Market Discussions

This character is a relatively new alt that I use as a dedicated station trader. All trading related skills are maxed to V.

I'm looking for advice on how to increase my isk per day, because I seem to have reached an interesting plateau:

Over the past two weeks or so I've been station trading in Jita. I started with about 1.8B and I'm up to about 3.6B. I trade all forms of consumer products and often max out my 305 max active orders.

My investment strategy consists of looking for items with a minimum real profit margin of 6% (i.e. a 6% return AFTER paying taxes and broker fees) although I'd say if I were to average my return on each product it is closer to 12% (since I have many items with much higher margins).

Furthermore, I use Elinor to look at the average daily volume for each item (both sell and buy orders) and typically only go for about 10-20% of total daily available transactions of either the sell or buy orders (whichever is less). In other words, I try to employ the capital in such a way so to avoid it getting tied up for an excessive amount of time.

Here's the problem I've encountered:

My return is very consistently 100mil per day (+-about 20%). This 100 million isk figure seems to be entirely independent of how often I update my orders (either once per day or several times per day) or the total capital I employ (since I've doubled my isk since a few weeks ago and I continually reinvest the extra isk into the market).

For whatever reason, it seems like 100 million isk per day is some form of market constant that I can't seem to push through.

Looking for advice.

Thanks.

Have you tried trading larger priced items, such as ships and T2 modules? Once I had gained enough capital to escape the high order counts of high volume, low priced items, I started investing in items that had larger prices and noticed a huge surge in my profits.

As a trader, I think it's important to evolve your portfolio and trading habits to reflect your NAV. If you do this, your profits will evolve also.

Are you trading any of the same items as when you had started with 1.8b? Perhaps you could do an analysis of items you are trading, the profit they make and time spent managing each of them, then drop those not worth your time. Even if you can make 1000% profit on a handful of trit, it's still not a lot of total ISK.





You guys seem to be trying really hard to look like the same person lazily trying to play two characters.

And you seem to be mimicking every troll that's ever graced the forums with her presence.

Branch out already.

Elizabeth said, in better words, what I had tried to convey. Ships may not make a greater profit percentage, but the amount of ISK their profit equates to can be far greater than high profit margin, cheaply traded items.

I think Elizabeth and Koniforous' replies here are bang on. All items and all stations have a limited profit potential based on competition and trade volume. Just because an item has high ROI does not mean it will, in the long run, make you the best profit. That said, your rate of expansion seems healthy, and the time seems right to scale up.

As others suggested: trade in more items, or trade in more stations. Either way, you'll need another trading toon and another 300 orders to work with. Once you have an account with 3x trading characters, the value of your plex per trading character goes up! (I'm assuming here you intend to play for free with all your earnings)

There is no in-game mechanic, but like all mechanics that will take your trading to the next level, it is out-of-game.

Another way of looking at things:

Early on in trading margins are quite important, but later on you will find that the volume of ISK traded for items becomes more relevant as the pile of isk you have to play with grows and grows.

Why? Because you need to find a way to put that isk to work is why - hence the reason why high volume isk becomes relevant.

So lets say you have a 12% margin on an item and sell 100 million worth of the stuff over a week - you've made 12 million.

Lets say I have a 5% margin on an item, but in that week I sell 400 million worth of the stuff... yeah I've made 20 million.

That's how it plays out as your pile of iskies grows.

Have fun.