a good way to learn but tbh none of them are doing it in a highly efficient manner, I would instead go watch videos about pulling market data from places like eve-central.com api into a spreadsheet, but I would say learn to be reasonable, 500 items so about 1500 separate calls per day, updating your sheet once per day. Also be courteous and caring by using something like evemon to upload your own cache data back to their server, don't just take, take, take and then ***** about getting old data...

Another great program to use is evementat, its a really good tool, specifically with learning about its self cost function and setting the market browser deviation setting to it, this way you can see if the current sell prices are profitable for your stack which if you read my last post they most probably will be ;D. This is where you will learn how easy it is to pick on noob traders, buying a stack of a tech 2 mod and selling it the next day to some clowns buy order for 10% profit is hilarious, similarly selling another stack of the same mod for 16% profit is amusing, on a tech 2 high volume item that is a very good trade....

yes station trading is very viable.
Chris Carlyle
Doomheim
#27 - 2013-12-25 15:04:12 UTC  |  Edited by: Chris Carlyle
@Nick Starkey
Indeed. I try to mix missions with trading. Another great benefit is the increase in Caldari Navy / Caldari State standings.

@Kate 'on
It's surprisingly time effective indeed. I've tried both active trading for hours in a row and taking only 10-20 minutes to set up and walk away. The last option is ideal on a busy work day.

@LittleTerror
I certainly have a lot to learn. I must admit I never really used evemon or evementat. I'll definitely look into that! Thank you so much for all the info. Note to self: set up a spreadsheet.

And before I forget, Merry Christmas to you all!
Nicholas Lafisques
Dark Matters Retail and Distribution
#28 - 2013-12-25 18:39:46 UTC
I have just started playing a bout 2 months ago and trading seems to be the best way to make isk. Though I had started with a lot of planetary interaction which got me a descent bit of isk to trade with, I have just about entirely neglected PI in order to focus more on trading.

I think I hit it lucky with my factory planets making wetwork mainframes and organic mortar appliactors after rubicon which gave me a way to make a serious amount of profit with little investment/time. That being said, after starting with nothing a couple months ago I am up to around 10b isk all in all. It certainly required a lot of time doing the .01 isking game, but now I have worked myself up to a point where I can put much less effort into it and make plenty of isk to support just about whatever it is I would like to do.

As other have stated its all about buying and selling at the right time. You are bound to lose/break even on some things, but don't let it discourage you. Even with buys that weren't all that good of an idea, I very rarely lost anything in the process and would usually come out a couple % ahead.

I would strongly suggest training the appropriate skills to reduce tax/broker fee and getting your standings up asap, buy the tags for the data centers once u can afford them. As someone said, u can run missions while you trade, which gives u some isk (though it was rather negligible in my case) and most of all extra standings.
Thermopylaee
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#29 - 2013-12-25 19:17:29 UTC
Jori McKie wrote:
There are two types of trading, you can break it down to
- High volume items
- Low volume items

Low volume items have two big advantages, nearly no 0.01ing and easier to manipulate. They're perfect for medium/long term trading between different trade hubs.
High volume items are for the most part t1, t2 stuff and materials, if you aren't producing t1 and t2 yourself i won't trade with them. Materials on the other hand are easier to trade with, example are Isotopes like clockwork they are manipulated on Friday morning to get a higher sell price for the weekend. This sort of manipulation is wide spread among many high volume items.

I spend 1h per day actively trading with low volume items, that is 7h per week. My weekly profit is between 5b to 7b, so 714m to 1b per hour. You won't get that numbers from the get go, but 200m per hour are easy once you set up shop.


That sounds very interesting. Do you pretty much solely station trade, or is there more to it than that? I'd like to be able to focus my ISK/hr generation, and trading sounds like a great way, just haven't figured out my own formula yet ;-) Maybe I haven't put the money into it that is required... takes money to make money?
Thermopylaee
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#30 - 2013-12-25 19:57:28 UTC
LittleTerror wrote:
1 billion in a day trading in jita with 2 billion investment if I play the 0.01 isk game for a few hours, but i can comfortable make 200 mill per day updating just a few things once a day on pure lazy mode then that isk is made while i sleep Bear

station trading in jita takes time to learn, I would go with the spreadsheet route and learn what things are trading for at their lowest and highest then work out your prices from that, one tip i will give which is probably important when considering number of orders limit per character. Try to only setup buy orders for items currently being bought at their lowest point in the cycle, and only buy them if they have at least at the minimum (if it is a rare or hardly used item) 5 - 10 units per day total median average volume sold. It is entirely possible to setup a good spreadsheet and pull all the data you need in almost real time and have the data sorted so you can see at a glance what items are worth trading today or next week...

I won't share my exact workflow as i've worked hard to be able to make this much isk per day for very little effort, i typically never break the 3 billion mark since i spend all my isk on funding 2 accounts, toys to fly and wardecs, I always however constantly improve my trading strategy, sometimes those improvements are actually not improvements on my system but destructive. Which is why I want to stress you should make yourself some rules and stick to them, in my early trading days i was constantly changing my mind, setting up like 200 orders and getting frustrated and cancelling them all... There is a lot of competition out there in the trading profession both in eve and in the real world, the only way to win at trading is to rise above the others by raising your own expectations of what you are able to do.

Make your trading rules or system and stick to it and see how it works, then look at it and look to why you lost isk or you made isk, look for ways to avoid the same mistakes, improve your system make new rules and stick to them, soon you be making billions with very little effort. However you can only make more isk if you're willing to put in the effort, because its hard to break the 1 billion mark for a noob trader, then its harder to break the 3 billion mark but that will sustain 2 accounts with plex, 1 main for pvp the other trading in jita, but only if you have a clue.

Ok that was more than one tip but w/e


When you're playing the 0.01 ISK game, do you still have a focus on the items, or can you pretty much blanket the market with orders and make decent profit?
Nicholas Lafisques
Dark Matters Retail and Distribution
#31 - 2013-12-25 22:54:33 UTC
Thermopylaee wrote:


When you're playing the 0.01 ISK game, do you still have a focus on the items, or can you pretty much blanket the market with orders and make decent profit?


In all honesty if ur constantly doing it you could prolly just put a bunch of random bids out there and still profit from it. This would require you to put the items up for sale the second u get them and keep updating the prices until theyre gone. I wouldn't recommend it though.

You're better off checking the graph out for the last couple months to make sure what ur getting is towards the lower end of the price range. Just blanketing the market with a ton of orders makes it all too likely that you will wind up losing on a few of them, which will put a nice dent in profits.

It is always a good idea to start small and make sure the things you are buying are actually sought after. Once you turn over a nice profit on an item a few times then feel free to start dumping more and more into it
Elizabeth Norn
Nornir Research
Nornir Empire
#32 - 2013-12-25 23:18:43 UTC  |  Edited by: Elizabeth Norn
Sabriz Adoudel wrote:

Beyond ~50b, trading superrare items is probably the most lucrative (t2 BPOs, supercarriers, AT ships, titan pilots, etc), although deep trust scamming works too.


50b would on average buy you:-


  • 5 bad T2 BPOs, unless you're very lucky, or a lower amount of less terrible, but still slow selling T2 BPOs.
  • 2 Supercarriers, not including characters.
  • A time share of an AT ship that you will be charged more for next year.
  • I wonder if the Titan pilot market is as bad as the Titan BPO market?

Free 3rd party services

Buddy link w/ bonus 250k SP, you keep the whole PLEX upon subscribing
LittleTerror
Stygian Systems
#33 - 2013-12-25 23:20:05 UTC
Chris Carlyle wrote:
@Nick Starkey
Indeed. I try to mix missions with trading. Another great benefit is the increase in Caldari Navy / Caldari State standings.

@Kate 'on
It's surprisingly time effective indeed. I've tried both active trading for hours in a row and taking only 10-20 minutes to set up and walk away. The last option is ideal on a busy work day.

@LittleTerror
I certainly have a lot to learn. I must admit I never really used evemon or evementat. I'll definitely look into that! Thank you so much for all the info. Note to self: set up a spreadsheet.

And before I forget, Merry Christmas to you all!


so glad all that you read helped you, yes very much spreadsheets but good spreadsheets, spreadsheets with purpose, pointless pulling data if you don't know what is means.
LittleTerror
Stygian Systems
#34 - 2013-12-25 23:23:13 UTC
Nicholas Lafisques wrote:
I have just started playing a bout 2 months ago and trading seems to be the best way to make isk. Though I had started with a lot of planetary interaction which got me a descent bit of isk to trade with, I have just about entirely neglected PI in order to focus more on trading.

I think I hit it lucky with my factory planets making wetwork mainframes and organic mortar appliactors after rubicon which gave me a way to make a serious amount of profit with little investment/time. That being said, after starting with nothing a couple months ago I am up to around 10b isk all in all. It certainly required a lot of time doing the .01 isking game, but now I have worked myself up to a point where I can put much less effort into it and make plenty of isk to support just about whatever it is I would like to do.

As other have stated its all about buying and selling at the right time. You are bound to lose/break even on some things, but don't let it discourage you. Even with buys that weren't all that good of an idea, I very rarely lost anything in the process and would usually come out a couple % ahead.

I would strongly suggest training the appropriate skills to reduce tax/broker fee and getting your standings up asap, buy the tags for the data centers once u can afford them. As someone said, u can run missions while you trade, which gives u some isk (though it was rather negligible in my case) and most of all extra standings.



sounds like you worked out your self a good system but don't let your own system be the end all, because you profit as lucky as it is now might not be there in 2 month.
Thermopylaee
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#35 - 2013-12-25 23:26:54 UTC
Nicholas Lafisques wrote:
Thermopylaee wrote:


When you're playing the 0.01 ISK game, do you still have a focus on the items, or can you pretty much blanket the market with orders and make decent profit?


In all honesty if ur constantly doing it you could prolly just put a bunch of random bids out there and still profit from it. This would require you to put the items up for sale the second u get them and keep updating the prices until theyre gone. I wouldn't recommend it though.

You're better off checking the graph out for the last couple months to make sure what ur getting is towards the lower end of the price range. Just blanketing the market with a ton of orders makes it all too likely that you will wind up losing on a few of them, which will put a nice dent in profits.

It is always a good idea to start small and make sure the things you are buying are actually sought after. Once you turn over a nice profit on an item a few times then feel free to start dumping more and more into it


Thanks for that. I did a bit of hunting around for popular items with decent margin spread and good stability over time and put about 680M in orders out there. We'll see how many fill and how quickly I can flip them!
LittleTerror
Stygian Systems
#36 - 2013-12-25 23:27:19 UTC  |  Edited by: LittleTerror
Thermopylaee wrote:
LittleTerror wrote:
1 billion in a day trading in jita with 2 billion investment if I play the 0.01 isk game for a few hours, but i can comfortable make 200 mill per day updating just a few things once a day on pure lazy mode then that isk is made while i sleep Bear

station trading in jita takes time to learn, I would go with the spreadsheet route and learn what things are trading for at their lowest and highest then work out your prices from that, one tip i will give which is probably important when considering number of orders limit per character. Try to only setup buy orders for items currently being bought at their lowest point in the cycle, and only buy them if they have at least at the minimum (if it is a rare or hardly used item) 5 - 10 units per day total median average volume sold. It is entirely possible to setup a good spreadsheet and pull all the data you need in almost real time and have the data sorted so you can see at a glance what items are worth trading today or next week...

I won't share my exact workflow as i've worked hard to be able to make this much isk per day for very little effort, i typically never break the 3 billion mark since i spend all my isk on funding 2 accounts, toys to fly and wardecs, I always however constantly improve my trading strategy, sometimes those improvements are actually not improvements on my system but destructive. Which is why I want to stress you should make yourself some rules and stick to them, in my early trading days i was constantly changing my mind, setting up like 200 orders and getting frustrated and cancelling them all... There is a lot of competition out there in the trading profession both in eve and in the real world, the only way to win at trading is to rise above the others by raising your own expectations of what you are able to do.

Make your trading rules or system and stick to it and see how it works, then look at it and look to why you lost isk or you made isk, look for ways to avoid the same mistakes, improve your system make new rules and stick to them, soon you be making billions with very little effort. However you can only make more isk if you're willing to put in the effort, because its hard to break the 1 billion mark for a noob trader, then its harder to break the 3 billion mark but that will sustain 2 accounts with plex, 1 main for pvp the other trading in jita, but only if you have a clue.

Ok that was more than one tip but w/e


When you're playing the 0.01 ISK game, do you still have a focus on the items, or can you pretty much blanket the market with orders and make decent profit?


I use a deviation measure, if the order is within 1 - 2 % i will consider updating but I also look at the price history graph in game to get a definite decision, I don't see a reason to buy something at 25 million if its lower trade is 16 million, I then know that at 25 mil i will struggle to make a trade which is profitable.

I hope that makes sense for you.

/edit

You also can't really expect spreadsheets to do all your work but at least they can filter out all the crap for you, so that you only check items of profitability, and that is key, anyone with the information i have that can't decide what to trade will just never get it.
LittleTerror
Stygian Systems
#37 - 2013-12-25 23:35:29 UTC
Also when so called elite traders say how it will effect their profits if they tell you, don't listen to them, they are not traders :D

I could tell you why but it would take pages to explain so i won't bother, but keep on going if its something you enjoy.
Nicholas Lafisques
Dark Matters Retail and Distribution
#38 - 2013-12-25 23:44:09 UTC  |  Edited by: Nicholas Lafisques
LittleTerror wrote:




sounds like you worked out your self a good system but don't let your own system be the end all, because you profit as lucky as it is now might not be there in 2 month.[/quote]

definitely have that on my mind. been working on getting some new things to bid on over the last few days in order to stabilize my profits and it seems to be going steady as of now... have certainly had a couple scares though. Just have to watch out being too over zealous with any single thing. have ran into that a couple times. And its not so much that I would end up losing isk on any investment, the problem is having my isk tied up in stuff in my hanger so that I cannot capitalize on opportunities that expose themselves

e/ and it turns out I don't know how to quote things haha
Skurja Volpar
Rattini Tribe
Minmatar Fleet Alliance
#39 - 2013-12-26 00:39:57 UTC
Before I put my alt to station trading funding my eve life was a grim world of missions and incursions. Station trading is no less repetetive, but it's over with within 15 minuites per burst. And waking up in the morning to find a huge suprise payout when all you've done is sleep, feels, when compared to countless hours of "primary the niarja", like pure distilled ambrosia.

You need to get to grips with your chosen hub, and get a feel for the items you mess with, but once you build up some momentum with your initial investment the isk just keeps on coming.
Chris Carlyle
Doomheim
#40 - 2013-12-26 13:31:11 UTC  |  Edited by: Chris Carlyle
Skurja Volpar wrote:
...waking up in the morning to find a huge surprise payout when all you've done is sleep, feels, when compared to countless hours of "primary the niarja", like pure distilled ambrosia..


I can't agree more. Nothing beats a big payout in the morning. I think we've pretty much proven that station trading is a viable profession. I did, however, not expect it to be so much fun.

You mentioned you have an alt for station trading. Would you recommend using an alt for the trade, instead of a main character?
Previous page123Next page