Market Discussions

TLDR:

NPC commodity sell price keeps dropping every day until it's filled. (or until it hits a certain limit)
NPC commodity buy price keeps rising every day until it's filled. (Also until it hits a certain limit)

Best NPC commodity in the game is Long-limb roes.

The range for sell price is 2390-2544. The range for buy price is 2538-2862.

As you can see potential profit is up to 460 isk/roe.

Here's how to profit:

STEP 1:
Buy roes in Orvolle and Maut in Placid region. Either buy for 2540 or put a buy order overbidding current highest buyer by 0.01isk as usual. Buy order will be filled because NPC sell price will drop within a day (unless you are overbid).
Chances are high you can buy for around 2460-2505. Worst case increase your buy order until NPC sells through to it.

STEP 2:
Haul either to highsec (Lonetrek, Citadel, Forge) or Syndicate.
Watch out for gankers. Join Anti-Ganking and Gank Intel in-game channels. Use a webbing frig.
For Syndicate you will need a cyno alt and a Jump Freighter.
* JF pilot should have maxed fuel conservation skills and preferably fly a Nomad. Ark is also tolerable but not as good. Rhea/Anshar don't work, fuel guzzlers.

STEP 3:
Put a sell order for around 2620-2670. The lower you set the faster it will sell-through generally.

STEP 4:
Underbid current lowest seller or just wait for sell-through. This may take a few days if you want to leave the price relatively high but you will eventually sell through, your risk is zero. NPC buys and sells between 1x and 2x of displayed volume every day.

STEP 5:
Profit between 90-170 isk/roe. This means a full freighter haul 1m*170 can be 170m per haul. Not too shabby. Haul to multiple stations per single freighter run to accelerate sell-through.

Note: Broker / standing / accounting / fuel conservation skills are VERY important.

STEP 6:
Read the posts below for more details. There's potential profit of up to 39 billion per month in roes.

Some advanced details and strategies:

The roes are sold at two Inner Zone Shipping stations in Placid region, Maut and Orvolle. Daily sell volume shows at 1.5m. There are also 13 hisec stations in lonetrek, the forge and citadel and 7 losec stations in the same region. Each station is showing 77834 volume of buy orders. Theres also 8 0.0 stations in Syndicate that buy this stuff at 171589 volume.

If you look at Maut and Orvolle right now you'll see the 2544 price. You will also see there are other sale orders there, under the 2544 price. The buy price you will see in most other spots is usually around 2539, so there is no immediate profit. The reason it's that way it's because the roes are being done.. someone (me and my competitors - some CO2 alts) has been hauling them and selling.. every day, for years.


Let me explain the exact details of how NPC price action works.

The server keeps an internal timer. Whenever more than full volume is sold the timer is reset. So for instance if you buy 1.5m +100 in Orvolle, the timer will get reset. What happens then, is after 12 hours the price will start rising (unless the timer is touched). The price rises at about 6.66isk/hr rate (for this particular commodity, but the same general rules apply to all NPC goods such as spiced wine for instance, which is also pretty profitable).

To obtain roes at a low price in Orvolle and Maut you need first off know when was the last timer reset. Buying a single unit or more from the NPC sell order resets the timer.

So for instance lets say today somebody bought over 1.5m of roes at 5pm PST. The downtime is at 4pm PST.
This means the next day at 5:01pm, if you buy one unit of roe from the NPC the price will reset down to 2544-6*12 roughly, that's if you only give it 12 hrs. If you reset the timer closer to downtime, like at 10pm, the price will have 20 hours to drop so will drop all the way to 2430 ish or even 2390 on a good day. The drop rate is not exact and can vary slightly. But the point is, you can obtain roes daily at 2430 (provided there are no competing buy orders).

Another detail is that you can actually buy double the volume. The sell price doesn't reset back up until you buy 1499999 + 1.
BUT if you buy 1 to reset the price, then buy 1499998, then buy 1500000 you will end up buying neary 3m at 2430.

The same price action happens on the sell side. Once you sell over 171589 at TXW-EI for instance, the timer gets reset and the price will start rising after 12hrs from that point. However if the price is touched anytime in between (ie 1 unit is sold), the rise gets reset again. So if you go with a 24hr rotation, the price will rise to 2684 under perfect conditions.

So anyway, doing it this way the worldwide sell volume is about 6m at about 250-tax price difference (provided there is no competition). Let's say 230 after tax. 6m * 230 = 1.3b/day = 39b/month. Not too shabby.

Of course there is some hauling involved (since the volume is large) and a nontrivial capital investment. So this is not for small traders generally speaking, but you can start small by just camping one station with sell order.

Now let me explain some strategies people have been using to counter others from interfering with price resets.

To protect the price from a reset, you can setup a protective order. So in Orvolle for instance, you can see there are orders with 90day timers (the NPC ones always have 365 day timers). Those are there to prevent other people from resetting the price at a time it's convenient for them. You can't buy from a higher order, the market doesn't allow you, so you have to buy from the lower order. Same goes with protective orders at the point of sale. You setup a buy order that covers the NPC buy order and it protects the price from reset for 24hrs. When it's time to sell you move your buy order to below NPC, sell 1 unit, the price pops to accumulated price, then sell whatever the ask volume is -1 (or -2) , so either 77832 in hi/lo or 171587 in Syndicate.

If others are also selling, there will be sell/buy orders, you can just underbid them as usual with sale orders.

Other strategies can involve trying to displace people from the market by forcing them to haul for cheap by setting your sell order kind of low but not low enough to produce poor isk/hr for yourself. In Syndicate you can stalk people and trap their jump freighters with bubbles/hics. In hisec you can stalk people and gank their haulers.

Yet another strategy is to sell into the protective buy order. This is effective in hisec, you just haul and dump and reset the timer. That way you take control away from the previous seller. You lose some money doing that (about 10isk/unit) but the seller ends up with a large stock and might eventually quits putting up the protective buy orders.

You can also setup buy orders in Orv and Maut. Those will reset at DT or at some point randomly after 24 hrs. You can outbid people on both buy and sell side.

Also check out this post:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=5276251

It's always interesting (to me anyway) to read a detailed story about trading, so thanks for re-posting this.

Have you ever looked at some of the other NPC goods? There are some interesting buy orders in The Forge and other places, interesting in that have a minimum quantity and are player buy and sell orders in the same system but different stations.

Edit : minor typo

This pops up every few years. I wish someone would just make a video explaining it instead of typing it all out.

My head hurts after reading that, and I am no closer to really understanding what to do. But it seems to be making you good money so that is all good.

one of my most memorable kills was a freighter full of long limbed-roes in Ihakana

so goons pushed you out or why are you telling us all this?

But yeah i estimate that i took about 80-120b from goons since i came back in the last 4 months :) That's equivalent to one or two titans.

It's certainly in the interests of Goon's enemies that i continue waging this price war since eveyone else is currently too lazy to do it :)

Chango Atacama participated in B-R5RB battle (Ragnarok, top damage dealer in some kills), so did Mortus Valitum (Leviathan), Come Muhlbach (Aeon), Mangu Jangovar (Nyx) , SirLibra (Moros):

These supercaps were funded with cash from long-limb roes, so at least 4 supercaps in B-R5RB have their roots in canned delicacies:

https://zkillboard.com/kill/36239800/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/36251805/
https://zkillboard.com/kill/36257371/

I already knew the connection between roes/ La Cooperative Fruitiere and Evuldgenzo Matari Gardening from observing their JF ops.

But here's supportive evidence:

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=3771383#post3771383
You can see that sale of Mortus Valitum closed on Nov 22, 2013

Now if you look at the yearly transaction history there was 8 million roes dumped on that day in Syndicate which is almost exactly 24b (2538 per unit).

On 2013.10.27 13.5m was dumped, probably for Leviathan hull (34b)

On 2014.02.01 12.6m dumped, probably to replace the lost Ragnarok in B-R5
And another 24.8m on 2014.02.13.

Next dump 10m units on 2014.03.28
21m units on 2014.06.14

On 2014.07.01 I came back to EVE and their profits drastically reduced from there.

I offered them a pretty sweet deal but they chose to be cheap.

Now there's no going back, it's the burning of Moscow.