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The problem with .01 ISKers...
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Charlinda Akheteru
Akheteru Integrated Astrometrics
#1 - 2015-09-22 22:15:57 UTC  |  Edited by: Charlinda Akheteru
...Or, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the ISK"

Tau Cabalander wrote:
You cannot choose which order to buy from or sell to!

You ALWAYS buy from the lowest priced available sell order, and sell to the highest priced available buy order.

You can only choose which station when buying.

If you try to buy from a higher priced seller, you only end-up paying the lowest priced seller more ISK.

This is how a brokerage market works.

Quoted from another thread, don't want to derail the tinfoilhatty-ness of that one so I'm starting a new topic.

So, fairly often on this board, I see all of you rich space bastids turn up your space noses and talk about how playing the .01 ISK game isn't "real trading" or what have you. That's cool, and all; I'm sure when one has a 12-figure wallet, one cent is negligible. But, knowing how the market system in this game works with regards to competing orders, how does one not end up "playing the .01 ISK game" while actively engaged in station trading?

And I'm not talking about working contracts, as I know some of you focus on, nor am I talking about trading only in low-volume, high-margin items like officer modules for supercapitals or X-types for faction battleship fleets. I'm talking about actual station trading, of the sort that made me my first billion. Station trading where, between certain T1, T2 and faction hulls, faction and T2 modules and other miscellany, I maintained and kept up-to-date dozens of buy and sell orders in order to turn a profit.

How does one do that and not "play the .01 ISK game" - without already being a bazillionaire?

Mind you, I'm not involved in station trading anymore, but I'm sure there are probably at least a dozen newer traders who would be very interested to learn how to avoid the mind-melting grind that I endured to stay in the black before I started my current adventure in narcotics.

EDIT: I'm sure the same question has been asked a thousand times - I am not asking any of you to divulge the secrets that have made you rich space bastids. In fact, please don't. That wouldn't be any fun for new traders. What I'm looking for is, hopefully, some more conceptual wisdom from the successful tycoons of New Eden.

AIA Pharmaceuticals: What's your drug of choice?™
Dethmourne Silvermane
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#2 - 2015-09-22 22:50:52 UTC
There's a certain style of trading called "swing trading" that's a fairly favorable way to play. If you're a clever git, you can find items that tend to have price changes that kind of ebb and flow like the tide - for example, a widget may be worth 1M ISK on a Friday evening, but only 800k ISK on a Tuesday morning. It's just a matter, then, of arranging your buys and sells such that you are a good target to "break through" on each upstroke/downstroke of the market - perhaps buying at 850k and selling at 950k, never in such volume that you reset the "natural" price.

Interested Party (TM)
Charlinda Akheteru
Akheteru Integrated Astrometrics
#3 - 2015-09-22 23:37:57 UTC
Interesting, never heard of that before. I can definitely see the logic though, and I think I might've unwittingly done that, now that I think about it. There was a time when a particular widget was pretty expensive but I noticed a price drop, set a buy order, then when I noticed the price had climbed beyond what I was willing to pay (at the time), I cancelled my buy and listed my stock for a nice little one-off profit.

I think that's the same as what you described, or close enough, yes?

AIA Pharmaceuticals: What's your drug of choice?™
Sabriz Adoudel
Move along there is nothing here
#4 - 2015-09-23 00:06:15 UTC
Dethmourne Silvermane wrote:
There's a certain style of trading called "swing trading" that's a fairly favorable way to play. If you're a clever git, you can find items that tend to have price changes that kind of ebb and flow like the tide - for example, a widget may be worth 1M ISK on a Friday evening, but only 800k ISK on a Tuesday morning. It's just a matter, then, of arranging your buys and sells such that you are a good target to "break through" on each upstroke/downstroke of the market - perhaps buying at 850k and selling at 950k, never in such volume that you reset the "natural" price.


Even doing that you need to do some 0.01 ISKing.

I place buy orders for thousands of Light Neutron Blaster IIs that are at the lower end of where the price on those oscillates, but I often have to outbid someone that goes slightly higher than my price with another buy order of a thousand or more units.

I support the New Order and CODE. alliance. www.minerbumping.com
goodlady Smith
TheCrazy88s
#5 - 2015-09-23 00:40:49 UTC
Using the graph view in the market window gives an ok view on overall trend and speed (for want of a better word*) of the cycles
*whats the correct term?

I look at it in 2 ways:
1 for 1 isking items I like to use the table to confirm regular high turn over and profit margin
2. for using the cycles use the graph

Lots of items tend to make their change over the weekend, try and ensure an item with an upward trend and regular cycles, I havent looked at plex in a while but it used to peek weekends with a low on monday/tuesdays (I dont recommend plex as a starting point) due to the costs.

Please like my posts it makes me feel better about the time I spend on the forums WTS... Smiles
SJ Astralana
Syncore
#6 - 2015-09-23 01:35:43 UTC
One thing that you will see repeatedly is a price trend of a material causing volatility in downstream items. For instance at the moment Burned Logic Circuits have been on a sustained rise, and as a result some capital rigs have been blowing the top off of normally sedate margins.

Hyperdrive your production business: Eve Production Manager

Charlinda Akheteru
Akheteru Integrated Astrometrics
#7 - 2015-09-23 03:26:07 UTC
SJ Astralana wrote:
One thing that you will see repeatedly is a price trend of a material causing volatility in downstream items. For instance at the moment Burned Logic Circuits have been on a sustained rise, and as a result some capital rigs have been blowing the top off of normally sedate margins.

Seeing this recently in my own business with the cost of a particular gas rising dramatically.

AIA Pharmaceuticals: What's your drug of choice?™
Alt Pilot1
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#8 - 2015-09-23 03:52:50 UTC  |  Edited by: Alt Pilot1
Charlinda Akheteru wrote:
...Or, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the ISK"

Tau Cabalander wrote:
You cannot choose which order to buy from or sell to!

You ALWAYS buy from the lowest priced available sell order, and sell to the highest priced available buy order.

You can only choose which station when buying.

If you try to buy from a higher priced seller, you only end-up paying the lowest priced seller more ISK.

This is how a brokerage market works.

Quoted from another thread, don't want to derail the tinfoilhatty-ness of that one so I'm starting a new topic.

So, fairly often on this board, I see all of you rich space bastids turn up your space noses and talk about how playing the .01 ISK game isn't "real trading" or what have you. That's cool, and all; I'm sure when one has a 12-figure wallet, one cent is negligible. But, knowing how the market system in this game works with regards to competing orders, how does one not end up "playing the .01 ISK game" while actively engaged in station trading?

And I'm not talking about working contracts, as I know some of you focus on, nor am I talking about trading only in low-volume, high-margin items like officer modules for supercapitals or X-types for faction battleship fleets. I'm talking about actual station trading, of the sort that made me my first billion. Station trading where, between certain T1, T2 and faction hulls, faction and T2 modules and other miscellany, I maintained and kept up-to-date dozens of buy and sell orders in order to turn a profit.

How does one do that and not "play the .01 ISK game" - without already being a bazillionaire?

Mind you, I'm not involved in station trading anymore, but I'm sure there are probably at least a dozen newer traders who would be very interested to learn how to avoid the mind-melting grind that I endured to stay in the black before I started my current adventure in narcotics.

EDIT: I'm sure the same question has been asked a thousand times - I am not asking any of you to divulge the secrets that have made you rich space bastids. In fact, please don't. That wouldn't be any fun for new traders. What I'm looking for is, hopefully, some more conceptual wisdom from the successful tycoons of New Eden.


I usually only undercut by 0.01, and outbid by 0.01. The other guy can do whatever they want, I don't really care.

For example, if someone outbid me by 20% - at that point I will decide if the price is too high for me. If the price is not too high for me, then I will outbid them by 0.01.

If the price is too high for me, then I will just wait for as long as it takes, until their order gets filled.

It's that simple really =P. I think the important thing is to know what price YOU are willing to buy / sell at, and how much quantity YOU are willing to buy / sell at that price.
Charlinda Akheteru
Akheteru Integrated Astrometrics
#9 - 2015-09-23 04:33:11 UTC
Alt Pilot1 wrote:


I usually only undercut by 0.01, and outbid by 0.01. The other guy can do whatever they want, I don't really care.

For example, if someone outbid me by 20% - at that point I will decide if the price is too high for me. If the price is not too high for me, then I will outbid them by 0.01.

If the price is too high for me, then I will just wait for as long as it takes, until their order gets filled.

It's that simple really =P. I think the important thing is to know what price YOU are willing to buy / sell at, and how much quantity YOU are willing to buy / sell at that price.

Aye, this was my opinion, as well.

Prices would get to a point, either sells too low or buys too high, where I said 'nope', cancelled those orders and focused on other markets. If something changed for the better, I'd re-list. 1600 RT plates, for example. This was well before the plate change that made T2 and faction plates a thing, but for a while I was making a huge margin on flipping 1600 and 800 RTs. That margin evaporated overnight on 800's and I was left holding something like 1300 units and would've had to sell at a loss... so I waited, and checked the prices every few days until suddenly there was an acceptable margin again.

For the most part though, I was quite actively .01 ISK'ing and frowning in bewilderment at the folks saying "if you .01 ISK you're doing it wrong", waiting for senpai to come along and notice me or something lol

AIA Pharmaceuticals: What's your drug of choice?™
Alt Pilot1
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#10 - 2015-09-23 05:05:41 UTC  |  Edited by: Alt Pilot1
Charlinda Akheteru wrote:
Alt Pilot1 wrote:


I usually only undercut by 0.01, and outbid by 0.01. The other guy can do whatever they want, I don't really care.

For example, if someone outbid me by 20% - at that point I will decide if the price is too high for me. If the price is not too high for me, then I will outbid them by 0.01.

If the price is too high for me, then I will just wait for as long as it takes, until their order gets filled.

It's that simple really =P. I think the important thing is to know what price YOU are willing to buy / sell at, and how much quantity YOU are willing to buy / sell at that price.

Aye, this was my opinion, as well.

Prices would get to a point, either sells too low or buys too high, where I said 'nope', cancelled those orders and focused on other markets. If something changed for the better, I'd re-list. 1600 RT plates, for example. This was well before the plate change that made T2 and faction plates a thing, but for a while I was making a huge margin on flipping 1600 and 800 RTs. That margin evaporated overnight on 800's and I was left holding something like 1300 units and would've had to sell at a loss... so I waited, and checked the prices every few days until suddenly there was an acceptable margin again.

For the most part though, I was quite actively .01 ISK'ing and frowning in bewilderment at the folks saying "if you .01 ISK you're doing it wrong", waiting for senpai to come along and notice me or something lol


My only recommendation would be to just keep your orders there, no need to cancel. You have a few hundred slots anyway.

Because having an order open serves as a reminder to check back every now and then, because sometimes you might forget after a while.

You never know, he might just cancel his order, leaving your order to fill. His order might get filled quickly by a large buyer / seller.

Or he might just modify his price to a more sensible range, if his original goal was to "manipulate", and he sees that it's not doing much good.
Cista2
EVE Museum
#11 - 2015-09-23 06:22:47 UTC  |  Edited by: Cista2
If you are limited by the amount of money you can invest, but not by the amount of time you can spend in game, then 0,01 isking always brings you the most profit per month.

If you have oodles of both money and time (which noone has), then 0,01 isking would also be the most effective. You would then become limited by the number of items the market can turn over, and your number of orders and the time it takes to go through them.

If you are however limited by the amount of time you can / want to spend in the game, then you cannot really maximise your profit with 0,01 isking. If you do, several others will just 0,01 isk you and each other while you are offline.
That's when you must find other ways to maximise your profit.
Usually this means foreseeing where the price will go, and then placing your orders aggressively. As Altpilot pointed out above, this will cause 0,01 iskers to refrain from overbidding you, as they would see their daily profit dwindle if they did.

It's probably because 0,01 isking IS the most evident and profitable way of trading that some players tend to look down on it. It is the largest hammer in the box and therefore the easiest one to find.

My channel: "Signatures" -
Darion Maken
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#12 - 2015-09-23 12:57:33 UTC
Cista2 wrote:


If you are however limited by the amount of time you can / want to spend in the game, then you cannot really maximise your profit with 0,01 isking. If you do, several others will just 0,01 isk you and each other while you are offline.

It's probably because 0,01 isking IS the most evident and profitable way of trading that some players tend to look down on it. It is the largest hammer in the box and therefore the easiest one to find.


I have to disagree with the first statement and agree with the second. If time is your limit - and profit is your goal. ISKing with a purpose is most profitable. Running 500 or a 1000 or more open orders, you have a certain amount of time to spend on each one. Putting the right thought into the initial order, price, and volume gets you partway there. Then ISK the order until dead and do it again. If I try to snipe (ie: list for a lower margin and plan for a quick sale), it takes me 2-5x the time for equivalent profit.

Darion
Cista2
EVE Museum
#13 - 2015-09-23 15:19:39 UTC
Darion Maken wrote:
If I try to snipe (ie: list for a lower margin and plan for a quick sale), it takes me 2-5x the time for equivalent profit.

Yes, but 0,01 isking is time consuming.
I am talking about how much time one is willing to spend each days nursing orders. If you can increase that amount of time, then 0,01 isking is the best tool. If that time is fixed at 10 minutes per day, then 0,01 isking is not likely to be the best approach.

My channel: "Signatures" -
Darion Maken
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#14 - 2015-09-23 16:24:38 UTC
Cista2 wrote:
Darion Maken wrote:
If I try to snipe (ie: list for a lower margin and plan for a quick sale), it takes me 2-5x the time for equivalent profit.

Yes, but 0,01 isking is time consuming.
I am talking about how much time one is willing to spend each days nursing orders. If you can increase that amount of time, then 0,01 isking is the best tool. If that time is fixed at 10 minutes per day, then 0,01 isking is not likely to be the best approach.


Hmmm....not sure I agree. In either method it takes time to select the item, decide price/volume, buy/make (transport?), and then list. After it is listed you have a decision, let it sit with occasional maintenance, or ISK. I will assert though that the time it takes to decide, buy, transport, list - at least for me - is the heavy lifting. ISKing takes probably 1/3 of my daily trade time. My experience is that my sales go down about 10x if I don't maintain (drop to 1/3 the first day of no ISKing, drops again 1/3 the second day, then stabilizes to a much slower decline for days after that). So after 3-4 days with no order update, I'll have a steady (but declining) income, but much, much less than if I actively maintain.

I think - again for me - the trade-off isn't if I ISK or not. It's the number of items I trade in. So if I run out of 'trade time' for the day, I'd be better off throwing out items to watch for list opportunities, then to throw out ISKing time after they are listed. I faced exactly this decision a couple of weeks ago. I had been working toward a goal of doubling my daily profit every month with October being the capstone. But after coming back from a long camping trip, I found I wasn't excited about 'increasing' my trading effort. I decided that staying on September's profit profile fit my life better right now. So while I had done all the prep work and started the next expansion, I changed directions and instead pared my trading list down to 200 items.

Everyone faces the same decision. What profit do I want, what capital do I have to invest, and how will I use that capital to get the profit. Most of the young space cadets here don't have 100's of billions to invest. If you are building up from a low number, pick a set of products, buy/make them wisely with margin, list, and ISK. This will get you the most profit per hour invested until other options open up because your capital is high enough or your needs lesson. So for me, my decision tree is:

1. Be smart enough to increase my ISK per hour beyond the 500-750million it is at currently (not there but have some time to experiment now)
2. Be rich enough that other options open up like significant #'s of T2 BPO's, massive market orders with little maintenance, etc. (not there but perhaps in the next couple of months)
3. Decide that I don't want/need billions per day in profit (hmmm....not sure, everyone has to understand when enough is enough, usually for me, it's when I can buy just about anything in the game and not break the bank in the process).

Darion
Dethmourne Silvermane
Federal Navy Academy
Gallente Federation
#15 - 2015-09-23 17:58:40 UTC
Sabriz Adoudel wrote:
Dethmourne Silvermane wrote:
There's a certain style of trading called "swing trading" that's a fairly favorable way to play. If you're a clever git, you can find items that tend to have price changes that kind of ebb and flow like the tide - for example, a widget may be worth 1M ISK on a Friday evening, but only 800k ISK on a Tuesday morning. It's just a matter, then, of arranging your buys and sells such that you are a good target to "break through" on each upstroke/downstroke of the market - perhaps buying at 850k and selling at 950k, never in such volume that you reset the "natural" price.


Even doing that you need to do some 0.01 ISKing.

I place buy orders for thousands of Light Neutron Blaster IIs that are at the lower end of where the price on those oscillates, but I often have to outbid someone that goes slightly higher than my price with another buy order of a thousand or more units.


Nah, when I do this style of trading I don't .01 at all, but I do put up buy orders for 3 months duration over a number of items so that if one doesn't hit it's not a big bother. I might, if I'm -really- feeling it, go update orders once a week this way.

That being said, right now I'm totally going .01 multiple times a week :P

Interested Party (TM)
Zhaceera Armerarram
Brutor Tribe
Minmatar Republic
#16 - 2015-09-24 10:36:49 UTC
I understand moral and ethic jibber jabber from fighter who somehow want to talk about locking and F-key smashing when done to a player anything more than when it is done to NPCs, Asteroids or Wrecks. I really think that its all self asureing bull, but anyways, understandable.

Trading ethics jibber jabber I really cant get. So there is a moral higher ground in buying from smart people who sells inteligently and it is immoral to prey on the ignorant or careless ?

Is not that what we do in EVE ?

"If justice is not for everyone, it is for no one."
Gilbaron
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#17 - 2015-09-24 19:40:11 UTC
The only thing ethical about my market shenanigans is that I don't set up any margin trading scams.

But I really don't consider asking for a 2000% "convenience fee" a scam
JasperVT
Native Freshfood
Minmatar Republic
#18 - 2015-09-27 12:23:32 UTC  |  Edited by: JasperVT
Charlinda Akheteru wrote:
Alt Pilot1 wrote:


I usually only undercut by 0.01, and outbid by 0.01. The other guy can do whatever they want, I don't really care.

For example, if someone outbid me by 20% - at that point I will decide if the price is too high for me. If the price is not too high for me, then I will outbid them by 0.01.

If the price is too high for me, then I will just wait for as long as it takes, until their order gets filled.

It's that simple really =P. I think the important thing is to know what price YOU are willing to buy / sell at, and how much quantity YOU are willing to buy / sell at that price.

Aye, this was my opinion, as well.

Prices would get to a point, either sells too low or buys too high, where I said 'nope', cancelled those orders and focused on other markets. If something changed for the better, I'd re-list. 1600 RT plates, for example. This was well before the plate change that made T2 and faction plates a thing, but for a while I was making a huge margin on flipping 1600 and 800 RTs. That margin evaporated overnight on 800's and I was left holding something like 1300 units and would've had to sell at a loss... so I waited, and checked the prices every few days until suddenly there was an acceptable margin again.

For the most part though, I was quite actively .01 ISK'ing and frowning in bewilderment at the folks saying "if you .01 ISK you're doing it wrong", waiting for senpai to come along and notice me or something lol


This is just trading the spread for those wondeirng what they're doing. You can make swing trades around that, but what you're describing is just known as "Spread Trading".

http://www.investopedia.com/exam-guide/series-3/studyguide/chapter7/spread-trading.asp

This is what most EVE market traders do as its the easiest to pickup and master on your own. AKA Buy Low Sell High!