Market Discussions

Hi all,

I have been doing some casual trading and market manipulation with my alt for years. Nothing major. Mostly just buy cheap and ship the stuff to an area of low supply and high demand. The occasional bit of station trading, etc. Often this works out as me shipping PvP goods to PvP lowsec hubs when me or my corp changes location. This type of trading has kept me reasonably well off for about a year or so now. I get enough ISK from these kind of trades to pay for my PvP losses, which retrospectively isn't that much seeing as I fly cheap ships and don't lose them very often. To cut a long story short, after quite a long time playing Eve I am fed up of earning "enough", I want to earn more than I could ever need.

Now, my question to you all is, if I wanted to get more seriously into trading and investing etc, what are the basics I really need to know? In another topic I saw someone talking about NAV, and despite googling it couldn't figure out what the hell is was. Also, are there any "essential" skills? I hear that Margin Trading makes life significantly easier.

TL:DR ; What does a budding trader need in assets and knowledge to get started? And indeed, where do you start?

NAV - Net Asset Value. It's what you're worth actually. :-)

Investment thing is for people who got more than they need already, cause usually it's a long term investment with a small profit but generally carefree stuff.

Trading is where the money is, but it's dynamic and takes a lot of time, research and determination.

Drop by the mentioned above channel and enjoy some smacktalk.


As for in-game skills, you'll need

- accounting 4-5
- broker relations 4-5
- margin trading 4-5
- trade 4 / retail 5 / wholesale 4-5 -> tycoon (that determines the amount of orders you can handle at a time)
- rest are for remote regional trading, but aren't that much useful if you've got alts in different hubs.

That's about it for skills.

Buy low... Sell high.

If your new start with ammo / pvp mods.

Margin trading is a very good skill. You'll hear a lot of whiners who say it's only used for scamming, but that's flat out not true.

Apart from scamming, you use Margin Trading when you want to buy some stuff but you're not sure which of the stuff you want to buy that the market is actually willing and able to sell to you.

If you have 1 billion ISK, then normally you can set up Buy Orders totalling 1 billion ISK:
250M ISK for Widget A
250M ISK for Widget B
250M ISK for Widget C
250M ISK for Widget D

You set your Buy Orders at cheap prices, of course, because you're a cheapskate capitalist bastard like me. So some guy who's in a hurry might drop by and want to sell 600M ISK worth of Widget B. But you only get 250M ISK of those. The other 350M ISK of B goes to some other dude who was even more of a cheapskate than you are.

For each level of Margin Trading skill, the amount of ISK transferred into escrow when you place a Buy Order is reduced by 25%.Multiplicatively, meaning that with Margin Trading trained to 4 it's something like 34% of the ISK, and with Margin Trading trained to 5 it's 24% of the ISK.

You still have your 1 billion ISK to set up Buy Orders. But with Margin Trading 5, you can set up Buy Orders for much more than 1 billion ISK, so that you can catch more of those 600 million ISK worth of Widget B that the rushed guy wanted to sell for cheap.

Once you've trained Margin Trading, you will automatically use it every time you set up a Buy Order. You can't choose to not use it. This means that you must keep a cash reserve in your Wallet, because ISK in escrew are tracked separately for each Buy Order, and when all the escrowed ISK in a Buy Order are gone, additional ISK will be taken from your Wallet to pay for anyone selling stuff to said Buy Order. If your Wallet is then empty... Well, my educated guess is that your Buy Order gets cancelled, giving you the hassle of having to set up a new one, and the loss of the broker's fee.

But say you keep 500M ISK in your Wallet, and invest the other 500M ISK in Buy Orders. 125 million divided by 24% rounds to 520 million, so now you can do:
520M ISK for Widget A
520M ISK for Widget B
520M ISK for Widget C
520M ISK for Widget D

That guy who was in a hurry to dump 600M ISK worth of Widget B on the Market? While before you'd get less than half of that, now you'd get almost all of it. More than 5/6 of his stuff, in fact. And if you had opted to keep less than 1/2 your ISK in reserve in your Wallet, you'd have gotten all of the Widget B's.

The problem with Margin Trading is that you constantly need to watch your Wallet. Margin Trading enables you to buy stuff, but you must use the stuff you buy to generate more profit, either by selling it or by producing something from it which you then sell. That's a bit stressful, but in the end when you're a buyer-of-stuff, it's very nice to not have to predict so exactly what the market feels like selling to your Buy Orders and when. You can just throw out multiple Buy Order nets, and sit and see what fish land in them.