Market Discussions

Hello trader friends.

I just started trying out the market aspect of EVE and I was wondering if you could help me understand it a little bit.

I understand the basics of trading, buy low/sell high, keeping your orders updated and look for
items that have a difference between buy/sell good enough to work with.

What I would like is your direction and help with how you more experienced traders work.
Do you source your items only through buy orders, what other sources are there?

How do you maintain momentum on your orders without grinding the .01 game all night long?

Is it a must to place yourself in one of the trading hubs?

I'm sure I'll have many more questions for you guys in the future, looking forward to mails/posts from you.


Lady Godwynn

I pick up goods any way I can including missioning, salvaging and mining. When I pvp I always return with a full cargohold of loot unless I get blown up.



To maximise return for click you want long duration orders not short ones you babysit. Suppose I sell a stack of guns. I'll list it at 1 isk or 0.01 isk under the cheapest and leave it for 3 months. If someone undercuts me it doesn't matter so long as at some point over the 3 months the price (briefly) spiked over my sell price. With the 3 month approach I've found that around 90% of my orders sell rather than return to hangar unsold. In fact most sell pretty soon but if they don't I'd rather get a few extra sales in exchange for no work than work a lot to shift everything. So if my guns sit there at 1000 while the price drops to 800 but then in Month 3 the price spikes back up to 1000 I sell my stack for just the one original piece of work.

If you want to get faster profits you can get them with more work, with 0.01 isking. But you pay the opportunity cost of spending an hour updating a long sheet of orders to get back in front. That's an hour you could have been doing something profitable. Plus it's pretty boring. I have close to 1000 order capacity now, too much to mess around with each one all the time.



Early on, I'd say yes. After trading for a couple of years i do some trading at Jita and some at a more expensive lower volume place which I'm trying to turn into a hub.

If you're in a corp you may be doing your corp a favour by stocking their locality. And they shouldn't mind you making a reasonable profit while you help them.

It is mostly an intel game. There are both items and areas with heavy trading. They represent a lot of time invested in the bidding game. Not worth it for me but I have friends who play that game. When the buy/ sell differential is worth the TIME (time os your ultimate investment in the game) it is worth microing bids. Me I like to work on depth of intel. That is to say if you hold a lot of information about a limited line of products you can pick buys and sells that return on the investment. Ideally this should work around your normal course of play.

I guess it's off to the countryside for me, in search of misplaced and undervalued items!

I have no doubt that savvy traders working together can accomplish much bigger things by joining forces. I cannot
afford to make any market moves yet, my bank account isn't ready for that, so I'll have to take it slower.

Right now I'm trying to reach out to people I see filling my buy orders to create some contacts with manufacturers,
have had positive response so far from the 3 I've been able to find.

Thank you for your informative replies
Lady Godwynn

Edit: I can now fly an Iteron Mark II and can be seen cruising around at dangerous speeds buying ammo (and clothes)