Market Discussions

Quick post for now. Start with trading. Manufacturing can easily cause negative profits if done incorrectly as there are more steps and more math.

That being said, manufacturing complements trading.

Pretty much. Don't post all of your material in one buy-order, hold onto some, post a little, wait for the inevitable undercut, post another batch, repeat. I've never bothered with this much, I've been far more fond of other means of selling items without the 0.1 game.



The more lucrative markets tend to be in tangible items. The problem I would see with 'contraband' items is that you either make a little profit, or you have 100% losses due to confiscation. I would actually recommend something more along the lines of modules/ammo/ships, things that everyone will use or need throughout their time in EVE.



The trade skills are key, as would be any skills to use your industrial ships for movement of material. The further you can reach without moving the easier expanding trade becomes, and the faster you can move material, and the more material you can move, maximizes your isk/hr income.



Noting your history in PVP, the notion that there are certain ships highly susceptible to ganks is not something that needs be covered. Most have found that a freighter, or ORCA, tend to be the best ways to go, as the ORCA allows for a unique ability to 'hide' what is being carried in the corp hangars to avoid scans. For the freighters, the Gallente freighter is slow, but has the highest carrying capacity of the four races, whilst the Amarr freighter has less capacity overall, but is the fastest of the 4. Also, the cloaking hauler is a very nice tool for sneaking around and avoiding ganks. The other 'industrial' ships are more focused on Salvage / PI / Mining and will not be worth your time.



Someone around here posted a good margin of gain, a percentage to look for as a desired target, but if starting with low capital like you are, you'll really either need to get the most bang for the buck and look for the rare, but big sales with cheap buys, or something steady but not as wondrously huge. I would recommend the latter.

(cont)

Incredible helpful, thank you very much. I tend to play very conservatively (Not risk-averse, just pragmatic) and will be playing it safe til I get a hang of how things work. I think I will start working toward transports, something fast and then into a Charon or Aeon.

Again, thanks for the concise answers.

Is playing the .01 Isk game a necessity to maintain margins, or is the need to play that tactic subjective?

Probably something I will avoid as well. Headaches I dont need.

I usually split my orders into at least 3 stacks, if the total is low or in 10 to 20% pieces if there is a big pile. What you’ll be aiming to do is control the timing of .01 iskers. If you .01 isk someone, you have to wait 5 minutes before a price change. If he’s there first and you set a new sale order, he will .01 isk you. You get zero time as the best order and now you have to wait 5 minutes. But since he came after you the first time by only a few seconds/minutes, his timer will expire right after yours and he’ll do it again.

Instead, as soon as he .01 isks you, undercut him with your second stack. Now he has to wait out his timer. But maybe he has another stack and does the same. Repeat. This is where the real market PvP begins.

Some guys will begin a dance with you to hold the best price spot for a short amount of time but then start sharing the slot with you by delaying price changes for 10 or 15 minutes or even longer so that you’re taking turns. This is best for everyone involved long term. Its also a fairly unusual situation and generally only occurs when the total number of competitors is small.

Some will get all ragey and do drastic, irrational things; you need to test this guy to see if he’s a rage quitter or a rage crasher. Rage quitters can be driven out of the market (waaaah! .01 isking is evil!). Rage crashers will deny themselves profits just to deny you profits, but they’re easily manipulated into selling out below real market value; let them crash it and then buy them out. Rage crashers are different than Price beaters.

Price beaters will stay in and chip away at the sales price over time because they’ve got big wallets and can get by on slimmer margins. Their game is to wait you out while your capital reserves are whittled away. They’re lowering the price slowly, maybe once an hour or more, to find your bottom price. They don’t usually want to totally crash the price, but they might to see if you’ll take the bait. The more sophisticated will also be involved in the materials market because they’re building the product. These guys can crush you in the long term by manipulating your costs. This kind of competition goes right down to the availability of manufacturing slots near Jita, which drives up transport time and costs for competitors. Some people intentionally put the longest run time BPOs into the factory and research slots to clog up the works for everyone else.

One of the things you’re doing in .01 isking is finding the competitors lowest sale price. Part time traders who are just selling off goodies or old stockpiles will usually go pretty low, pretty fast because they’re just looking to make more than the best buy order. They care more about the time and annoyance. They’ll try it for a day or two and then sell into the highest buy. Station traders bought at a certain price and need to unload it for at least that price; they’re slaves to market trends and anything beyond a month’s advance buying puts them into pure speculation mode. They have little room for error and their primary strategy is quick turnover to stay liquid and keep from succumbing to sudden price fluctuations. These guys are the most vulnerable to buy order manipulation and they’re also the most likely to be manipulating buy orders. The Price Beaters are doing all of this on several market fronts, plus they’re building the product. They’re in a much better position to crash things or to operate when margins are thin for everyone who isn’t completely vertically integrated.

A simple pricing strategy can be used with multiple stacks to help you with the stuff mentioned above. Stack 1 is your first stack on the market. You’ll put it out at the lowest sale price. Stack 2 is for responding to the undercutters. Stack 3 is for bracketing the undercutters. It goes something like this. Stack 1 goes up. Later an undercutter comes in under your price. Put out stack 2 at more than .01 isk below. There’s no set number, but the highest buy order will play into it. The goal here is to quickly widen the pricing gap so you can find his bottom price. Let’s say something sells for 1mill ISK and best buy is 500k. I might try a quick 10k price drop to see if he .01 isks me. Then a 20k drop and so on. If he’s not a rage crasher or a pro price beater, at some point he will stop undercutting you or will be using 1 item stacks to do it or will adopt a cooperative strategy. You’ve found his price point; the point at which he won’t go any lower. Now for Stack 3. Stack 3 is priced just above the competitor’s price and it should be a large number of items that the competitor will look at and decide that the time it will take for the stack to sell means he can’t wait for it to sell out and have his order come up. In other words, he needs to think that the “share the market” strategy won’t work because he can’t go lower and you won’t give him a turn. Now his market order is bracketed; if he goes up, you get the sales, if he goes down you buy him out or he loses ISK. If you’re a Price Beater, you can probably cut him out of the market altogether by riding the thin margin until he drops from the market. You should think of the stacks like your PvP modules on a ship. Your actual stock is Stack 10 or whatever. Those 3 stacks are the ones that move and drag the competitors down. Meanwhile your main stack is still at the normal price, waiting for the “tail” of orders below it to be bought out.

This doesn’t always work and there are lots and lots of permutations and variations. It also won’t work nearly as well if you don’t know the materials market associated with your product. You should be buying and selling to as many different orders as possible to build up a list of the market players in your product. Don’t forget to do it in all of the hubs. Do the same for the materials used in your product. Your best bet with the limited ISK you have is basic inter-regional arbitrage to build up your wallet.

yep, very good info there. Those tactics are in my arsenal and still used when needed. Especially the middle part, it's part of my standard operating procedure.

If you're like me, you'll end up making your own words for the different situations that an item is currently in. For those examples I call is 'boxing' and 'leading'. Boxing as their orders get boxed above and below by yours and leading the price where you want it to go. I'm not taking credit for the terms either, more than likely I heard them from another trader at some point and started using them myself

Again, more incredibly helpful information. Thank you.