Market Discussions

How much money should I start with?

The more the better. If you don't have a lot, then whatever you can spare. If you have a lot, then however much you can manage without it sitting idle. This will depend on how much time you are going to put into trading. There isn't really an easy answer here. But 500m-1 billion is a decent starting capital and you can grow that very quickly.

Which trade hub should I start with? Dodixie? Amarr?

If you intend to put a lot of time into it, Jita will give you the fastest turnover, but there is a lot more 0.1 ISK game to play. Amarr and Dodixie have a slower pace and higher margins. I'm not sure that Dodixie is what it used to be though so if you don't want to do Jita then Amarr is probably a better option.

What kinds of things should I trade in to start?

Depends on your capital and the margins you are looking for. If you are station trading then you don't need to particular care about what sells where, so anything that has a reasonable volume and margin. Meta 4 modules is where many people start out. Ships don't tend to have much margin in them though can turn a decent profit if the market is moving your way. Materials (salvage etc) are traded in large quantities so can be a good option to trade in volume.

Good luck

Good for you mate, jump in the trading game and make some isk!

On your questions though, if you really get into trading you'll never have enough isk to cover what you want to do. You'll have to do a lot of compromising as you grow your wallet balance.

Trade hub? Jita is king.

With the certain items to trade in you'll have to pick which end of the spectrum you want to trade. Either high volume low margins, low volume high margins or those that fall somewhere in the middle. Pick the one you'll be most comfortable with as you're going to be doing it for a long time if you get the trading bug. Continually scan the items to add to your trading portfolio, remove the under performers and add the up and coming items. Pay particular attention to the dev blogs and upcoming patch notes for juicy items.

Some additional things to consider: Standings. They play a big part in how much profits you make in trading. Both the state and faction standings. Get going on the data center missions, the epic arc missions, the SoE missions, FW and whatever it takes to get them up as fast as possible (any others, are those still right? it's been years since I worked on standings) There are even some services that let you join fleets while the fleet members fun missions and raise your standings WHILE you sit in station and trade. Play it safe in the beginning, if something looks too good to be true it almost certainly is. Don't try for manipulations till you really understand the items you're trading and the ebb and flow of each

Cheers and happy trading.

I'm really bad at trading, but I was sitting in Jita and I got bored, so I decided to give myself a challenge:

Start with 5,000 ISK (what rookies start with) and see how long / far I can get.

Currently at 23099.74 after 9 flips, so not long before I get a titan!

Hmm, I started trading, yet I'm barely making any profit. How much should I be making as I get more and more proficient at trading?

I recommend using a program called Elinor both for station trading and regional long term trading, and to build up your capital base I would say active trading should be on your list active order trading by using eve-central so you can build up your capital, my guess is and I am not there yet you need at least 10 billion in the market to make what I would consider descent returns.

Lots of good information here! If I can add my $0.02... I think this will help to get you motivated to make Station Trading work regardless of your trading experience!

Video : Station Trading like a boss with 5000 isk and no skill training - don't ever think you're limited on making awesome gains on the market:

See the video either on YouTube, or
Check out the website to see the video with all the accompanying info.


All the best!

Ready yourself for either unnatural amounts of patience working outside of jita or unnatural amounts of order updates working in jita. There really are two distinct station trading methods: Hawking in Jita 23/7, or as much time as you feasibly can keep your orders on top, OR patiently monitoring slower moving trades in other stations. As an aside, and you should take this and all advice with a grain of salt, I'm incredibly bullish on Hek right now. It's been getting slow lately and a lot of the big boys have abandoned it, but there's still money to be made there, especially off the nearby SOE missioners, FW combatants, pirates, and various other locals.



As much or as little as you can afford to lose. Station trading is not so incredibly risky, but you can take a bath now and then, especially when you're new to it. In terms of what will generate good isk per effort or hour you put in, that's relative. I've currently got a mere 8-9bil, which is small fries by market vet standards, invested on my trader alt, but that's what I am currently comfortable investing. My return is probably around 500-600mil per week and I invest extremely conservatively on slower turnover than Jita stations.

My start was in Amarr a few years ago and I didn't really take the time to sit down and figure out how to make real money until last year. My trade alt for the most part was just a guy to sell and buy things for my main who was an outlaw. I had a few million isk one weekend and my main was camped in station out in nullsec, so I paused training my main for a week and trained up a few trade skills. The rest just sort of followed from there. My trade still has only accounting, broker relations, margin trading, and a couple other skills trained at all. I did put him in the amarr militia for a while to get easy standing boosts, but I made my first billion before all that.

tl;dr: You can start with whatever, but if I had to give a point where having X much isk made trading simpler it would be a few hundred million isk.



As mentioned, I started in Amarr. I wouldn't necessarily recommend that today as I feel competition there has come up quite a bit in the intervening years, but all stations are viable if you have the time to deal with more competitive locations. Dodixie is still a good choice, or as good as any other major non-jita hub. Again, if you decide not to work in Jita, you'll be learning zen-like patience no matter where you work.



Crius is going to shake up a lot of things, so it's hard to say without painting in broad strokes. Generally, I advise new traders to stick to t1 or meta modules, ammo, and other things cheap enough to dig into. You don't want to be betting the farm on expensive t2 ships or something with no experience. That's just asking for losses.