Market Discussions

I have written a python script to pull crest market data in attempt to discover good items to trade in a more scientific way than just going through them one by one and eyeballing it.


My aim is to "score" all the items based off of profit, margin, volume and competition.

The current formula i am using is:

if sevenDayAvgVolume >= 2:
    score = ((pureProfit*profitMargin)*sevenDayAvgVolume)
else:
    score = 0

I am ignoring anything with a avg daily volume of less than 2 mostly to filter out offcer stuff and other items that never get traded but have massive margins as i have no interest in attempting to trade them as they would lock up too much isk.

I am currently trying to find a good way to measure how competitive a market is and score lower competitive items higher as it dose not matter how much profit in a item their is if you have 2+ people constantly 0.01 isking your never going to be able to buy or sell them.

I would appreciate any input, i do plan on releasing the tool eventually but currently its just a cli python script.

score = ((pureProfit*profitMargin)*sevenDayAvgVolume)*%ofTimeAsLowestOrder

%ofTimeAsLowestOrder is going to be a function of how often your competitors' orders are being updated and how often you want to update your own.

One quick way to figure this out would be the following:
- count orders updated in the past day, call this N
- define a number of times you're willing to update per day, call this U

your time as the lowest order is going to be roughly U / (U + N), so if there were 8 order updates in the past 24 hours and you plan to update twice per day, you'll have about 20% of the volume. This of course assumes order updates are uncorrelated, have a uniform distribution over time, and that there arent a low number of competitors updating many many times per day.


another approach might be to look at time between orders. So suppose there is one order updated 6h ago and another updated 5h30mins ago. Under this approach, you'd assume your order stays the lowest for 30mins before it is undercut, so updating twice a day you would capture 1/24= 4% of daily volume.

my guess is the second method is going to be more accurate, but try them for yourself!

Ive also been thing of a variation of this idea take the most recent X% of orders and then find the time average time between issued and now (note issued date time is reset when an order is updated) and then use that as a multiplier in the score.

I will try both and see as their not complex to program.



This is something im acutely aware of my aim was to create a computationally light weight indicator that basically says look at these items first, so that i don't have to go through 100's of items manually.

I did think about trying to build some kind of predictor but im not a statistician or economist and the only ones i really know much about are candlestick graphs and bollinger bands if anyone is more educated in these areas and wants to work with a programmer id be happy to team up on a project.



I think and could be wrong that although higher profit and margin attracts competitiveness they are inextricably linked and so some items will have more competition and some will have less and the trick is to find the ones that have less.



This is a very good point originally i had thought i would just experiment with weighting it but now thinking about it their is no reason why it has to be part of the formula itself but instead have a separate score for competitiveness again used as an indicator.

I'm not trying to build something that will be the work for me just to give me more information to make better decision on what to invest in.

I use the python library pycrest, i found the docs to be verry lacking as well your best best is to go read up in the techlab https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=263

Its not possible to tell who orders belong to without filling them then checking your journal, I believe this is by design.