Market Discussions

For over a month now I've been sort of passively (sometimes actively) station trading in Jita. I turned 300 mil into a bil but I'm not satisfied. I did this to pay for two accounts and all the PVP ships my heart desires--1 bil isn't enough. My ultimate goal is to have an outrageous empire and infinite ships without ruining my real life.

I hear stories and meet people who have made billions--multiple billions. I want to be one of these guys with 10-20 bil in his wallet (that's probably not all that much to some) and another few invested in buy orders/assets/etc. Maybe I'm just being impatient... yeah that's probably it. The more ISK you have to throw around the more you can make with it I suppose... I'd like to pose the question anyways.

What separates the 1 bil station traders from the big boys? How do you break through? And, in order to do so, do I have to give up my real life, or can balance be achieved? I doubt anyone will give away "the secret" in here, but perhaps Bill Gates of eve will come along and twirl some wisdom before our eyes. In any case, I want to find these people and learn from them.

The big boys don't simply find markets that make a good %, they move markets themselves. See Goons and minerals (now ice seems to be their latest target). If you have enough cash to actually influence the price yourself, and you're smart, you can print isk. Get it wrong, and you can lose a lot of isk too, of course.

Also, patch notes are your friends. See what's coming, and prepare. Most recent example, easy to see in the market graphs, would be the recent changes to certain frigates. I think the condor was one - look at how much that influenced the price and volume when the changes hit. A savvy person would have read the patch notes and been buying up condors in advance.

I guess I don't really know what I'm asking. I just feel like I've hit a glass ceiling and I don't know how to progress.

To anyone that has pulled it off, how long did it take you to be able to pay for your accounts and all your ships? I'm wondering how long I have to do this for to be completely self sustaining.

Essentially I want to retire from PVE

1 word - speculate.

Get in to a market early enough before a patch and you can easily turn 1bn into 20bn. Do that each patch and you can sustain an account quite easily. You just have to do your research beforehand.

There are lots of ways to make great isk but most involve risk as you may lose a lot. Keep in mind if you are stockpiling and selling at peak.. if the item drops in value greatly.. You didn't lose any isk unless you sell when it drops.. Passive incomes are great, Long manufacturing/research jobs are good investments as it takes lots of isk but all but guaruntees a return on investment. Station trading is good if you don't mind logging on multiple times a day to update prices. Opening up a buisness is always good. Making your own trade hub as mentioned above sounds like a ton of fun, But would require great ammounts of investments as well as risk that people will buy there.

Really?

3. Industry - T2 ship building is fairly passive if you have enough capital to do it right. But, you'd be wanting a startup capital of 5-50bn to do it with minimal work.

That sounds interesting. I am relativly new to EVE and I am still working in mostly pretty secure markets. I started station trading 3 months ago with a little less than 1b. In the meantime I made it to ca. 20b and I am earning a little more than 1b per day. So before long I will have a pile of ISK to work with. Maybe that's the right time to look into something that's a little more risky. I need to find a way how to make larger amounts of ISK work efficiently.

Obviously the whole speculation thing is one option.

I am kind of curious about what the two of you stated, though. Big Players "move the market themselves", they "make the market".
I'm having trouble figuring out what that means exactly. How does that work?

Can you give an (abstract) example on how this would be done?

I appreciate any advice :)

I mentioned moving the market AKA market manipulation. You can do it yourself easily enough. You have to know the market for that item first.

Absract example:

Let's say there's 200 of an item on sale. This is theoretical, so let's say there's 100 on sale a 500 isk, and another 100 on sale at 5,000 isk. 50 of them sell per day. So buyout the 100 on sale at the lower price, and relist them at 4,999 isk. BINGO! You just moved the market upwards, and in 2 days (if nothing else changes - this is theory after all) you'll have made 449,900 isk from a 50,000isk investment. Approx 900% profit. Or maybe buyout the lot and relist them at 10,000 isk and make even more. Then who cares about scouring the market for the best profit margin? You decide what the margin is.

But you have to know the market. Are there 20 producers going to come to market tomorrow and relist lower than you? What are the buy orders like? What impact will increasing the price have on the market for that item? Remember when a player buys an item it comes up with a little warning box if it's very far off the average price. Who are you competing against? Is someone doing the same as you? Or (worse) is someone trying to crash the price while you are trying to raise it? Out of those 50 that sell per day, how many are ACTUAL sales from sell orders (which is your channel in this scenario) and how many of those are people dumping a rubbish item to the best available buy order?

You can also crash a market. Flood it with low-priced items, or in many cases you can drive the price downwards with only a handful of items (you'd be surprised how many people will 0.01 isk your sell order of 10 units of very low priced item X with another 500 units, even though it only sells 20 per day, then instead of 0.01 isking them back, you drop the price by 100,000 isk, rinse and repeat until those items are cheap enough for ya).

So, optmally, crash the price for a few days, buy all the stock up, then move the market upwards for the next few days. This is market pvp. If the 0.01 isk game is like small scale pvp, then market manipulation is like fleet warfare.

Try it yourself, in a smaller hub than Jita though to begin with though if you don't want our wallet to be butthurt. You want a popular-ish item, no point in doing this with something that only sells 5 units a week. But very hard to do it with an item that sells thousands per day. You need to be able to afford to buy enough of that item to cover multiple days (if not multiple weeks) worth of sales volume to really affect the market in any significant way for any significant time, which is how you really make the money. Comparing sales volume to the volume available on the market is a key part of the decision process (prices don't really matter any more though, because you're the one who's going to set the price).

Partly what you go into depends on what markets you know, how big your wallet is (and how much of your wallet you want to commit to this), and do your research. I've told you plenty already, no handouts on what items I may be trading.

When you are absoutey megarich then you can do it with minerals in Jita, like the Goons did. Just had a look at the data, 21 billion units of Trit sold yesterday. Even if you moved the price 0.1 isk, that's 2.1 billion in one day. I believe that when they shifted the price, although there were other factors going on as well, the price went from about 3 to 6 isk. That persisted for weeks. 60 billion isk per day, for weeks on end.

Ultimately, it does boil down to buy low, sell high. Helps if you can set the high and low prices though

Glad it was helpful.

Some notes:

On thekiller's strategy: I've done that too, try to find mission hubs not near trade hubs, supply stuff mission runners need. My experience was that sales volume is low but you didn't have to spend a lot of time babysitting orders. Like he said, doing it in the same region as Jita is a waste of time. Same goes for Amarr, Dodixie, Rens Apparently some people have had some success building hubs in low sec but have never tried that myself. Population seems low and hassle factor increases.

On my strategy: I have the advantage that for a long time I was producing a lot of items, so I know the markets well, particularly how many competing producers there were and the handful of useful items that fall "out of stock" regularly at the trade hub I was working in. They are your best targets - remember what I said about trade volume per day versus the amount of available stock in the market being a critical part of the decision process. Also remember that it's not fast. You need to pick items where you are willing to commit (and have) enough isk to change the market for a week or 2. Which means it's really not cheap when you get it wrong, but you can know that in advance if you know typical volumes / can estimate how many wil come on to the market over the course of a week.

One advantage though is that other people 0.01isking helps you when you are crashing the market, so that part's almost easy and requires less updating. On the flip side you have to be hyper-agressive on updating orders when it comes to selling your stock at the higher price. Timing counts here - any trader with any experience should know what days and times you get the bigger sales volumes... so I'm sure I don't need to spell that out for you.