Market Discussions

Buy low and sell high. The markets in Eve are not very efficient. It's easy to make a bundle just helping people buy the goods they want. It's even easier if you have the right intel. All the stuff that would get you thrown into prison in the real world (market manipulations, boiler rooms, insider trading and such) are all fair game!

If your looking into station trading you need to find a system and location that works for you. Then work the system. You can find all kinds of real world trading books and just apply the knowledge to Eve markets. If you decide to stick with it learn to read charts, find and study the markets you are trading. It's a marathon not a sprint.

If all of this fails your play style, just lie and steal from other players.

Learn to read charts. Develop your system and be prepared to move into more expensive markets as your wealth grows. I worry less about margin than I do about volume. You should also be prepared for drawdowns and screwups. Spread your trades over many markets and you will alleviate some of the pain.

There are many blogs that discuss the Eve markets and talk about their strategies for making ISK.

I keep a list of such blogs on my blog marketsforisk

My own blog talks about how i started with 4m ISK and i am now at 126bn.

My best advice is to start small and learn the ropes. The first blog post i did on my blog starts there.

You don't need to know the big picture of the in-depth nuances of the Eve economy, you just need to know your part of the market.

Well said. I've been reading your blog off and on for awhile. Good stuff.

I like the big picture too. If you would like to learn a trick or two, or got a question - you are welcome to mail me, and/or come by our mumble server :-)

Ok, a bit of theory and a bit of practical advice.

As compared to a real world economy, the EVE market is very simple. The basic model for a game economy is what can be called “faucet” and “sink”. EVE is no different than any other game in this respect.

In EVE, players more or less directly convert time to ISK. They do this by mining, ratting, missioning, manufacturing etc. This is called the “faucet” – sources of isk. Players often talk about “isk grinding” and “isk per hour” for their efforts.
There are also some activities that create a “sink”. These are activities that destroy isk. Buying PLEX, having your ship blown up, upgrading a clone or paying taxes on the market are examples of “sinks”.

Ergo, the simplest way to make a useful “income” in EVE is to make sure that you maximize your “faucets” and minimize your “sinks” or at least that you have an idea of the scale of both. For example, if you “lose” a billion ISK per month from ships getting blown up, you should make sure that you’re making that much isk from your “isk grinding” activities or you should modify your game play so that you lose less.

Faucet and sink.

Like a real world market there is also an aspect of supply and demand. However, unlike a real world market, there is never a scarcity of anything. Manufacturers produce much more of every item on the market than demand would justify. Therefore, there is little or no “demand pull” inflation. The selling price of all items on the market are normally a stable % higher than their manufacturing costs. The reason is twofold: -1- because there simply isn’t enough demand to create inflation and -2- because inventories can expand indefinitely without consequences to producers. (market manipulations and short term demand bubbles during major null-sec wars excluded).

[Practical tip] The above ideas are important because over-supply means that people are sitting on HUGE inventories of items that are not on the market, so if you think you can buy everything on the market and relist it at a higher price then you’re going to be wrong, because what is on the market is only the tip of the iceberg.

The main driver for the cost of an item on the market is the cost of manufacturing it. For this, the costs of the component items, costs of production slots, POS fuel for an indy POS etc etc etc can simply be all added up together in order to find out how much it costs to make something. Making a “profit” means you need to put that item on the market for more than the sum total of the price of its component materials. If not, then you are spending time without making more isk than you could have by just selling the component materials. Any time spent that makes no ISK is no longer a faucet.

[Practical tip] For successful market buying and selling you should have some idea of the production cost of a given item. Knowing what something costs to make will help you decide if you should make it, buy it from the market or start manufacturing it to sell for profit. The point here is to be curious about the costs, not to necessarily remember them all.

There is another kind of buying and selling on the market. Arbitrage trading. In economics this term has a specific meaning but for the context of EVE what it means is that if you buy an apple from your sister for $0.10 and sell it to your cousin the same day for $0.20 then you’re arbitrage trading. In EVE you can take advantage of the difference between the buy and sell price of an item to buy and relist the item for a profit.

Most items on the market can be traded like this without even leaving a station. However, sometimes regional differences appear that make it possible to make a quick buck by buying something and physically moving it to sell somewhere else. If you do this on a large enough scale then (a) you will make a lot of money and (b) you will get RSI. Speed is the name of the game here. You need to minimize the time between buying and selling in order to keep churning your isk through the market and making a profit. If you’re too slow at it then you’ll end up with inventory, not isk.

[practical tip] To keep the isk mill churning, speed is important, as I said. In order to gauge speed, look at demand.

Is this the kind of information you were looking for?

T-

Np. Just send me a mail, with the context and we can take it from there. We are always loking for more smart people :-)

You will find supply and demand has very little to do with EVE. Supply is infinite, in every aspect. The markets rely on trends and those trends are usually manipulated.

The best, honest advice I can give you is, if you see an advantage? Keep it to yourself. Don't tell corp mates, don't tell me, just roll with it. It won't last long.

Hello,

If I may bring in my little input: my blog Vahrokh.com has a whole section dedicated to EvE Online. It's being totally re-styled so it should look prettier and responsive.

In there you'll find a number of commented EvE resources, expecially related to EvE economy.

There's a three pane "menu" where you may find tons of stuff including "meta" activities related to this forum, explaining what is a third party service or how to give quality and price to collateral people could offer you.


If you want to go deep and study charts so you know trends and prices setups there are a lot of resources on that website as well.

In example you can find a tutorial about how to load EvE markets data into a RL trading platform (the free version of it) and see them as a "real trader".

It might look funny, but at Fanfest 2014 that was exactly what the EvE Economist had shown on his computer.