Market Discussions

The only way to raise the price is to buy those sell orders (also it is possible that some sell orders drop out when their time expires). If the supply is bigger than demand and there are many sell orders with price differences of 0,01 ISK from each other it might take a long time for a price to rise up.

Also, remember that demand and supply might drastically and quickly change when CCP makes some game changes (keep an eye on dev blogs and dev posts).

EDIT: Find an awesome way to use that item or lie about that item or its future price (or anything else), post it on forums, talk about it in game chats and make people think that they must buy it, make profit out of it. Use your imagination, be smart

And remember - there is always a risk

its quite simple:

lets say there are 100 people selling a hammer every day, but there are only 50 people who need one. the way the people try to sell their hammer, is usually by making it more appealing to buy theirs, by making their price lower than the competition. this brings a price down over time, since there will be more supply than demand.

now imagine the opposite:
50 people are selling a hammer, but 100 people need one.these 50 hammers get bought up quickly, while the other 50 customers will become desperate for a new hammer. this will make it possible for the sellers to adjust their price the other way, since out of those 100 customers, surely 50 of them are willing to pay more for it.

it's all a game of thug rope really, or "supply and demand".

If a seller placed a sell order for a duration of 3 months, they can extend that time indefinitely by changing the price, every time item price is changed sell order time is renewed back to 3 months for example.

Only the big boys who have tenths of billions ISK or hundreds of billions of ISK can manipulate the price directly the way they want. "Smaller" guys need to analize the market, adjust to it.

Basically yes. For example: people might buy out items for 1000 isk, 1200 isk, 1500 isk per unit and the lowest price for sale left is 2000 isk, BUT it is possible that someone might come in and place sell order for 1200 isk again. There a really many things that might happen to item prices, as others said it depends on suplly and demand, depends on other players speculating the prices and so on.

Also, as sellers chip away at sell orders, buyers (often the same players) are doing the same with buy orders. Competition drives sell prices down and buy prices up. In an efficient market, the "spread" between "bid" and "ask" will be small. In EVE, traders don't like small profit margins, so they look for opportunities to move the prices in their favor. Sometimes those prices don't represent real "value" or cost to build. At the same time, there are other players looking for prices that are out-of-touch with reality, and they will often step in to correct the prices.

It can be a beautiful thing, or it can be the most annoying experience in the game, all depending on your perspective.

Much smaller players can manipulate prices. I do it occasionally and my total in-game wealth is between ten and fifteen billion ISK, with only 3-5b liquid or close to it.

I don't try to manipulate big markets, like the tech 1 battleship market. Instead I look for markets that take time to resupply, and that demand for in pretty constant. Tech 2 ammo markets can be very prone to manipulation because it takes so damn long to build and (for large ammo) is also somewhat skill-intensive to build.

I have on several occasions identified a tech 2 ammunition charge that was worth doing a major price manipulation on, purchased all of the sell orders under a certain point, then relisted my entire supply at a high price. Sometimes I've made decent ISK doing so, other times I've become stuck with over a million charges that just will not sell quickly at all, but overall I'm ahead.

When you look at the bids, there is usually a pattern.

Maybe 8 orders within .01 isk of one another. These are the daytraders. Add up all their units for sale. Then depending on how long they have been going at it, there could be another tier of bids maybe 20 million isk higher than the highest daytrader. It may be less or more, but there will be a clear break between the daytrader prices and the long term price. Check the time remaining to decide how long this guy has been waiting.

Now go to history and check volume and average price. Chances are there will be certain days or periodic cycles with a volume that is greater than the total volume of daytrades. It may look like a lot of trades are out there and that prices can only come down, but the market tends to move in cycles of BIG orders. Where an alliance decides to change from a apocalypse to a tengu doctrine, so they decide they need to make 10,000 tengus, so during the next war lull, a swarm of jump freighters decend on jita and buy the market out.