EVE New Citizens Q&A

probably not. most people who are into industry have a 99.5% or 100% yield and as refining does not take any time (which is a shame in my opinion), they will always have a leg up on you.

that said, you can always go the extra mile and create a spreadsheet that will calculate these things for you.

Do the spreadsheet up and compare it to your area. I used to make money this way in a couple areas, but once people figure out they are wasting money they stop selling to you.

In general you need both your refining at V and standings with the owners up enough that they don't take a cut. For most miners it's almost always better to sell the ore than refine it as you lack the standing with the corp which owns the station as that requires mission running.



PS- Which is not to say people don't do stupid things to save time like selling ore at cut rate prices to save hauling it some where. In general in these cases you'll need to haul the ore or minerals else where to sell it, and you'll make more selling the ore. As it doesn't do any good to refine the ore and put it on the market and have it not sell. Minerals are generally only going to sell if there are manufacturing slots in system, in a trade hub, or price at least 10% under market rate.

You devil!

I'll echo the sentiment elsewhere: if you (the generic you, but specifically the OP) aren't achieving 100% efficiency, you're not in the game. My partner maintains a stead billion-ISK-a-month income simply buying ores (and other stuff) in remote places, hauling them to market and refining there. She low-balls every bid and miners still sell to her.

I guess one lesson to learn from my partner is that you can't afford to be a one-trick pony. You need to have some value to add to the market over and above being able to do a tedious and boring task better than the next chump.

Rule of thumb:
If it's easy to do, accessible by many, and if there are many people in your area, it's not profitable due to competition.

To make profit from other players, you either have to perform a very SP specialized task(this is the least reliable route), or provide significant convenience service(therefore requiring lots of time investment or a large-scale operation), posses rare knowledge(such as discovering hidden metrics within a complex system via spreadsheeting), or by working in low-population, low-competition areas.

That said don't discount how much you can make off lazy. You can make a tidy profit off of mission runners for example who just sell all their loot to sell orders. It use to be better when there was meta-0 loot worth more refined than as modules. You can get a lot of loot, and salvage at low prices in the right place. The trick is to find an area with enough pop to be worth it, but low enough not to be worth it to the big guys. Like wise back when I was taking a mining break I'd regularly haul my ore to market, then fill my orca with mining ships, mining ganking ships, and the fittings for both. People will often pay a 10-20% hike to avoid traveling a 3-4 systems to the market hub.