Market Discussions

Ouside of trade hubs dont expect stuff to move too fast. Ignoreing Jita/Amarr as exceptions... You talk about 15 minutes when you should be talking about days to fill buy/sell orders. Nothing about manufacturing is fast. It is meant to be a more passive activity where you update orders/jobs and then go do other stuff. So you can run you 30m/h missions while your factories are in production.

For manufacturing the hardest part is aquiring the components/minerals and moving them to the right place.

The only thing more capital would do is let you make bigger buy and sell order and probably reduce transportation costs if you move in bulk. With enough isk you might be able to start making deals with mining corps or off the market deals... but really you can do that at any level if you have the contacts.

I started station trading myself about five days ago starting with a 500m investment. At first things were slow and profit was there but not as substantial as I would have liked. I was putting in buy orders on about 10-15 different items (this used up all but 30m of my initial investment) and would babysit them over the course of the day while I did other things on my other account. In my first couple days I only made about 30m total in profit which to me wasn't worth my time so I eventually broke down and purchased another PLEX to put towards my investment. This changed things DRAMATICALLY. This allowed me to spread my money over ~50-60 items now and with that level of spread my orders were filling immensely faster (not each individual order mind you, but my hangar was filling with items overall much faster). Now I was pushing 100-150m in profits per day which was satisfactory for my needs.

Now, with the information you provided along with some assumptions I had to make to fill the gaps where questions arose, I would say the steps you need to take to improve your profits would be to first spread your investment across more items overall (high and low volume items). I would also suggest staying away from minerals and ammunition because these items are traded in much too high volume to give you any solid profit. Essentially what I like to do is I use a program called Elinor that will give me instant profit margins on items, so I click through hundreds of items looking for margins above 10% (usually between 10-30% as anything higher usually has far too low a volume to make a timely profit as well). I then check the market history graph for that item and I usually look for a minimum trade volume average of about 50 units and a maximum within the thousands (typically around 20,000 units max). Elinor then provides sample data to show my expected profits based on the number of items I purchase so lets say the average volume moved is 100-200 units per day and Elinor says that I can profit about 5.89m from flipping 25 units. To me this profit is worth the time it will take to flip, and should be rather easy to flip considering I am only attempting to buy less than half that days volume for that item. Rinse and repeat until your left with about 50-100m or all your orders are used. Then play the waiting game, updating your orders as often as you can and the profit will begin to come in. Lastly and although it's obvious I would say start with a higher investment, 300m isn't going to bring in the profits you are probably looking/hoping for.

tl;dr

Spread your investment over as many items as you can, stay away from super high and super low volume items, look for something in between (ship modules tab holds a lot of great items), start with a larger investment, give it about 24 hours or enough time for your orders to get going, imagine your on a bike and each time you pedal = one day of trading, obviously the first pedal is going to take a little more effort then the next, but eventually you'll be pedaling along at a good pace without much effort and your profits will come flowing in.

The real money in ammo is to become a producer. Trading these items is hopeless if you want to make much of a profit.

In terms of trading i would recommend looking at t2 modules to start with. Look for at least a 10% margin after taxes and focus on items that over the last year have generally traded at higher prices than they're at right now. T2 Damage controls, for example, will start to become a viable item to flip when the price gets down to the 320k range and/or starts to go back up.

When trading T2 items it will really help if you not just churn isk for little or no profit if know how much it costs to produce them. If you don't have some idea of what a modules costs to make then you could end up holding inventory that you don't want for longer than you want.

Good luck.

T-

Interesting. I still have a lot to learn, obviously.

Thank you all for the information.

When i started trading, also with very little starting capital, i realised like other said to spread to gain proffits from many items at onve. This resulted in buy 2 items and sell them and repeat all the time. This took huge amounts of time, for very little profits. Seen in the backlight that time was spendt more visely on other iskmaking activities til i had a decent investment sum and then start trading. So what i am getting at, get a big pile of ISK and spend it on a lot of different items. (Not ammo or minerals)