Market Discussions

I see people say they station trade and only update orders once or twice a day.

I have a few questions.

Do you have a lot of orders? like 200??

Are you trading in Jita?

I am new to this. I downloaded eve mentats but dont see how it is suppose to help other than tell me my assets.

my problem is i will invest in some items only to have the margin decimated. my alt has decent skills. Accounting and broker relations 5. so if its 3% margin or better i can make money.

When the margin is gone, should i cancel the order?


thanks

ill list some of the items i tried to trade but got killed in the margins to see if any of you can tell me why i shouldnt have traded them in the first place.

Rupture
biocells
cadmium
Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction

Probably the best advice I could give you.

Don't use programs like mentat or spreadsheets, although mentat can actually be good for checking how well you're doing, I still would not bog your self down with getting into the whole fetish of constantly checking things like spreadsheets and other programs.

Secondly learn to get into the habit of alternating between modes of buying and selling, ideally you're either buying items or selling them but not both, what I mean is this. Lets say you have 500 million isk in your wallet in which to trade with, what you want to do is setup buy orders for 3 times that amount, so spread your buys over 1.5 billion isk, so between 10 - 30 million per item depending on how many item types you wanna deal with, 50 - 80 items is a good measure. Once you have your orders setup, you wanna setup your client so you have the market, wallet and inventory windows visible, removing unnecessary clutter, like location, region, jumps and anything else you don't need for trading in just one station, resize and adjust columns so you can fit all the info on the screen.

You will want to go into the market screen settings and filter by 0 - 0 jumps, then check the box highlight my orders, this will filter out any orders not in the same station, it will also show your orders as blue.

Now you start by going through all your buy orders in the wallet screen by double clicking them which opens, switches and refreshes the market screen for that item, then right click modify if someone outbided you , do this with every item over and over again until your inventory is full of stuff and your wallet has only 50 million isk left in it. Now switch to selling mode and put all that stuff up on the market for sale, then go through the same process for those sell orders untill your wallet is now full of isk + profit :) oh and a little tip, sort your orders in your wallet screen by time remaining/expires in, have them sorted so the orders with the least amount of time left are at the top. As you know , you can only update an order every 5 minutes, that means once an order reaches an expire time of ' 89d 23h 54m 59s ' you can update it but if you do everything right and select only fast moving items (at least while your capital is still low) you typically only need to update them every 1 hour if you want but obviously the more effort you put in the more profit you will make.

Just repeat the process over and over and now you're a station day trader :), once you have over 10 billion isk you could start having a go at long term investments.

Oh one more thing, although I said don't do both buying and selling at the same time, don't cancel your buy orders, just leave them alone while you sell your stock or you will lose the broker fees and besides they will probably provide you with some extra stock while your selling.

same system* sorry.

Hmm advice.. lets see..

Learn to read market graph. Learn to read the market table.

Speculate over more than 1 day. The moving avg are your friend.

Dont expect to be able to source items in Jita and flipping on margins that are not wider than 5%, the competition is way too high and it takes a lot more experience and liquidity. You can NOT compete with someone that is max skilled, max standing, and can chip king you to death. So those markets you have to source products wider and preferably via bulk orders or similar methods.

Always plan buy orders for more than moment snapshots, use PATIENCE and orders will fill when the trends catch up..

Automation tools, and spreadsheets can be useful, but that is only when you move beyond basics.

An asset management tool like jEVEassets or mentat etc is very helpful, and make sure to balance your operations/portfolio to have positions as wide as possible to limit your assets volatility and risk..

Also for general banter and chat about markets feel free to drop by the lounge or one of the affiliate channels..

Good luck with your business.