Market Discussions

I am no expert on this, and it might work differently with scaling.

I learned it the hard way, that having to large orders are just not worth it (to me).
So I keep my orders around 1-4 units if its something like mining barges.
And 4-10 units if its a module, 10K-10M units if its materials/ores.
I do not really trade in anything else!

My point is, that with larger orders it just takes to long for them to fill, and I get a better turnover with smaller orders.
This also means more micromanaging and is more time consuming.
So perhaps it is more about time available than anything else.

Generally I only want to have enough to tide me over until the next time I log on to update my orders. If I buy a whole heap of something which will take me about a week to shift and the price drops in any significant fashion after just a few days I'll just loose a lot of money. If I only stock half a day's worth and the price has dropped below my cost next time I log, it's nowhere near the same size of a hit. Better yet, I log to see I've sold all of module x but find the margin has plummeted, I abandon that item for now and make money elsewhere. Happy days!

You'll still get screwed by over-zealous bidders though, I have to the tune of billions before, but it doesn't happen anywhere nearly as often and orders of magnitude less than it could have been.

Look at the number of units that move per day. I tend to aim for 10-20% of that per buy order as a general rule. That of course is with the exception of very expensive items which I'll only stock a handfull of at a time regardless so I don't invest too much of my wallet in one thing.

Generally I don't stockpile, I've not got a full enough picture of how the mineral markets and such work to be able to speculate with any confidence, so I can't help you there. Although in that case you rarely have difficulty shifting even the most obscene volumes of things like trit so I guess your wallet and the size of your gonads are the only limiting factors there.

Hope that helps!

I tend to keep a day or two's supply on hand for the items I'm currently involved in. I'm not messing around with buy orders too much, yet, but I do a lot of shipping and manufacturing. For shipping, I buy enough stock for a few days worth of sell orders in Jita, and make sure to diversify them so that I have pretty much all of my trade slots allocated. On top of that, I tend to manufacture items in batches that take 1-2 days to complete. Sometimes that results in less than a day's supply in jita, sometimes it results in a week's supply. I've found that one day batches allow for the flexibility I'd need to react to market fluctuations (gotta love taking advantage of a market "reset" on an item without taking the risk of resetting it yourself!! :P), but also allows me to keep my manufacturing lines up with as much uptime as possible.

Most of the time, thus far, it works out in my favor, though I'm always aware of the potential for an aggressive trader to drive prices on those fluctuations back down below cost for me at any given time. It's only happened once, thus far, though. I had a module that I made 900 units of. Managed to sell 600 for between 5% and 500% profit. The market restabilized about 10% below my costs before I could get the other 300 sold. Now it's just a matter of waiting for someone to come along and reset the market again. No big deal. (Another bonus to 1-2 day batches is that your overstock is generally pretty small in cases like this.)

Sure, it's not strictly station trading, but I'd imagine that the concepts are generally the same. Larger stock == Less liquidity and more susceptibility to market fluctuations, but less overall work. Smaller Stock == More work, but more liquidity and more flexibility with regard to fluctuations. It's really your call as to what your proper balance is.

I typically make my buy orders good for a minimum of a day's worth. If I think I might not check order for a week, I put up a week's worth of volume. When doing so, I may outbid the next guy by a decent amount to discourage him from bumping his up.

If I want to screw with the other sellers or put a perceived support level in the price, I will do a large volume order. I also do large volumes when I really want to acquire the item at a low price.

I stay away from high volume, low margin trades so I have less risk of it moving against me. Look for wide spreads and consistent volumes.

Margin Trading is absolutely essential if cost of orders is a concern as you can increase your buys with it.

To be honest though, I have been trading less and less as my isk doubling business has taken off like crazy.

To help out my fellow traders (trading is my passion) I will offer you a special bonus that is only available here. Send me 500 million or more for your 1st isk double investment and enter in reason code MD500 This will let me know to give you an extra 25% above and beyond what I normally payout.

Good luck trading!

Two days worth of local trade volume is my stock size. Less means more work for me and more means greater risk of price change.