Market Discussions

I'm new to EVE--I pretty quickly started a station trading alt in Amarr. I started with 177M and had no problem getting to ~500M within a few weeks without a whole lot of effort (besides learning!). I'm training up trade skills: my broker fees are 0.75% (doing a few missions a day as well for standings; I know it could improve significantly), and taxes at 0.9%. I'm working on Wholesale right now, and currently have max. 109 orders, which is proving to be a limitation.

My net worth is currently about 2.5B, but 2B liquid. I'm still making >100M/day, but the other 2B is just sitting there. As it is, some of my buy orders take a few days to fill, so increasing them would do nothing.

Clearly I'm doing it wrong, and I can think of several strategies that might help, but as with most things, there are probably one or two things that would help more than all the rest:

Do I need to move on to more expensive items? (Though they're lower volume, but perhaps higher ISK/day volume) Do I need to drive my fees down so I can profit on high volume/low margin commodities? Do I need to move to Jita already? Do I need to invest in some longer returns (e.g., PLEX?) Do I need to do more regional trading?

Again, I'm new to this, so please be gentle.

Have you been trading pretty much the the same items for a while?

You don't move to "more expensive items". Take in example Jump Freighters: they are "more expensive" for sure, but they move slow.

You want multiple, liquid markets, ideally where the amount of items moved per day is a multiple of your net worth.

As your net worth grows, you'll find less and less suitable items. I.e. I usually just stick to ices and minerals because I don't like to 0.01 ISK but if I dumped all the stock most markets would crash. So I am "constrained" to those. Other good candidates are very high usage T2 modules. Pick multiple markets with something that is at least 500k - 1M a piece and that rolls 500+ pieces a day.

Other traders instead, prefer to totally focus on a number of items they analyzed everything (market) about. I.e. 2 years ago I made a killing selling some T1 MAPC at Dodixie, I had 35% profit for 3 weeks, I even started producing them to keep up!

Finally, when you have your fees minimized, you may enter the PLEX market, which some regard as "end game trading".

If market PVP stops being fun, take a break.

Buy a billion ISK worth of ganking ships, kill some miners, then get back to trading.

5% per day is not terrible, especially when completely new to trading.

After 14d you have doubled your isk, so you will have 4b, assuming I am reading it right and you have 2B invested in the market at any one time.

If I am mis-reading it, and you have 500m in the market, and making 100m/day, then that is 20%/day, which means you double your invested ISK even faster :p

Could you be making more? Absolutely, and there has been some useful advice from VV in here to help you get started
Should you feel bad? Hell no, just remember to keep reinvesting :)