Market Discussions

I just wanted to pop in an introduce myself to the market forum. I'm basically a total newbie to this entire game, especially the economic side (Had an account back in '05/'06, but it was ratting/military ops), and I just wanted to stop by and say that after 7 days of pulling my hair out, I think I've developed an addiction.

I made my first few million using Eve-Central to find good hauling opportunities. After the relatively mind numbing process of hauling space soda, charcoal, and antibiotics to various stations, I got sick of being a glorified space trucker.

Since then, I've decided to step into the station trading game. It took me a while to figure out exactly what all of the pretty lines and bars in the price history graph meant, but I'm beginning to get a hang of it, I think. Yesterday was my first serious attempt at it, and I think it went well. I started with about 6m cash on hand and maybe another 5 million in assets to be sold, based out of Rens. I thought about moving to Jita to try this, but I've read that the competition is much stiffer, there, and I figured a less competitive market might be better to start with. Unfortunately, 6m cash on hand isn't a whole lot to finance a trade operation with, so I very quickly ended up with about 90% of it in escrow. Luckily, stuff started turning over relatively quickly, and after about 4 hours of trading (and flying a baby minmatar combat alt, while waiting for orders to be filled), called it a night.

I woke up this morning with about 12 million in cash and probably close to 100 million in assets to be sold. (Granted, selling them in a slower market like Rens might take a while). Ultimately, I'm hoping to fund both this account and a combat account with the money I earn doing this. I'm hoping that this is pretty decent for one day of trading, considering what I started with.

Now that my introduction is out of the way, I figured I'd pick your brains to see if the more experienced folks out there might have some valuable advice for a newbie like me. What kinds of tools/programs do you use to assist you? Do you just use spreadsheets and do everything manually? Any tips/tricks that you've picked up that you'd like to share? Is there a certain methodology you use to identify trade items ripe for the picking? I'm basically using the Burger Method that I found on one of the various Eve-Wikis. Other than that, I'm kind of just feeling out the market and seeing what sticks.

High point:
Buying some ship modules in bulk and reselling them for a 900% profit.

Low point:
Falling for a Margin trading scam that caused a 2 million isk loss before I knew that was even a thing.

wooops

forgot my beloved scare quotes:

"bond offer"

Some generic newbie trade advice:

grind standings for the hubs you want to trade in, be aware that going up in one pair of factions means either going down in the other or having to put a lot of effort in getting middling standings for all of them, also be aware that if your standings get too low, you can't haul through that faction's space

always play to have fun. this obviously sounds silly, but it's really easy to burn yourself out with "just one more billion", until the very thought of opening the Eve client sends you into a convulsive fit

develop strategies for the long term. your advantage at the start is your freshness and gumption, this will fade. plan on creating low time and effort trading schemes that will keep you in the game for the long run. I make 10s of billions per month across a few trades involving no more than an hour or two of real time spent planning or using the client. trade smart, not hard.

the hard part is finding what to trade, not the actual trading. newbie mistake number one is thinking that the actual button clicking is the "work" of trading, it is not. It is the searching, experimenting, defending, etc of your little slice of the pie that constitutes the real work of trading, and not every hat will fit every head. always be improving your "portfolio" because markets will sour and you will be forced out by bigger better fish often

do other things in the game. trading will allow you to do things that most players either won;t get to do or will have to grind for hours or buy plex to achieve. don't waste you effort and skill by growing your wallet for its own sake. get out there, try stuff, and spend your money. you will enjoy the game more, and even your trading will be more enjoyable when your profits have a purpose

In my earlier days of hub trading I started from Hek then moved onto Rens. Hek has a slightly lower volume of trade but was good from the perspective that the competition wasn't fierce and margins are good.

I started by trading in items (once I hit the 100m'ish mark, before that it was what ever turned a profit) that yielded a net profit of 200k+, and then eventually 500k+, this meant I was able to quickly decipher what my on-target earnings would be and kept the maths simple.

I found that building my familiarity with each of the module groups by cycling through the groups (and trading in them) helped me to get a sense of what was worth trading in. This also helped me get a feel for the items themselves, which in the long run is probably a lot better than looking at a page which tells you which has the best margin, because best margin doesn't necessarily mean best profit.

I traded with a character in each hub and managed with a buy/sell pool of about 45 orders on each character. I kept the buy distance just to station and if a good deal came up I'd just buy it then haul it, but 99% of the time I stayed in the station.

Hek and Rens where my starting point as I had little time to manage my orders. I found that 2-3 checks a day was just about enough to keep on top of them. My approach wasn't aggressive as my monthly target was just a mere 1b at the time. From those activities I made circa 1.5-2b a month which was more that adequate at the time.

Anyways, hope you find your feet, hub trading can be a nice semi-passive income stream.

Fly safe. o7

When you were trading in Hek and Rens, what kind of trade volume were you looking for in items? Or was it basically whatever you could sell?

Seeing as my liquid capital is still really low, I think I need to focus more on high volume, high turnover items, as opposed to low volume, big profit ones.

This is pretty much the only reason I trade now, as I have more ISK than I'll ever need. I just didn't want to get into advanced bittervet trader topics with a noob.

Get those broker fees down, they add up.

I had a 0.37% broker fee. In the last *month*, EveMentat claims my journal has about 611m in broker fees. I purchased 90m worth of tags and did the datacenter missions. I am now down to 0.3% broker fee. That's an 18% reduction.

18% of 611m is 110m. The broker fee reduction would have paid itself off in just this past month.