Market Discussions

Firstly, train your trading skills -- accounting, broker relations, retail and trade (for lower taxes and greater buy/sell orders) and probably most importantly, train margin trading

It's all good and well having all the ISK on earth but if you have it all wrapped up in 5 buy orders that don't shift often then it's wasted time.

Margin trading will allow you to "spread" your investment -- instead of putting 2bn into say 5 items and having your 2bn disappear and you just sit tight, it enables you to spread that 2bn over, say, 20 or 30 items that would offer the same profit - thus maximising your chances of actually buying something and making a profit.

Can't stress that enough. This will mean your liquid ISK won't really be dead, so long as it's covering your excess required after escrow.

Secondly, your questions re how many orders we have / how much ISK in buy/sell changes every day. IF everyone fills my buy orders, then I have zero orders!! But I may still have 10 or 50 sell orders.

Station trading is boring but profitable. You'll spend a lot of time upping your orders by .01 ISK. Region trading is more exciting, or as exciting as spending 6- minutes in a providence jumping through a dozen gates can be...

Personally I prefer just trading off the margin in Jita (buying and immediately selling for 5% profit or so) as this is reasonably fast paced and more exciting.

Profit wise for a decent trader - I think most would like to think they could make at least 30-50% actively per month (and by that I mean the ability to immediately liquide all stock on the 30th day if needbe and it would be 30-50% more ISK than what they had on the 1st of the month.

Personally I settle for 10-20% weekly of what I invest - not necessarily all my ISK - as this would be well in excess of the rate of inflation.

Would advise a cheeky buy order of tritanium before bed at what appears to be low (in Jita that's about 5.8x right now) and then when I waken up in the morning sell for what seems "reasonably high" (say around 6.2x right now) for 6.9% profit just for going to sleep....

If you want to chat and speak to likemindeds in game, join my channel VonBel Trading - hope to see you there.

Also, some essential reading...

Oh, and when you get mega rich, you can begin to seed your own trade hubs around the EvE world. That's good and right now I'm turning about 30-40% profit on Amarr prices.

https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Market_(Useful_threads)

Buy High, Sell Low.

Beware of the taxes.

nice topic.
try to use search option and you will discover thousands of the same problems in eve database.
that was instead of introduction :)

as for the advice:
1. only trade in major hubs. i would narrow the list just to Jita 4-4. That's enough.
2. trade big numbers. things like ferrogel, dysprosium, etc are bought and sold in huge amounts daily. Perhaps margins are not that big, but the volatility is great. additionally you always can liquidate your stock in case of unpredicted shift of the market in no time and with a minimum loss.
3. do not forget to maximize your market skills. no need to pay more tax if you can pay less.

My 0.02

- Do you typically have items shipped from major hubs to another, higher profit hub?
I buy in Jita with buy orders and sell in minor hubs with sell orders.


- If you theoretically had ~4b ISK, how much gets invested in buy/sell orders? All of it? I keep hearing that liquid isk is wasted isk, is that fairly accurate?
Since I also haul my own stuff (it's small stuff), the higher my stock the less often I have to haul. So since I'm lazy I invest all the cash I don't need in stock. I'd also invest in expanding the range of products I sell and the number of stations I sell them in, if I weren't lazy.


- How many orders/items do you typically handle at one time? Is 12-18 orders of ~14 separate items a solid spread?
About 25 items, each bought in Jita and sold in 5 systems.


And finally

- What sort of profit should a decent trader (not elite) expect per week given all the above? Roughly 2b invested in actual items, another 2b in liquid isk. No buy orders currently, 12-18 sell orders for various items.

I have no idea if I'm a good or bad trader. I personally have 3 weeks stock on average (including sell orders) and make 30% ROS. Applied to 2b invested that would make 2b / 3 * 30% = 200 Mil / week.

Is this normal? I feel like I'm losing ISK. I'm not sure if that's the case, but It sure feels like it.

I'm using EvE Mogul, which says I am +85m this week.

I have my main character purchasing about 300m worth of items at a time, then shipping them to Derek who then puts up the orders and sells them.

How do you keep track of profits between two characters? Especially with taxes and shipping fees and all sorts of insane things? I am trying to keep a log on paper, but I am failing quickly. I'm assuming EvE Mogul does this for me (as I have both characters funneling API information through one account) but I don't feel like it's right.

I make my own spreadsheets.

Buy cost: updated manually (I don't care if it's not precise).

Sell price and quantity, stock levels: manually copypasted (it takes less than a minute if you're quick).

Taxes: I just ignore :)

This obviously only works because my business is small, items rarely change and my profits are 15-80% per item.

I also use jEveAssets twice a week to double-check that I'm actually making the money that I think I'm making.

Ignore dev blogs. I never speculate. Your profits come from the delta or the difference in the buy/sell spread. Eve markets are highly inefficient. There are arbitrage opportunities on almost every item. And never underestimate the laze of Eve pilots.