Market Discussions

What you're missing is the amount of effort to collect those items and refine them, and potential opportunity costs.

Consider:

(a) other existing buy orders are around for those items. You'll be competing with them in the inevitable 0.01 ISK war
(b) they come it at a relatively steady, though low, rate
(c) many people just do as you do and reprocess their junk themselves, even at substantial refining loss

All this means that you certainly CAN make SOME profit via these buy orders (essentially refining arbitrage), but the amount of profit per day per order slot is relatively low, and you'll need to babysit the orders against competition.

So, a good thing for someone to do who has nothing better to do with their order slots.

When I was a mission bear, I used to have a filter for modules under 10000 ISK. They all got melted.

Then another for under 100000 and meta 3 or lower. They also got melted. (This does hit tech 1 drones, but those are cheap enough that you just buy more if you ever need them, the minerals cover 80-90% of their price anyway).

Finally, 1000000 and under meta 0 items got melted unless they were useful in some way (e.g. precursors for T2 production). These don't drop any more so now I'd replace that filter with a filter for meta 1 and 2 items that ignores price.


The only items I melt that might have been worth keeping are meta 3 versions of items I invent (which can be worth burning for invention in some situations). No big loss there, the time saved more than makes up for it.

Not true, a good 20-30% of mission loot sells for 60-75% of (perfect) refine rates.

The thing is, you can't get the quantities you need to turn any decent profit. Think of it this way - if an item is regularly sold at 30000isk and refines for 55000 (and I can think of several), you need to buy 40 of them to make a mere million ISK.

These items are sold 1 by 1 or 2 by 2 by mission runners and there's more 0.01 ISKing competition on buying them than you might expect.

Don't be fooled by the 80% return, think in terms of millions of ISK per minute spent adjusting orders. You'll find the returns are around a horrible 0.1M/min at best. You can earn that running level 3 security missions (or earn 1-2M/min posting ingenious scams).

You are wrong. Most mission loot sells for more than their refine value(or equal) and only the buy orders are lower than their reprocess value.

I know this because it is my job, i make my living with reprocessing. This true for trade hubs. If we are to talk about region orders tho it will be different.

I will give an example;

Let's look at a common mission loot, 1600mm plates. In Amarr,


Item version------------------- Lowest sell order----------Reprocess value--------Profit(after taxes)

---

1600mm rolled tungsten--------923,996.00------------------891,245.72--------------(-53,248.93)
1600mm titanium-----------------874,999.00------------------891,245.72--------------(-4,251.93)
1600mm crystaline---------------849,999.99------------------891,245.72 --------------(20,747.08)




As you can see only 1 item is profitable and it still requires high volume to be profitable. 100x 1600mm crystaline will only net you 2mil ISK profit, others will net you a loss.

I can give more example if necessary but most items are like this.


Mineral prices: (current in-game values of lowest sell orders at the time of writing)

Trit: 4.98
Pyre: 13.3
Mexa: 38.9
Iso: 130
Nocx: 867
Zyd: 893


p.s. sry about the crude chart.

Dumbest post ever..rofl.

If you are looking at ships, be advised that the mineral cost of building most ship types (like barges and battleships) were recently increased. However, any ship that was built prior to the increase will still refine back to its original mineral amount ie. you cannot make more minerals out of thin air by building ships prior to the patch, then refining it after the patch for more minerals than what you put in.

However, many people made huge stockpiles of ships prior to the patch at the lower mineral cost and are now seemingly selling them at below "current" cost price.

If done right it is possible to make a fortune doing this but it requires a lot of effort. AnakieNine made something approaching a trillion isk in profits controlling the reprocess market in Domain for a few years. Flakeys also made a couple of hundred billion doing this in other regions. The optimal approach is to not only buy and reprocess the loot but then use your cheap mins and your logistical network to build the ships and equipment that the same mission runners you are buying from want to buy themselves. When you go to a station to pick up the stuff you have purchased you can also drop off a bunch of finished goods and list it on the market there. Maximum integration and efficiency yields maximum profits.

Edit - Link to a discussion

And it was 3 trillion not 1! Have a look around evesearch on the topic as there are some other threads in which Anakie talks about what he did.

I did this a lot and it can indeed be quite profitable. Over the last winter i made about 500m profit/day from it. Good days up to a billion. BUT it is quite a bit of work. First you need to identify all the items that are worth reprocessing (something in the range of 200-250 items if i'm not mistaken). Then it's not enough to put up buy orders. You have to keep an eye on mineral prices and double check for every item daily that you actualy still buy them under reprocessing value, especially the ones with thin margins.
Lots of people have the same idea aswell so you have to adjust orders a few times a day which is quite tedious when you have over 100 buy orders.
Also need perfect skills and standing to compete in the markets with thin margins. And if you do region wide buy orders or just a few jumps even be prepared to haul stuff from A LOT of different stations.

He's also looking at sell orders which is almost useless for this job. Mission loot is a market thriving on buy orders for the most part (like salvage). Exception being the couple meta items that people actualy use to fit their ships (most loot items are not).
Even then 1600mm plates are still good items for reprocessing from my expereince. The margin is rather thin but there is good volume in this market.