Market Discussions

Hello everyone, I recently got back into EVE and I decided I was going to approach trading full force this time. Last time around I found my niche, which was trading. I have characters dating back to 2003 but have only a few months of actual play time. I know very little about EVE, but in about 2 weeks of trading, I managed to make close to a billion from a starting capital of about 150 million. It was fairly easy, and it was almost all made simply flying T2 fittings and other common items from Jita into smaller trade hubs.

One of the biggest draw backs was looking for good deals however. I didn't want to waste my time with anything under a 15% profit margin, but I had no real way of checking other than "hand" scanning the market and doing the math in my head. This got old pretty quick, and I eventually quit all together. This time around I have decided I want to learn a bit about spreadsheets because I know they could make that aspect of trading a whole lot easier.

So over the past day or so I have been getting my feet wet with some pretty basic spreadsheeting; learning the ropes. So far I have come up with this simple spreadsheet. It's nothing spectacular but it's helped me learn a lot. So as you can see, the sheet uses importXML to import the current Jita buy price, current Jita sell price, and average number of the item sold daily. The profit margin is calculated before taxes and fees, but I can add that in later.

Now, down to why I made this post. I can certainly clean this up and give it more functionality. Right now, I basically just click "data / sort sheet by column E Z-->A" when I want to sort the highest profit margin to the top, and I am sure there is a better way to do that. But what I am really curious about, is why does anyone use spreadsheets? Can't this all be done much easier and 10 times faster using a website such as EVE-marketdata or EVE-central? Both of those sites look a hell of a lot better as well. I know there is a big possibility that I am simply overlooking some of the spreadsheet potential here, but I can't imagine eve-marketdata and eve-central not providing something that I could do myself. Another thing to note, is that when creating my own spreadsheets (through Google Drive anyways), I am limited to about 200 rows of data. I don't run into that problem when using eve-marketdata or eve-central.

So am I overlooking the potential of spreadsheets here? Is the data I receive from the eve-marketdata APIs any more accurate or "better" in any way when compared to what is listed on their website?

Whats not to love about having information organised into a logical, clear and concise way?

Thats why I use spreadsheets

..Spreadsheets? We don't need no stinkin' spreadsheets!

Today I had to build a different amounts quite a few different items, actually most days I do. Before I would just buy a bunch of minerals that I thought would cover everything, a couple of times I've come up short, but most of the time I have excess minerals which then need to be moved or it's possible they'll sit there doing nothing for days.

Anyway, I thought it was time to make a spreadsheet for this, and basically it adds up all the required materials for each of my production lines to allow for easy and accurate buying of minerals.

I discussed my manufacturer's spreadsheet recently in the last two posts on my very infrequently updated blog: http://derbk.com/eve/?p=119

It's lowtech, but it helps a ton.

Never used spreadsheets and prob never will.I manage fine with my ingame notepad and market quickbar.

I use Spreadsheets like a crazy.

I pull Eve-Central data to gather pricing for the 5 main hubs so I can see an instant comparison of the buy / sell side-by-side for the 5 hubs and all the items I'm interested in. This is then the source inforamtion for further calculations. I then use the Price History info to generate statistical sales data for me.

With this base data I then do all my calculations to produce my invention plan, calculate invention costs, calculate manufacturing costs and any other associated costs. This also produces info about what I need to purchase.

I then pull Eve API information for the pilots I use for my project including Assets, Market Orders, Escrow, ISK which then gives me a nice overview of my project as it amalgamates all the data to give me my project NAV (in effect).

I combine this with the previous data to basically produce something where I click a few buttons and it tells me what I need, what I need to make and where I need to ship it to and all without login into Eve.

With all this info I can calculate my market share in each of the hubs, and more accurately calculate my margins and ultimately what net I make from each hub.

But the best thing about using spreadsheets is that I can break them if I want to tweak my calculations, I can whip up a new sheet with further calculations, develop new ideas and produce specific information / reports which I can easily share (if needed).

From what I see a lot of the stuff out there doesn't cater for multiple hubs, using multiple pilots in a single project. With my shiz I can also be specific about what information I collect / include (junk is excluded from calcs) to get very accurate info about my project.

With this setup it also means I could in effect run a second project using the same pilots yet still produce separate data, I'd hazzard a guess that no 3rd party site would give you the power to segregate your info in such a manner.

But I digress, I'm an ex-app developer so I get pretty excited about data and what you can do with it.

Fly safe. o7

Im listening to the Benny hill theme song reading this.

spreadsheet is so oldschool notepad+iph does any thinking that i could possibly have to do with this game.Why think when you can leave that to the pc...