Market Discussions

I think in your situation the market may be the perfect thing to do. log in, farm your orders, list your stock, maybe courier an item or 2 around for bigger income, log off. next day you'll see the results. its one of those things that can be very rewarding with no more than an hr or so to manage it. of course this will not bring you in league with the whalesharks but at least it will get you in the fishtank.

check out this guy's blog for a more step by step "how to be a billionaire" approach.

Absolutely. Read the marketsforisk blog and he'll guide you along nicely. You can update trade orders each day as a casual player and make billions per month. I was able to go from nothing to about 30b+ in about 7 months. And I play very casually. And I'm sure others can do a lot better than that.

Yes

Don't be a 0.01 ISKing monkey, trade on trends, take longer term views.

Limited game time, get Customs Code Expertise to 4 on all 3 characters on your account. It will take around 12 days total. Take Planetology to IV on all 3 as well Everything else to 3. Any Industrial will work but Gallente have PI specific ones.

This will get you 15 planets, set them to 1 day cycles. I'd suggest finding some RvB High Sec planets. They have 15% tax, you will pay 11 and RvB are public about their place in EVE.

A system with 4 planets of the same type is ideal, close to a hub. Be diligent, it won't consume a lot of time to keep it active. Even the most casual player will make 400 mill a month if they make it a routine and have all 3 character slots active. It's not going to make you rich, pay your sub or anything. It's going to build your wallet. A wallet you can then make market decisions with.

All my market decisions are long term so yes, casual can work. When I say long term, I mean years. The PI stream and the market investment system works well together.

I can just offer advice as a station trader and its probably the most suited occupation in EVE for casual play, in fifteen minutes you can update all your orders (if you are well organised) and use Elinor a third party tool to do it I wouldn't be a station trader without it.

People on here talk about long term trends and that sort of a thing but the question is how much of your headspace do you want occupied by what price direction are items in an online game moving when there are other things perhaps more pressing in your real life that you need to consider. So in saying that trading in the now or as close to now as a person can get, has its place for certain individuals.

As for how those amounts are possible, a smart person once said compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe and in principle growing a 100m pile isk by 5% isn't all that different than growing a 1b pile by 5% in terms of organisation but the output amounts are quite different and as your capital pile grows so will its outputs which simply put is that old saying 'it takes money to make money'.

EDIT:

I did say fifteen minutes to update orders, perhaps rashly, although with Elinor its possible to do it very quickly, general rule is the more capital you have across more items the longer it will take, whatever the time is its a far cry from some ISK making PVE activities in EVE and in addition to updating orders there are other things that have to be decided like capital placement which is important and does involve time itself but this time can be measured more in tens of minutes than hours for example.

I am casual since 4 years, I trade over weeks, I stopped taking account of my stuff past 300B... so yes you definitely CAN.

I can only speak for myself. Sometimes yes, sometimes I just let stuff sell through for weeks at a time. This works for me because, like VV and some others, I mostly trade on regular cycles in the market. There is always a chance you will get caught with your pants down if you do this on a small number of items and don't pay attention to the forums, dev blogs, test server forum etc, so you need to bit a bit cautious with this approach and mitigate the possible downside.

for many items the price goes up and down over the week. I tend to set my orders and forget about them for at least a week as they almost always sell.