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Would like a little advice on station trading
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Phoenix Vos
The Golden Phoenix
#1 - 2014-09-11 21:04:19 UTC
Hi all,

I am a relatively new station trader and am wondering what I can do to further increase my profits. I am currently sitting with 2 bil available to invest in the market, and I've had some limited amount of success. I have Wholesale trained up to III, so I have plenty of orders I can put up. Accounting, Broker Relations, Margin Trading are all at IV. I am trading in Amarr, updating orders 2-3 times a day.

However, the profit I've been able to bring in is sparse. From Sep 1st to today, my profit has only been 250 mil, with a lot of money still sitting in my wallet. I feel like this is way below what I could be making with this amount of money. Could it be I'm choosing terrible items to invest in? Without fail, my list of buy orders is way bigger than my list of sell orders. I am trying to do a good job diversifying what I invest in, but it still seems like very few buy orders get filled throughout the day, yet on average I sell items quickly once I have them.

What I have considered doing is going through each category, locating the potential things to invest in, noting them in a spreadsheet, and then placing buy orders once I've done that. Is that a smart way to determine items to sell?

As for tools, I am using Eve-Mentat, Elinor, and EveWalletAware. If I need a little more starting money, I'm not opposed to buying a PLEX and selling it for more liquid isk, if needed. Are there additional tools I should be using?

Any tips shared would be greatly appreciated.
Samwise Everquest
Plus 10 NV
#2 - 2014-09-11 22:07:46 UTC  |  Edited by: Samwise Everquest
Why even station trade if you are just willing to buy plex for isk? To be honest sounds like you've already bought a couple of plexes. Unless you are just an alt of some kind. In any case if you are already using those tools and understand the concept of buy low, sell high you are good to go.

Pras Phil.
Phoenix Vos
The Golden Phoenix
#3 - 2014-09-11 22:10:43 UTC
Samwise Everquest wrote:
Why even station trade if you are just willing to buy plex for isk?



1) I like it
2) I find it entertaining.
3) It's something I want to master
4) It's a challenge
5) I eventually want to acquire amounts in the 10 bil + range. That's expensive in dollars.
Samwise Everquest
Plus 10 NV
#4 - 2014-09-11 22:12:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Samwise Everquest
Phoenix Vos wrote:
Samwise Everquest wrote:
Why even station trade if you are just willing to buy plex for isk?



1) I like it
2) I find it entertaining.
3) It's something I want to master
4) It's a challenge
5) I eventually want to acquire amounts in the 10 bil + range. That's expensive in dollars.


I've never used 3rd party tools successfully or spreadsheets and I make a decent amount trading here and there. As long as you can read the in game graph, understand supply vs demand, and buy low sell high you cant really go wrong. If you are spending alot of time in-game then you should probably look into regional trading instead unless you enjoy the .01 isk game.

edit: I assume your standings at the station you are trading at are 8.0+, if not that will help your margins by alot.

Pras Phil.
Phoenix Vos
The Golden Phoenix
#5 - 2014-09-11 23:09:12 UTC
Samwise Everquest wrote:

I've never used 3rd party tools successfully or spreadsheets and I make a decent amount trading here and there. As long as you can read the in game graph, understand supply vs demand, and buy low sell high you cant really go wrong. If you are spending alot of time in-game then you should probably look into regional trading instead unless you enjoy the .01 isk game.

edit: I assume your standings at the station you are trading at are 8.0+, if not that will help your margins by alot.


Hm. Yeah that's a problem - this toon is neutral with Amarr. Not sure what the best way to fix that is though, since all she can do is station trading. There has to be a way to bump her up.
Jerex Deka
Tempest Shipyards
#6 - 2014-09-11 23:15:48 UTC
Don't really know what happened but I threw together a long post and when I clicked "post" it disappeared, so here's the short version..

Train Margin Trading to V ASAP, it's more important than amount of orders because it allows you to escrow your isk and keep it available to have more buy orders.

Study the market your in, go down the list and check most if not ALL items. While it will eat up a solid 2-3 hours of your time, the first time, you will only do this once in a blue moon and it's WORTH IT!

Join SCC-Lounge, while they sometimes troll questions (all in good fun), they also answer a lot of questions with GREAT advice, not only that but you can sit in on the conversations and learn a S**T ton of info about the game, or external blogs and whatnot.

Don't be afraid to be aggressive in trading - It's called market PVP for a reason, if someone undercuts you by 10% or whatever, buy them OUT of the game, and resell for more! Yeah it's a lower margin on THOSE items, but the other 10 items you were selling keep the original margins. (this only works well with more liquid isk available)

If I were you and you can comfortably afford it I would buy a further 3b in plex (or attempt a loan) and then move to jita for awhile to get your feet wet. It's MUCH faster paced and more **** happens - for the better, and worse!

That's really all I have as far as general tips, if you have any specific questions you can evemail, I remember starting out last year and it was ROUGH. So don't hesitate, meet people and learn ****, all you're doing is sitting in a station anyway!

Good luck and remember to HAVE FUN
Adunh Slavy
#7 - 2014-09-12 00:07:44 UTC
I am a station trader too. I will sell you Jita 4-4 for 5 billion ISK.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.  - William Pitt
Cista2
EVE Museum
#8 - 2014-09-12 06:32:17 UTC  |  Edited by: Cista2
Hey, hope you're having fun with trading Big smile

A couple of things that have not been covered:

First of all, all the spreadsheets in the world will do you no good Smile Just make a note of the items you find that are attractive. The key variable you are looking for (if you are trading short) is [daily turnover] times [current spread].

If you only update 3 times per day, you cannot play the 0.01 isk game, because those guys update 40-50 times per day. You will have to find items where you will be able to buy/sell regardless of them, that is, you will have to catch price trends before or as they happen. Or, you will have to set your prices aggressively to eliminate those guys, while diminishing your own profits.

The reason your buy orders are harder to fill is simple. Every daytrader is a buyer of items. But only those daytraders that succeed in buying a certain item is selling that certain item. So the competition on buy orders is higher Cool

If you want to chat further, jump into my ingame channel "Signatures", good luck!

My channel: "Signatures" -
voetius
Grundrisse
#9 - 2014-09-12 08:38:59 UTC
Phoenix Vos wrote:
Samwise Everquest wrote:

I've never used 3rd party tools successfully or spreadsheets and I make a decent amount trading here and there. As long as you can read the in game graph, understand supply vs demand, and buy low sell high you cant really go wrong. If you are spending alot of time in-game then you should probably look into regional trading instead unless you enjoy the .01 isk game.

edit: I assume your standings at the station you are trading at are 8.0+, if not that will help your margins by alot.


Hm. Yeah that's a problem - this toon is neutral with Amarr. Not sure what the best way to fix that is though, since all she can do is station trading. There has to be a way to bump her up.


https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Faction_Standing_Repair_Plan

This covers most things related to getting higher faction standing. There is stuff in there you can do with relatively little isk and skills e.g. the tutorial missions for Amarr, 3 military+ 3 adv. military = 6 in total and they should get you from 0.0 to 1.0 faction.

Circle Agents can be done in a rookie ship.

You can do the Caldari ones as well and get some derived standings from Caldari to Amarr, but that wouldn't be quite as much of an increase as doing the Amarr ones.

Then there is the Sisters Epic Arc, quite new player friendly.

And Data Center tags hand ins which are fairly cheap for Amarr and although the Caldari ones are a bit more expensive you can skip the expensive ones and just do the cheaper ones if you want.

Finally, there are "standing correction" services that usually advertise in the WTS forum where you pay someone to boost your corporation standings. You can't get faction standings this way but you could get e.g. Emperor Family up to 8+ with some patience and isk spent. They typically charge 100mill for corpration standing increase of e.g. 0.0 to 1.0, 1.0 to 2.0, though after 6 or 7 standings they are going to have diminishing returns so may cost more.

Which or any of the above you choose to do is a decision you have to make based on time, cost, perceived usefulness, etc.

You can trade without standings just using your trade skills though it might be better to focus on lower volume higher margin items as they can have less competition.
Tinu Moorhsum
Random Events
#10 - 2014-09-12 10:06:12 UTC  |  Edited by: Tinu Moorhsum
Phoenix Vos wrote:
Hi all,

I am a relatively new station trader and am wondering what I can do to further increase my profits. I am currently sitting with 2 bil available to invest in the market, and I've had some limited amount of success. I have Wholesale trained up to III, so I have plenty of orders I can put up. Accounting, Broker Relations, Margin Trading are all at IV. I am trading in Amarr, updating orders 2-3 times a day.

However, the profit I've been able to bring in is sparse. From Sep 1st to today, my profit has only been 250 mil, with a lot of money still sitting in my wallet. I feel like this is way below what I could be making with this amount of money. Could it be I'm choosing terrible items to invest in? Without fail, my list of buy orders is way bigger than my list of sell orders. I am trying to do a good job diversifying what I invest in, but it still seems like very few buy orders get filled throughout the day, yet on average I sell items quickly once I have them.

What I have considered doing is going through each category, locating the potential things to invest in, noting them in a spreadsheet, and then placing buy orders once I've done that. Is that a smart way to determine items to sell?

As for tools, I am using Eve-Mentat, Elinor, and EveWalletAware. If I need a little more starting money, I'm not opposed to buying a PLEX and selling it for more liquid isk, if needed. Are there additional tools I should be using?

Any tips shared would be greatly appreciated.


couple of tips:

1) You should be able to generate a good churn with about a billion isk (maybe 2). Maximize your buy orders. Make sure you aren't sinking too much isk into inventory.

2) apply the 80/20 rule. 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your effort. Decided carefully which items are worth playing the 0.01isk game. Ignore the rest. 80% of what you ignore will sell in 3 months.

3) the only way to scale up the station trading game is to put in more time. That's what makes it such a grind. If you have the time, then go for it. If you don't then consider becoming a producer. The problem with trading is acquiring enough stuff to sell. Suppose I said to you that you could "buy" 600... say... damage controls per month for 1/2 of the highest buy order in Jita. Would that sound like a good deal? That's what producers do.

T-
Phoenix Vos
The Golden Phoenix
#11 - 2014-09-12 15:45:13 UTC
Cista2 wrote:
Hey, hope you're having fun with trading Big smile

A couple of things that have not been covered:

First of all, all the spreadsheets in the world will do you no good Smile Just make a note of the items you find that are attractive. The key variable you are looking for (if you are trading short) is [daily turnover] times [current spread].

If you only update 3 times per day, you cannot play the 0.01 isk game, because those guys update 40-50 times per day. You will have to find items where you will be able to buy/sell regardless of them, that is, you will have to catch price trends before or as they happen. Or, you will have to set your prices aggressively to eliminate those guys, while diminishing your own profits.

The reason your buy orders are harder to fill is simple. Every daytrader is a buyer of items. But only those daytraders that succeed in buying a certain item is selling that certain item. So the competition on buy orders is higher Cool

If you want to chat further, jump into my ingame channel "Signatures", good luck!



I did buy a spreadsheet off the WTS forum, so I guess I'll find out the truth of that statement for myself. :)

After setting up shop in Jita last night and waking up to find none of my orders filled, I'm inclined to think you're correct. I will probably move back to Amarr.

Thank you for your tips Voetius - I'm not sure how much time I want to invest in raising my standings. I don't think they are having too dramatic an effect on my profit margins to make it worth it, but we'll see as I increase my experience.


Tinu Moorhsum wrote:
1) You should be able to generate a good churn with about a billion isk (maybe 2). Maximize your buy orders. Make sure you aren't sinking too much isk into inventory.


So it's not unusual to have double the amount of buy orders compared to your sell orders? I am having trouble getting isk out of my wallet and into buy orders (which I guess is a good thing, thanks Margin Trading). Does that mean I need to invest in more expensive items?

Tinu Moorhsum wrote:
apply the 80/20 rule. 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your effort. Decided carefully which items are worth playing the 0.01isk game. Ignore the rest. 80% of what you ignore will sell in 3 months.

I am workin on this. I'm going through each item category item by item, examining the graph, and noting down items I may want to invest in. Once I get some data, i'll sit down and filter items based on what has sold well and what hasn't.


Tinu Moorhsum wrote:
the only way to scale up the station trading game is to put in more time. That's what makes it such a grind. If you have the time, then go for it. If you don't then consider becoming a producer. The problem with trading is acquiring enough stuff to sell. Suppose I said to you that you could "buy" 600... say... damage controls per month for 1/2 of the highest buy order in Jita. Would that sound like a good deal? That's what producers do.


Hm being a producer sounds like it may be a good idea too. I have a industry alt skilling up to do research and invention, but I haven't figured out how to use him to make Isk yet. The time thing is difficult - I usually only have 2-3 hours to play per weekday and 4-6 on the weekends. I figured station trading would be the fastest way to use that time to make isk.
Chad Ramsbottom
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#12 - 2014-09-12 19:46:34 UTC
When I settle in to a new hub, I tend to just go down the market and find any items with good volumes. I add those to the quickbar under a folder for that specific hub and then go back through the ones I added to see what has nice profit margins.

Then I set a ton of buy/sell orders

mfw your bottom
voetius
Grundrisse
#13 - 2014-09-13 17:42:50 UTC

I know a couple of the bigger traders in Amarr are buying stuff in Jita and using public couriers to move to Amarr and relist so that would be one reason why you might have problems with buying stuff in Amarr to relist. Bigger as in a few 10s of bill per week.

This especially applies to things like T2 ships, and you can get a good idea of which ships and modules if you are patient enough to look through the market history in Amarr to see what is selling there which doesn't come from buy orders in the Emperor station - market history tells you this if you know how to read it. I'm thinking of higher ticket items here so I'm not suggesting you look through the whole market - but that isn't a bad idea when you have a lot of time on your hands.

I've seen some lists of what these traders sell, indirectly, by looking at their failed courier contracts from ganks, then looking up the lossmail, but also through other means as well.
Pookoko
Sigma Sagittarii Inc.
#14 - 2014-09-15 09:08:52 UTC
It heavily depends on items, but you CAN station trade at Jita while updating 2~3 times a day (which is what I do, and I trade at Jita among other regional hubs).

The thing about Jita is that there is so much trade that your buy orders may get filled and sell orders get sold over night even if it is not the top order. Sometimes when I think current top buy order is a bit too high, I just place a buy order at the price I think is right. It's same with sell orders. If the current top sell order seems too low, I just put it at the price I like and go to sleep. It's not unusual for me to log on the next day to see those orders to be filled/sold.

If I have a lot of time to play I sometimes indulge in 0.01 isk game, and at Jita this can get quite hectic with fast buy/sell cycles. Otherwise I just use the method I mentioned above. Don't always feel that your order needs to be at the top to trade. If you think longer term you can identify more strategic price point to draw your buy/sell line.

Just remember that 'longer term' doesn't necessarily mean weeks or months or years. It can even be just a few days difference between selling stuff on Tuesday vs. selling stuff on Saturday. Amarr is decent place for station trading and I suggest you do what you feel comfortable with. But I wouldn't advise discounting Jita as unplayable for casual trader.