Market Discussions

Well I guess for one moment I hoped that eve had a soft underbelly that i just hadn't seen before.

It can't all be deception lies and theivery.

Show me the love trust and hope!

Why must people keep bringing up that unfortunate period of my life? I know my behavior was unseemly, particularly since I was the groom. But it was a long time ago.

Don't know what Block was finding 'odd'.

It makes sense to offer a return on a bond that the OP can be certain to earn, in addition to his other income goals. It's also not unusual to have good returns in station trading in a short time using lots of capital.

What is unusual is trying to extrapolate one or two good days of trading to a monthly income number. This can be awfully risky.

The OP has decided not to start with a small amount of capital and build it up to 30bil. Instead, he's using other people's money to play in the markets, fund his PvP, and then pay people back with interest.

I don't think there's anything odd about that at all.

Mate you have so much patience, if I had to trade 1-2 hours a day I'd lose my sanity! Assuming I have one to begin with, of course.




The trend is your friend. Even in EvE. Even when you manipulate.

It's not too bad as I just drop in for a few 20 minute sessions. Or at least that's what I did on the last cycle. This weekend I did a bit more grinding. Set up the buy orders on Friday afternoon and just hit c. 5bil profit a few minutes ago (4.5bil realised and another 500mil when the current sell orders go). That was a bit more eye-watering as I put in about 7 hours of keyboard time over the last 40 hours but I've worked out that if I session it late at night when I'm a little drunk it doesn't hurt as much.

Now I can go off and do fun things for the next two weeks with everything covered!




Aye, very true. My mistake was trying a manipulation with only 2 days exposure to that market so I didn't really have a handle on supply and demand and ended up making a mistaken assumption about the equilibrium between buy and sell. I think in the future I'll just take the path of least resistance and follow the market as I can make more than enough without trying to push things around.


I have got into a nice little zone with it now. The spread leads me where it will so long as I don't try to push it around. There is something rather taoist about following the path

Roideater... Nice..

Yeah - it's a horrible name but it came with the character when I bought her. I assume whoever started the character had asteroids in mind and didn't think things through properly. But, then again, this is eve ...



That's a fun exercise! I'm not sure I follow everything you are saying but some of it is spot on (e.g. following Rykker's pattern I use a basket of 100 items).

I think your problem with my figures might come down to this:



You seem to have turned my total volume of trades into turnover here when the amount turned over is actually half of the total volume. The total volume of trade includes each item twice - once as a purchase and the second time as a sale. The c.2% margin (I think closer to 2.2 actually) is thus on half that volume, which leads to the inconsistency between your expected figure and the actual figure.

There is nothing particularly special about the plan I am following except that the items have been picked well and have decent profits and volumes. It is worth noting that having a decent profit does not necessarily mean that any given item has a particularly good margin though. There are a mix of small margins and big margins on high value and relatively low value goods - the aim is to make some quantity of profit from each item traded rather than some margin on each item. For example, some of the items might cost a billion and only sell for 25mil more than the buy. After taxes and broker fees that would only give a c. 10 or 11 mil profit on a sale, or a 1% margin. But if I can turn over two of those in a day that's 20 mil profit on that item. On the other hand, another item might cost 50mil and sell for 56mil, giving a a 5mil post tax profit. I would need to sell four of those a day to get 20mil for that slot and it might require more effort than the other item, despite having a much better margin.

I also wouldn't put too much weight on the language of 'bursts' or 'cycles' as all I'm referring to here are the periods of active trading. To give a bit more detail about what I'm doing, when I start a period of trading I will set up my 100 or so buy orders with a total buy value of something in the region of 50-60bil. When I come back an hour later perhaps 15-20 of my orders will have picked up something (not necessarily filling the whole order). I'll put the purchases up on sale and comb through the buy orders again, updating them all and replacing any that filled the whole order. This process takes about 15-20 minutes. An hour or two later I'll come back again and do the same, also combing through any remaining sell orders at this point (the sells move faster than the buys typically in the short periods but when left overnight buys outstrip the sells). The amount of success on each cycle is partly determined by the time of day. At peak playing periods less will happen if I just leave the orders as there is more competition but, conversely, if I focus more cycles into a shorter period of time I'll get more hits in this period because there is also more volume being transacted. Quite a lot of the volume happens overnight. It is not unusual to wake up and find that my last update the previous day picked up 12bil or so of goods.

At the end of a trading 'burst' I'll cancel most of the remaining buy orders and just focus on the sells, updating twice as often and maybe dumping some slow moving stock back into other people's buy orders. Once most of it is gone I'm more or less done with trading for the next ten days and will just casually update any remaining sells and watch them move quite slowly. Having studied the market for each item a bit more now I've done my second cycle I have a better idea of what price levels it is safe to hold which items at. Last time round I made a few mistakes on this and saw some of the held items devalue because I had held them at the top of their price cycle. I now know better what those cycles are and will just dump excess stock to sells before going idle if the items are at the top of their cycles. If they are at the bottom, on the other hand, I might even lift the sell orders a bit, not update them, and wait for the natural swing to eat them up in the time before my next burst. This time, for instance, I made an effort to buy up quite a bit of excess stock that was at the bottom of its cycle and listed it at an appropriate sell price, so when I say I am waiting for the sells to clear I'm just waiting for the market to take care of them naturally.

The key to the whole thing, really, is not so much finding the most profitable items or the items with the best margins but rather the items that fit with the trading pattern I am using. That is where Rykker's knowledge came in because he has been trading on a similar pattern on and off for years and he knows which items are worth looking at. Volume is important and so are margins but you don't actually want anything with too good a margin because that will bring the vultures in and the excessive competition will likely crowd out anyone who is not updating frequently. On the other hand, having a few highly competitive items on the list means that good profits can be made any time I choose to have a longer session at the keyboard by focusing on a smaller basket for the most part while the rest of the items do their own thing on their longer update intervals.

Let me know if you still have any queries or still think that something doesn't add up.

I think I spent most of my brain last night, but let me try to continue.

I think I must've overlooked RAW's comment [didn't realize RAW23 replied before you, I respond to him after] because that highly suggests a much more diversified portfolio (regarding item trading characteristics). I think what threw me off is I read the term "strategy" and "plan", and jumped to the conclusion that it would be a more singular approach without precluding the possibility of some minor diversification. Also that a singular approach would be more suited to an unproven trader, for learning; but I forget this is about profits.

My lack of really playing the market shows here, I've been playing on and off for the past year and maybe have looked over 1/8-1/5th of the total market items. I like to constantly try new strategies, always seeking to maximize that isk/time(effort) ratio. But my preference is in high value/low velocity or mid velocity items, as it's easier to compete on a slower schedule. Plus since they're smaller I can practice control and manipulation with at my market cap level.

My guess would be that the strategy is more general (nothing too eccentric), and might actually be that more research heavy theory I proposed. I'll have to give it more thought, usually insight is slow, and I'm sure there's more gems of clues that you dropped in that response that I'm not seeing at the moment.

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But even if you give me misinformation, as long as the logic is sound then I can make sense of it. If I can make sense of it, then even if it's not exactly what you do I can use it to improve my game/become more creative and have fun. So as long as you keep talking and explain with logic, I'll either get close to figuring out what you are doing or devise something far off that has the potential to approach the results you list.

A quick correction before I hit the sack - the c. 100 orders are just the buy orders. I was going to write more but with my head a bit fuzzy I decided to delete it as it might be giving away too many clues and depriving you of the fun of working things out

Two other quick points - I wouldn't dwell too much on the fact that I'm a newbie station trader learning the ropes. This is true in the sense that a) I have never done dedicated single station trading as the only element of a business before, and b) in the sense that I certainly don't have the feel for it yet that Rykker has. However, i) Rykker's standard is a pretty high bar and ii) I do have LOTS of experience with the markets from other perspectives, having started off as an inter-regional trader and having produced almost all classes of items in the game in a way that involved getting the raw mats on buys and selling the finished products on sells (not to mention long term market speculation and analysis). This particular format is new but I am pretty familiar with the underlying principles and with's EvE's markets in general, so don't assume too gentle a learning curve.

Secondly, with 100 different items in play at any given time it would be a mistake to focus too much on the particular items. Quantity has a quality all of its own and a decent proportion of the profits (perhaps even as much as half on some rare days) comes from exploiting the dynamism of the markets and the fact that across a basket of a hundred items a good number will be being manipulated by other people at any given time. Some manipulations open up the spreads and can be taken advantage of while others close down the spreads and more or less lock up a given item for a day, a week, or longer, so it is vital to respond to these changes in the correct way. In my first burst I was blundering around a bit on this front but now that I have found my footing I'm realising how important these are, although they can still be difficult to judge. On Saturday, for instance, about a third of my profit came from a single item that someone else was manipulating. By contrast, another item that had the same sort of manipulation going on ended up providing no benefit to me because excessive competition effectively froze me out. Knowing in advance which ones are going to be worth committing time and effort to and which are not is probably the thing that is highest on my learning agenda at the moment. However, while my current approach is the taoist approach of going where the market leads the ultimate goal is to do the kind of things Rykker alludes to in his post and guiding the path of the markets to my advantage. But as my failed manipulation attempt taught me you need to know the behaviour of any given item intimately if you want to work with it and not against it.

Quick points ... right

On your analyses,I will say that some of your deductions are sound and others are a bit off the mark. I'm not going to tell you which are which though, partly because this exchange is a lot of fun and partly because you think out loud

♥ ♥ ♥ Thief of my heart ♥ ♥ ♥