EVE New Citizens Q&A

1) skills
the first thing i would do would be a few levels of trade and retail so you can put up multiple orders. After that Broker relations and Accounting will be useful, as they reduce your costs. lastly I like having margin trading as it lets you trade in more items as you don't have to put as much isk down to place a buy order.

2) ships
there are a few strategies here depending on what you want to do. having small and fast ships can be useful for moving low volume high value goods, the goal is to warp before anyone can cargo scan you. and/or a ship with a covert ops cloak. A blockade runner is a good goal here as they can carry a few 1000 m3, warp fast and have cloaks. plus they can't be cargo scanned. Although some gankers may just try and gank one out of boredom, some are empty, some have billions in cargo.

beyond that I would mostly just use courier contracts. although having a personal freighter or bowhead or something like it might be useful. also if you can fly a blockade runner you can fly a deep space transport which has a rather large fleet hangar so it can move quite a bit of cargo and have a large tank. plus a DST can do the MWD + Cloak trick.

3) high vs low.
I generally assume most people in low have hauling alts or know a hauler, although you can stock some places with nice markups. I would probably wait till I had a blockade runner and some insta bookmarks so you can get in and out fairly safely.

I mostly stick to high.

4) find where the people are, buy low in a hub sell high there. A mission hub, a staging system, or even another trade hub is a good place to sell goods.

5) I kinda like space trading as you can drop your goods off at various points and usually you don't get too much competition. in hubs you usually have to update orders somewhat frequently or wait for price swings. Station trading can be very nice and lazy, or a constant 0.01 isk war.

6) guides maybe, I'd go check the market forums

7) mostly up to you. I've almost always done trading on an alt, but that was mostly because I can sit my alt in jita and move my main more freely, however if you have some more spread out orders it might make sense to use a main and roam around. Also with trading corp standing with the stations you trade in helps reduce fees so you might also want to use a main to run missions to reduce those fees, a specialty trade alt probably won't be very effective at missions. sure at some point you can train both skill sets but that takes time.

Find an area of the game you have much more than average knowledge of.

Understand what people involved in that part of the game desire, and what they produce.

Use this information to decide what to buy and sell to/from those players.

The goblin has written a decent guide on this: http://greedygoblin.blogspot.fi/p/newbie-guide-for-riches-in-eve.html

If you're just starting, you won't have the working capital to use buy orders or the skills to fly T2 transports. I recommend you consider buying salvage at backwater stations and hauling it to a trade hub for sale - all you need is a frigate. Things like fried interface circuits, burned logic circuits, armor plates and tripped power circuits are required in large quantities by rig manufacturers and they are happy to pay a premium to have someone gather them together in a trade hub.

It will also let you decide if this is a career path you want to follow or if you prefer to take the next step and turn that salvage into rigs!

As others have indicated, T2 transports (Blockade Runner and Deep Space Transport) are useful for just about any industrial career but don't neglect the support skills to fit them properly

Closest that comes to mind:

Http://eve-central.com


And of course MS-Excel

7) Main or Alt

There are many good reasons to use an alt for trading. And I can't think of any reason where a main would be better. So I'd say go with an alt.

For me the two main reasons are the possibility to keep my trader in or near my preferred trade hub while my main is deployed somewhere else and - because I use my trader to move stuff for my main sometimes - to keep the trader in a neutral corp, so I'm not affected by wardecs against my mains corp/alliance.


6) Guides

Maybe you'll find something in the market section of the forums or via Google. However, most guides I have read are written with a certain view that I would not always share. Make up your own mind and maybe just try some things.

A few basic rules:
If something looks too good to be true, it's neither good nor true. (Look up margin trading scam.)
Don't trade what you don't understand. (You have no idea what Armor Plates are good for? Stay away from them - especially faction and deadspace plates.)
As a beginner, don't accept contracts advertised in local. (If it looks good, you just don't understand how the scam works.)
As a beginner, stay away from ISK doublers. They want to double their ISK, not yours. (No, not even just to try it.)
Never ever put all your eggs into one basket. (Especially if that "basket" is some kind of hauler.)


5) Space vs Station Trading

Station Trading is simple and safe. you just buy low and sell high. The catch is, that you need ISK to make ISK. As a beginner it's unlikely that you have enough to make it worth your time (unless you bought a few PLEX and converted them to ISK). Station Trading is perfect, if you need to be semi-afk ... for example because you are doing something else on your main account or because you have some stuff to do in RL (that allows to check your computer now and then).

The main tasks in station trading are finding and monitoring goods that you want to trade and then updating buy and sell orders. Agressive traders update every 5-10 minutes and may behave like bots (some are). In large trade hubs (especially Jita) and with items that have good margins, this often means that you are on top for only 1 or 2 minutes, sometimes even less (0.01 ISK war).

And while we're at it, my advice for fighting the 0.01 ISK war would be to stoically modify your orders to overcut/undercut the best orders always by 0.01 ISK. Do not get emotionally involved. Do not get angry. (Anger just leads to frustration and mistakes.) Some people have a different opinion on modifying orders, though (and not all of them are wrong... you'll learn when to modify by higher values and why). But never try to daunt someone by deep undercutting, it simply doesn't work. You'll just kill the margin that way.


A more advanced approach to Station Trading is Swing Trading. This requieres deep pockets and patience. Most items go up and down in certain cycles, which are not always predictable. You simply set your buy order near the probable low spot (analog with sell orders) and wait. Don't get too greedy, or your orders won't fill fast enough. There's no need to update orders often this way, although you should still monitor those orders, of course.


Region (to Region) Trading is less safe and needs more attention (at least to move stuff around). But usually there's much less competition and single transactions often have a very good margin. (My first ISK from trading was buying Ravens from sell orders in one region and selling them in another to buy orders - being able to pilot a Raven helped, of course).

Probably the most profitable approach to Region Trading is doing logistics for a major alliance. Usually you should be a member of that alliance, of course, plus it has higher requirements than all other forms of trading (not counting having ISK as a requirement here).


4) Building a Trade Route

Depends on what you mean. EVE has no trade routes like ELITE, for example. But in case you're seeding markets in deep null someday, you'll need to find a route to get the stuff out there (and maybe take some stuff back to high-sec, like PI materials or loot from ratting or anoms). Typically you would use a jump freighter (or several) and move it through a cyno chain (which requires several cyno alts placed in strategic positions).


3) High Sec vs Low Sec

High sec for now.
You can easily make billions in high sec. Look into low/null trading when you know more and when you can fly some of the ships needed.


2) Ships

Pure Station Trading can be done without flying any ship. However, if you do station trading you'll want to improve your standings with the station owner sooner or later, to decrease costs. If you want max standings in a reasonable amount of time, you should be able to fly level 4 missions. (Lookup faction standing repair plan. Check the Misisons & Complexes and the Ships & Modules subsections of this forum for L4 mission ships.)

For Region Trading you'll need a way to transport your goods around. As long as you stay in high sec, T1 industrials (and later freighters) are probably enough. In most cases a good tank is much better than a large cargo bay. If you carry something valuable, you want it as safe as possible. (Lookup CODE). For low volume/high value items you want better protection. Maybe an Interceptor, Covops or a well fitted T3.


1) The Skills

Besides the skills to fly the above mentioned ships (if you need them) you'll need the skills in the Trade section. Especially the skills that give you more trading slots (get them all to L5) and those that reduce tax and fees (L5 asap). Also get Margin Trading to L3 or L4 to make better use of your ISK.