Market Discussions

So after about 4 days of intense trading in Jita I have doubled my 400m isk investment, and I'm closing in on the 900m mark as I'm writing this post. While I myself am impressed with how successful this venture has been thus far, I've grown quite tired of the constant .01 isk war. I was wondering whether there is a secret technique to spend less time babysitting orders so I can spend my time elsewhere. Obviously not wanting to start botting, that would take the fun out of it for me. I have read claims of people making billions a day while only logging in once or twice a day. To me this seems unreal, but it might be because I don't have the skills to handle more than 45 orders yet.

Also wondering which is more profitable between region and station trading, based on experience if you have any.

Making billions a day is very possible it is just a matter of how much NIC you have to invest with and how much you want to risk.

as far as the .01 war just be patient. Post your item and update the price a few times a day. unless you are selling very low volume items you do not necessarily need to be #1 on the list to sell your items. People come along and buy items in bulk all the time. Especially on the weekends.

0.01 games are more fun than either of those activities.

it depends on how much profit you are wanting to make. If you just want SOME profit to turn back into something that is a better investment sell at a larger chunk under the next lowest and watch it fly off the shelf and able to be re-invested.

If you want maximum profit fior your products, sadly you have to play some of the 0.01 isk games which can be a drag but it's all about profits in the end.

You can go between either of these extremes, just make sure your atleast making some profit. If you don't want to constantly baby sit orders also think about not doing it in Jita, go to some of the other trade hubs and try it out there. Stuff will not sell as fast but you will be able to get away with not bothering with the 0.01 isk games as much and you can do more entertaining things like ship spinning or reading forums/a book or whatever.

That is one of the reasons why I have settled outside of Jita. If you have no fun doing it, you will burn out very fast, as have many Jita traders and this will lead you either to start botting or stop playing alltogether.

You hear often, other hubs are much slower. This is kind of true, but this doesn't mean you can't make there profit. The contrary is true, you can find opportunities in other hubs to sell items for much higher than you ever could in Jita. You also will have to compete much less with extreme 0.01-wars and bots. Another hub might suit your playstyle and the time you can or want to invest constantly better.

I'm still including Jita in my business, but only for specific activities that require me to stay there just short.

I might move out of Jita soon... I'm getting a bit tired of all the little asswipes who bid 0.1 isk above me.

I try to bid 100k above them every time, eventually they seem to just wait for me to get my buy order then continue on with their lousy 0.1 isk...

It's always been my feeling that Jita is best for two times in a trader's career, the very beginning and the end-game. Young traders can benefit from the fact that they typically don't have a ton of orders to look at (a limitation of both skill points and capital), in combination with the insane turnover. It's an ideal setting to turn your money around fast and easy. And then there's the end-game, where you have X billions saved up, burning a hole in your wallet because whatever trade routine you're running can't possibly sop it all up and put it to good use. At this point, you'll likely find yourself returning to Jita to engage in longer-term investments. You look at the charts, observe the market, try to find items that appear to be in a price dip. Buy massive amounts of those items (this is where the gigantic bankroll comes in) and then wait for them to go up in price. Dump accordingly. Or you can do short-term manipulations and things of that nature.

But in between, it's probably best to leave Jita and strike out into new territory. You could do the hauling thing, of course. But if the station is where you feel most comfortable, then you'll really be able to put all those Trade skills to the test with some region-wide station trading. You'll want to have Marketing and Daytrading up to 4. You'll also want to have a ton of orders, probably up to at least 2 levels of Tycoon.

In my opinion, the key in choosing a location is to look for an off-hub region. If there's a major trade hub in the region (i.e. Jita, Dodixie, etc), then you'll tend to find that that hub station works like a sponge and that everything gravitates toward it in a way that's not so fabulous for region-wide station trading. So you find a system that has several highly active systems, but no major hub. Check the map to find such systems. Within the region, you'll want to position yourself so you're as much in the center of all those systems as possible (if you've got Marketing and Daytrading maxed, or no system will ever be more than 20 jumps from you, ignore that part).

Then what you do is you check the market in the entire region, and you find your items, as usual. What you'll notice is that the margins are much, much higher in off-hub regions. It's not difficult to find items where you can sell off what you buy for over 100% profit. The trade-off is a reduced rate of turnover. Choose somewhere between 20 and 30 items to place buy orders for. When you place your buy orders, place them region-wide so goods will pour in from every station.

Your assets window will be very important with this kind of trading scheme, so keep it open all the time. The way I do it is I check my assets window once or twice a day, looking for entries for products that have accumulated 3 or more units in a given station. When I see 3 or more units of an item stacked up, I put them up for sale remotely at the station where they're located (this is why you need Marketing trained up).

It can seem kind of intimidating to have all these goods flung all over the region, but as long as you've got the skills, you'll soon find that you're very much in control of the situation. You're sitting at a station whose individual market traffic is very little compared to a place like Jita, or even one of the lesser trade hubs. But you're leveraging more than that one station. You've got an entire region at your fingertips, and money is going out and streaming in from dozens of different sources.

The key with this system is to focus most of your effort to keeping your buy orders on top. I check twice a day, or maybe three times depending on whether I've got time to kill IRL or not. You may have 305 orders filled up with stuff, but it's those 20 to 30 buy orders that are the key, because they are your lifeblood. The sell orders will be snapped up eventually. You can check those on a weekly basis if you want to, maybe when you have extra time on the weekend (once you get a sense of things, you'll be able to breeze through sell orders in a matter of 20 minutes maybe). But if the buy orders aren't flowing because you've been knocked down a few spots by other traders (it does happen, just with not as much frequency as in Jita), that could seriously mess with your mojo. So keep an eye on the buy orders at least daily, I'd recommend once in the morning and once before you go to bed. And that's super-fast, too. Not a burden at all.

I'd say that maybe the ideal bankroll to have for this sort of set-up, just when you're beginning, would be maybe in the neighborhood of 1-2bn ISK. With region-wide trading, you will be building up and relying on a constant back inventory, so you'll necessarily always have some of your money, perhaps a large part of it even, tied up in that. Jita is typically good for at least the first billion ISK, in my experience anyway. After that, the .01 ISK grind seems to stop paying great dividends. So once you've got that much (and the skill points), I'd give region-wide trading a go.

Nice post. I would also add that noting chronic shortages in adjacent regions can make for another rather laid-back approach. I like to have a relatively centralized station in off-hub regions to collect value goods for contract shipping elsewhere. It sometimes takes a few days for the order to fill and the contract to be taken up, but the margins can be great.

As I just started this char I don't have the skills to handle more than 54 orders, nor the skills to sell / buy items remotely. But once I do I think I'll try it. Seems like a way more time efficient method than jita :P. I guess the volume is a bit less or the same as in Jita since it's an entire region and not a single station you'd be handling, would you say this is true about most items?

Awesome, thanks for the answers guys (Especially you Mu-Shi Ai <3). Guess I'll give region trading a go when I have the skills for it... Which will probably be in a month or two. :( Should probably get a +5 social implant...