Market Discussions

1% profit on ten billion each week is an ok ROI if the alternative is to have them idle in your wallet.
If you don't have that much ISK I would look into trading goods with a slower turn around, less competition, and higher margin, the trick is to diversify and don't put all of your eggs in one basket.
Jita is a very competitive place, so also if you are new to trading maybe look for other markets were you can buy modules in Jita and transport them to. Alternative use Red frog.
In some cases you can also find items to take the other way.

Also look at the graphs in the market, if the median are close to the buy order price they don't sell very well and the traffic you see is people only buying it.

Eve market is pretty mature at this time, so you are competing with people that have huge sums of ISK, that don't mind a low % profit just to keep the ISK they all ready have to work for them. With that lower profit margin they effectively shut out people like you and keeping a bigger part of the market for themselves.

Another tip is looking for Mission hubs or factional warfare hubs. Usually the demand for ammo and drones and some modules such as armor repairer can be high and you can make a decent profit if the market isn't already saturated.
If you still want to station trade prepare to be very active, I would look into T2 modules I think first and remember to work with several active orders on the same item in order to circumvent the 5 minute timer.

Just a word of warning, it was a while ago I was that active in trading. So do your own research, and just use these advice as guidelines.
It is so much more to it put I don't have that much time atm, but maybe it is somewhere to start for you.

have a nice day

My tip is to simply try it out, no-one forces u to buy large volumes at the beginning.
Set yourself a limit of like 50-100mill and simply "play" as if u actually would put 1b into. U can than simply see what items have a high competition and which don't, since the queue system is used it wont matter if u try sell/buy 10 or 100 items, but u get a feeling for the competition. The only things that wont work the same is that the competition may react differently if they are undercut with a 10 stack vs a 1000 stack, but most will play the 0.1 isk game anyway, since those 10x stack may be reappear every 5 minutes :p

So the idea is to "play" the game but with no risk involved and get a feeling for it for some days/week. Than if u feel comfortable, simply scale up until u run out of money.

Not all items have buy and sell orders that are realistic. Sometimes sell orders don't sell: everyone is buying with buy orders. Sometimes it's the reverse, and buy orders just sit there.

If your competitor goes very low and doesn't have a huge number of items, it may be worth buying up his stock rather than undercutting further. But this might be what he wants you to do. Gulp!

Regarding patience, it's easier with a wider spread of items. If you're selling 50 or a hundred different modules (or thousands I guess, for a lot of these serious MD guys) it becomes less of a problem if one item isn't shifting units - you can afford to wait, or just drop prices and suck up the loss in a worst case scenario.

The other thing to remember is location, location, location. It's not uncommon to find items in Jita that sell for 5-10% more in Dodixie (or the reverse). Looted modules, and salvage sell cheaply in mission hubs while ammo and repair modules/paste are higher. Systems on the edge of LS or NS have greater demand for ammo, pvp modules and ships. Also you'll find ammo, and weapon prices vary from region to region due to race.

The other to watch is dev blogs. For example I haven't checked but I assume the various non hulk mining ships are rising in price and hulks are taking a hit. (Or they will be once people realize that they are suddenly going to become more valuable.)

Just an update, I've confirmed that station trading is massively about the marketing rule of thumb: buy low, sell high. I've been making some profits on some expensive items that have a price difference in between buy/sell orders. Nothing remotely impressive at all (we're talking 10-20mil profit per day from investing 400 mil into the buy orders). If I got Trading or something that gives me more buy orders I could make more profit with more investment - I think I might just do that soon.

All in all, I am getting a good handle on how things work when it comes to playing the market.

When the devblog hit someone bought all the covetors in all the regions surrounding The Forge (as well as in The Forge), immediately bumping the price from 4.2M (or so) to whatever the market could sustain; it stayed at 9M until people realized that hell, that's a nice margin for a t1 ship you can produce yourself. It's now down to around 4.7M again (which makes sense giving the rising mineral prices -- I've not done the math but it could probably fall a bit more before finding a new stable price). While this is just anecdotal evidence it supports the notion of reading dev blogs to gain an upper hand at the market.




I wouldn't call flipping orders playing the market. You should probably look at some cheaper but faster moving items too; expensive items might give you a huge profit but if they don't move fast enough the money invested might be better spent elsewhere. For instance, ammo always (or almost always) moves a lot quicker on the weekends than in the middle of the week, and the price difference between buying mid-week and selling on weekends can be quite a nice bit of profit indeed. T1 ammo is required for all faction ammo as well, so you could look at what faction ammo is moving a lot and supply the T1 ammo necessary; chances are it'll be moving similar numbers (or higher, given that people use regular T1 ammo as well).

I personally like to have both fast movers and slow movers. 55M profit on a really slow buy order? Sure, but I'm not going to invest all my capital in it because if it only sells 1 unit every week that's just 220M per month, and that's if I'm not undercut. A good rule of thumb I picked up years ago was to look at orders fulfilled times average price and if it's below 1b not invest in it (or invest but not too much). You don't want your capital to be tied up in orders that aren't getting filled/sold.

Constantly updating your orders is also something that I don't recommend; look at the daily volume and see if the orders undercutting you are enough to fill it or not. If they're not, just leave your order and watch it sell sooner or later.

Or something.