Market Discussions

Not asking for specific niches to occupy, just what methods are used to find those niches. just park two accounts as two hubs and start randomly clicking items, looking for a price discrepancy to even out?

and if that's the case, has anyone ever made a bot that can scan the entire market of a region from one client, compare it to a different region scan, and suggest things to trade based on purchase velocity and expected return? Hell, i could probably code something like that.

yes, that's actually quite easy and even possible within the bounds of the EULA using a combination of IGB javascript (which allows you to cycle through all market items) and a cache reader.

They have. But they don't give it to other people, as if it was easy to do/get, there'd be no profit available. Hobble your competition by not giving them the tools you make.

The best advice i can think of for station trading is do just as you said, characters in different hubs to see the hub price differences. And when you start trading, between hubs, maximize profits by never flying with an empty hold. For example, ammar and jita. You find a profitable item in amarr, buy in jita and sell in amarr, and at the same time, you find a profitable item in jita where you can buy in amarr and sell in jita. The best way is to have alts in hubs you want to trade in and use tools like eve-central as a guide only because the data with such tools is going to be out of date by however many hours, but those tools can give you a sense of possibilities. Another way to get a good sense is to look at your own experience, what mods or ships do you use for whatever purpose? what items do miners use? pvpers? missioners? explorers? popular ships and fits? don't go all in on 1 item, diversify. Diversify between not only items, but volume as well. Have some items that move fast, move medium, move slow, low profit margin, medium profit margin, and high profit margin. A solid diverse station/hub trading portfolio will be more win over the long term than say putting everything into 1 item. Be sure to level your trade skills to your comfort level to minimize taxes and maximize orders, be sure to run missions for the trade hub faction to minimize taxes, and be sure to research, then when you feel you have researched enough, research some more. And finally, the best tool is your own customized spreadsheet. Good luck and happy trading.

that trade finder tool is probably the most useful of the bunch by a good margin, it's pretty much exactly what i was trying to design anyway.

the only downside to the eve central scanning tool (i actually have it running in two clients right now) is that you don't have any control over what it scans, so it ends up going through kinda useless stuff (at least, i think it's useless for most pilots)

From experience, there are merchants who will pray on people who do interegional trade exclusivly, and they make a Killing, Telling you first hand, bin a victim myself a few billion ISK times and some.

Stick with 3-4 hubs and dont over exert yourself for about half a year to learn the intricate movements of the items you wish to play a role in.

theres tricks you can also pull, like jacking up station buy order prices, people usually play right along, then drop, rinse and repeat.

if it's within the same region you shouldn't be hauling.

inter-region shouldn't be done unless you know what you're doing
there are MANY MANY traps to inter-region traders.

This is generally good advice, but it shouldn't be an absolute rule. For maximum profitability, the real metric you want to track is ISK per hour, not ISK per m3.

Here's an example. Let's say you have 10,000,000 ISK. You find an item selling in Jita for 1,000,000 and in Amarr for 2,000,000, but the best deal you can find in the other direction is an item selling in Amarr for 1,000,000 and in Jita for 1,100,000. The optimal solution in this case is to buy 10 in Jita and sell in Amarr, returning to Jita with an empty hold.

Of course, you can always wait for the lot to sell before returning to Jita with 20 units of the Amarr-Jita item. But in terms of ISK per hour, you may be better off flying back to Jita while the lot sells, so you're ready for another hauling trip afterwards.

ISK per m3 should really only be considered if you've got limited cargo space, and you need to choose between several items. Even then, m3 may not be a true restriction: you can make multiple runs, you can hire a freight service, you can put up a hauling contract, etc.