Market Discussions

I've been feeling a little guilty lately about the ease at which these go off. I thought I'd write a guide all about it then I can sleep soundly knowing that I've done my bit to help prevent them.

Margin trading - The skill. Allows you to place buy orders larger than you have Isk to cover. Down to 25% of the Order value.

Some setting up first, you need a place that has no Isk or somewhere you can throw Isk for safe keeping., an Alt, alt Corp wallet, empty wallet division, anything really.
Lets say I use my alt's Corp wallet which generally contains little or no Isk.

Find youself a target item. The best ones are very popular with high turnover but really no more than a days stock left in it.
You need a price point as well, do you buy the entire stock and relist it for some much higher number, or do you see a large gap in pricing where you can slot in at 20-50% more than you paid for your items? It's up to you, either way works.


Lets take my latest one for example, 5000 Units of Scorch M.

I'm looking through the markets and I spot that Scorch M has a decent seperation between 350K and 410K, about 1500 on the high end at 350 with some 3500 Units at or about 315K.

Count up how many units you're going to need to buy, to raise the Min Sell to 410000. In this case it was just over 5000 units.



Before you buy them up, set up your Margin Buy.
Remember the wallet you're using has no cash in it currently.

Place buy order, select advanced and make sure your empty corp wallet division is selected. Enter in 5000 with 5000 min quantity.

Set your buy price 80-100% above what you're going to list 5000 units at. Hit ok on your order and take note of how much Isk you're missing.
In my case this time, I listed items @ 412K and set my Buy @ 750K

Transfer from whatever source a little over the amount of Isk required to make the buy order and set it up again. 5000 with 5000 Min.

This order will never complete, it's impossible.
You don't have enough money in the wallet to buy the 5000 units, and the order can only be completed if they sell 5000 units all at once, but you can't afford all 5000, so the order just fails.
You lose your market fees, the remainder of Isk for the buy order is put back into your corp wallet division and the order dissapears.
You get a pop-up saying "You don't have enough isk"


Ok so go ahead and buy up your items now.
Relist said items at whatever you think is reasonable.
The crazier you are the longer it will take and the more chance you have of producers coming in and blowing it for you by dumping stock on the market at lower prices.

Don't list the whole lot in 1 big chunk, try to make it look less like a scam.

975 here, 1245 there, 300 here etc etc

This is to make it look attractive to people that don't know better.
They will see it and go "holy **** I can buy these 5000 units and sell them again straight away and nearly double my money!"

What really happens...

They buy up all your over-priced stock plus generally others stock as well, until they have thier 5000 units and they go to sell it to your margin buy.
Which fails...
So you've made your 20-50% (or however much, 500% isnt unheard of) you got your buy order money back, they bought the vast majority of your items and are stuck holding over-priced items.
You've made 20-50% for your effort, got some leftover items for resale at competative pricing, and they are holding several Billion worth of items that they will never get what they paid for it.


If it has a Min Qty in the Buy order...don't touch it.


Just to add, you don't sell any items at the hyper inflated price, you sell Zero items to the Margin Buy, the placer of the Margin buy only loses market fees.

durrrr i dont get it. ****. i'll never get to play the market if im even too dumb to understand a scam if its laid out for me.

but good for you m8. i dont really see the evil in this scam, but then i dont understand it, so there.

You're right it's not new, and yet every time it takes less than a day for someone to fall for it.

So here it is laid out, let there be no more guilt about it.

I think the owner of a very large stockpile of Scorch M just had me War Declared.

Silent tears...

This is brillant even though its nothing new. I think the exspansion of this game is unreal and outright amazing as to the imagination of people. Whats sad is that there are scams like this in the real world...just laid out in this forum for EVE. Awesome to me!

You obviously didn't read the OP properly, let me clarify for you:

The BUY order (the inflated one) is created at say 100m isk total and a MINIMUM of 1000 items. The WALLET the buy order is for only has 50m in it because of the margin trading skill.

If someone was to attempt to sell 1000 items to that buy order it FAILS because there's only 50m in the wallet and 100mil is needed to pay the seller.

If someone tried to sell 10 items to that buy order it FAILS because theres a minimum sell quantity of 1000.

The whole point of this scam is that you CANT counter/ruin it, it's simply not possible because there is always at least 1 condition (namely that the wallet the buy order uses never has enough isk in it) that cannot be met.

Whoever originally found this was a clever puppy!

Obviously, you have not tried this. Let me enlighten you:

Say you set the inflated BUY order for 100m, of which you only pay, say, 50m in escrow because of the skill. If someone sets a SELL order to meet your required quantity, with low enough price so that the total is LOWER than your escrow, your scam is countered.

The point is that in order to make profit while countering the scam, the inflated BUY order price has to be really high, hence "under certain circumstances" in my first post.

U mean not all margin traders do it......

I'd just say it's an exploit. That it can be done shows another CCP-made hole you can drive a Fenrir through.
(What IS a fenrir anyway???)

It's funny because it's true.