Market Discussions

If you end up with more isk after the trade than you had before the trade you are a good trader.

well a "good trader" is a relative term, like a "good football player", it depends on what league you are in. If you are wanting to be the best of the best, you will probably never be a "good trader". If you are a few weeks into trading and you turn a tidy profit, you may consider yourself a good trader, but to others if you are not doubling your money every few weeks, then you are doing it wrong. So it is in the eye of the beholder and since it's a sandbox game, really a good trader is a trader that YOU feel is good at trading. I advise to set yourself goals.. Like earn x profits in y amount of time, or get enough money for z item/ship.

As long as you are trading for a profit, most would consider you are "doing it right". Most players judge success by profit per week/month/year, and as such try to maximize profits, which involves a quick turnaround, a good profit, and fun (the most important and often overlooked aspect).

I don't like your stand on trying to enforce your playing style onto others what you excessively are trying to do in GD. Please stay in GD but stop infesting MD as you are clearly trying to troll here because your questions show you have no clue about traders.
Traders are most times hardcore PvP gamer driving and killing off the competition in the sense of denying them ISK. Traders need the harsh EVE environment not the hello kitty world you personally want so i will give you a hint, traders are more vicious, more focused in getting what they want, extracting ISK from other players, than 99% of all non traders in EVE.

What a good trader defines is extracting ISK from other players without the official notice aka killmail that you were ripped of your ISK.

Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Though, of course, most answers to this question are going to be.

Still, don't understand why you'd use this in your personal success mantra. We part people from their ISK - it's what we do, by nature. So maybe you convince yourself you're an honorable Bushido internet space trader, you're still a thief with a sweet smile. Once you're at that point, it's not so much of a stretch to use a little obfuscation to fatten the wallet.

To answer the OP:
I echo many before me. 1) this is a game...do you find it fun? 2) do you make isk or lose it? 3) are you able to buy what you want, within reason? (Usually these are the ships you want to fly and the Plex you need to live.) If you can do all that, IMUO, you are a good trader.

But since we've veered into whether or not trading is vicious or kind PVP, first realize that it provides a service. Many people don't want to spend the time and effort putting up buy orders and fighting the isk war to get what they want at a lower price. So traders trade their time for the buyers Isk. We battle in the buy area to provide good in the sell area. The spread is payment for our efforts.
Others don't have the time (or in the case of items in low/null, the ability) to go get an item trading at a cheaper price 18 jumps away. Traders spend their time hauling the goods to where people want to buy them. For this service we get compensated with more profit, exchanging our time for their isk.
This carries through within the trading ranks themselves. Those that can spend more time at it (and learning it) will do better. Those that want to do it casually can, and will make a profit, just at a slower pace. Again, it is a trading of time for Isk (profit).
I spend way too much time at this :)

I'm sorry but, how am I trolling. I like trading, I want to get more into it, and I want to see what others deem as successful or not. For instance, I started with around 1b set aside for market and investing etc. I am now at 2b liquid with around 300m in orders still out.

From what I can gather, that is a fair success according to some here. So I fail to see how I'm trolling.

Anslol used to be full pirate.

Judging from his recent in-game conduct and his sudden egregious appetite for tearing down and spitting on all aspects of the game which from the thin white line, I'm either guessing he has a severe case of cognitive dissonance or is trying to forge some kind of new, 'straight-laced carebear' persona in an attempt to harbor trust in the prologue to a long-term scam campaign.

You're a good trader if you can catch pre-patch oportunities and exucute small scale(6-7b) market manipulations easy.

We traders do get killmails, we do...

It took me a while to learn the market, but now i average about 500 million isk an hour if i spend an entire hour following my tedious trade strategy. sometimes i pull in far less, other times i pull in a billion isk or more off an hour of work, it depends on the randomness of player item sales and my competition.

Being a good trader boils down to the ratio of isk earned and the amount of time it took to earn the isk.

Judging a players success at trading based on gross worth, trade turn arounds, patch speculation, PVP funding, or a players ability to turn 1 billion isk into 2 billion isk in 1 month is arbitrary, unless you look at the amount of game time it took to earn the isk in question.



although i share the similar goal as CowNoseTheCat, 1 billion an hour on the regular versus 1 billion a day, i am fairly happy with what i earn now.

these numbers are from my ass, but if you look at other eve careers, 500 million an hour is far superior.

mining = 15 million an hour? **** that
ratting = 40 million an hour? **** that too
whatever else = 100 million and hour? **** that also

to answer your question OP, you are a successful trader if you make isk, but you are a "good trader" if you earn more isk a hour trading, than you could be earning doing something else. Until then you are just a trader.

I feel that at this point im just a trader.

The fewer traders out there the more isk ill make per hour of work, so i hope you fail OP.