Market Discussions

"What would you do if you had 100 billion ISK?"

I'd start getting worried at how much I lost!

You said it!! This is a great game and I'm not insulting it in any way, it's THE best mmo.

But looking back I should have spent all that time making real money lol.

However, this game did give me an introduction to how the stock market works, which is what I'm doing now, so I have this game to thank for that. The market mechanics in this game is similar to the stock market, except it's much simplified, and things happen much, much slower.

With 100b isk.. I would probably buy myself a decent character then give the rest away to the new players to make the game more enjoyable. (I'm taking donations :D)

On another note, how much ISK do you people actually have? I heard somewhere that some of you people have 500b+, but with what I've been reading, are there any trillionairs on eve?

Yes, there are more than you would think

http://i.imgur.com/KaEnbCz.png

And I'm not even the richest guy around.

.. I take donations.. :P

But seriously, cheers on having that much. How did you do it?

I'd buy 7 falcon alts, 7 logi alts, a set of slaves and a booster

I'd finally be able to win lowsec solo pvp

Wow....just speechless. Does anyone own a JF bpo?

I'm a market trader. These days I do what Darkstar01 said in his second point, though a) I'm an engineer, not a programmer and b) being either isn't necessary. Success in that kind of investment comes from making educated guesses as soon as possible (so, watching chaos, watching any dev appearance anywhere lest they leak something, watching the test server, etc) and being right. Knowing how systems in the game tie together is helpful as it uncovers things that are less obvious, including secondary and tertiary effects, but it's not required.

The full history? I'm new money, relatively speaking speaking. I've played for a long time and got in and out of various money making schemes but didn't really start on any serious path to fortune until mid-2008, when I took a humble 400m isk gleaned from exploration and started trading on the market. At first it was just regular daytrading on the margins, but over the course of six months, updating twice a day, that turned into 18b. Not much, but I'd started to identify interactions and cycles in the market, plus mechanics that tied things together.

Then I decided I was quitting and gave most of my isk to the corp.

Three months later when I came back I started trading again, but found the 3b isk I'd left myself to be boring, so I took out a bond inside Goonswarm for 50b isk and started trading with that, using what I'd learned previous doing a mix of margin trading and longer term cycle trading. Then someone made the suggestion to me that I setup as a faction resale business - buy at a discount in goonspace from our ratters, ship to Jita and sell. Back then, faction items were contract-only, which people found to me a huge hassle as sellers, so getting cash from me right away was a huge hit. Business flourished and quickly absorbed all my capital, then continued growing. As it grew I got back into trading, started stocking our nullsec markets in Delve, and other activities. After awhile I'd burned myself out, so I closed out the bond, liquidated my remaining stocks and closed out most of my trading activities. This included liquidating some highly speculative investments I'd made: a pile of Neodymium - it was what this guy had bought and with the quantities & date available in the blog, it wasn't much of a stretch to figure it out - and a pile of Technetium, unfortunately long before it really spiked hard.

Whoops.

While I was gone, I missed the introduction of PI, which was one of the largest wealth multipliers the game has seen in sometime. Goods sold for pennies at NPC prices instantly increased 1000% in value over night and have of course gone up since. Oh well.

I finally got active again sometime shortly before Crucible. I relaunched the faction trade business on a bond again, with similar success as before. I once again got into trading as well, but limited myself to cycle trading in highly liquid markets. Margin trading felt too much like grinding at this point and besides, I wanted to get into patch speculation anyway. Building on what I'd learned before, I started gobbling up knowledge. How do reactions and the T2 production chain work, how does the Tech III production chain work, fuel blocks, you name it. Armed with this, the twitter feed of CCP Diagoras (pbuh) was not the stream of innocuous statistics (well okay, most of it still was), but a literal goldmine of information.

While Crucible was well received in the wake of Incarna, it was a wet fart for major investment. This amusing thing happened and I made a lot of isk after it was patched and Nocx allowed to rise. Inferno was interesting. There was this little side-show. As the blog says, we wound up making nothing from it. I did however make lots of money cycle trading implants whose prices went nuts And there was also this, announced ahead of time. Made quite a lot of isk buying high ends and then selling them into the spike, then buying low ends and selling them into the next spike.

Retribution, largely another wet fart aside from continuing tiericide. With minerals stockpiled earlier I built cruisers, then BCs, then battleships. And then Odyssey. Remember what I said at the start of this post that key to maximizing success is using whatever info you can to get in early? At PAX East, early 2013, someone snapped this, talked about in context of "resource rebalancing". Isotopes were already literally as low as they could go, with nowhere to go but up from any changes. I took whatever profit I could get on my tiericide stocks and went all in. 250b on isotopes... and plenty more increasing the size of the pile of R64s I'd been accumulating for months as a hedge against an eventual revamp. A lotto ticket, if you will. Already at 140b in value, I piled isk onto it. After all, isotopes I merely expected to triple, but the moongoo? Technetium had been worth 80k after Alchemy... and the price range for R64s was 2k-10k per unit.

Fast forwarding, I unloaded ice, bought more R64s, diversified into R16s (which spiked due to alchemy and metamaterials usage and should continue to do so) and intermediates, and patiently wait for my investments to mature. It's all been rather convenient, really, I don't have to worry about sitting out due to inside information from the CSM - instead, my money's parked in a long term market that still has plenty of room to rise.

Some of the ways have been mentioned, others got trillions by taking a big risk on something they noticed on the test server and invested heavily in, and it paid off.

Remember, you rarely hear of the "Oh, crap, my investment risk I took didnt work out"