Market Discussions

Long story short, had an alt in amarr, bought some [redacted] for 180k two jumps out, sold a bunch in amarr at [redacted]. I decided to go ahead and raise the price.... and then put another sell order for those [redacted]s at .01 isk less..... my sales volume doubled. People are ******* stupid man. So my question is.... do people do this? Or have I stumbled across something?

Your post is so clear, concise, necessary and original my mind was shattered whilst attempting to decipher it

[redacted]

You stumbled upon the Amarr / Tash-Murkon paradox......
Once upon a time when meta 4 stuff was decent to trade, i made a fortune with that.

This

I appreciated reading your gradual building and slow burning sarcasm. Then slapping the entire thread with the GREAT BIG HAMMER of SARCASM for your finish. It made me laugh.
Now if you'll excuse me. I have fresh beer I need to clean

I was undecided for a while as to whether or not adding a smiley, or a "/s" to my post would make me seem more or less like a ****. Still unsure, but anyway.

On a quick check it seems OP, SFR... is indeed a brand new newbie, and not only that is seemingly struggling with even getting the launcher start Eve - so now I feel bad.

So a quick attempt to balance out some Karma.

OP - many people roll through either these forums, or reddit or somewhere else and ask "How do I make ISK from trading ?" the answer is always "Buy low, sell high. /Thread"
On the outset, this always appears to be a **** response. But in reality its not only an in-joke - its actually as simple as it works. Sell a thing for more than you paid for it -> repeat -> win@trading.

There is really no need to redact your own post for fear of someone else swooping in to steal all of the potential profit you have just found. The only constant in the market is that it moves. What is most profitable to trade right now will likely be far far less profitable to trade next week, and if there is good spectacularly good ISK to be found somewhere right now, someone else *will* find it and it will be all gone in an hour.

Good trades are a function of supply and demand. As a brand new newbie, you have almost no power to influence either of these fundamentals. Heck, Most of the people here with less than several hundred B to throw around the market also have next to no power to influence either of these also.
-Thus you need to rely on either finding fortuitous items on the market (be it finding a stack of things that were listed with a typo missing a zero, or finding a ganker who is dumping all of his recent haul and not really caring about how much he his making on any given item) -> good/cheap/below 'market' supply.
//Or// you need to work out where the demand is, and fulfill that side of things (Mission runners have a high demand for ammo and drones... Null-sec logistics guys need JF fuel... Industrialists need raw materials) -> high demand.

Noting the supply/demand premise also works in values of laziness - this is where most early marketeers make their ISK;
Most people who have more ISK than you will happily spend several M more per module if said module is available where they happen to be right now, travelling 8 jumps to save $5M is really not worth the time of a lot of people... easily exploited.

Still on the subject of 'laziness' - Most people would rather play the game than fight with the market - thus "Station Trading"; it is far far far more cost effective to only ever buy anything on the market by using just Buy orders, equally far far far more effective to only ever sell with sell orders. But just as 'far' more cost effective it is, it is n+1 'far' more annoying to market your goods than just immediately selling your loot to buy orders, buying your new modules/ammo from sell orders and getting on with your game. Station traders are those guys who have both the sell orders and the buy orders for the same item - all they ever need to do is maintain buy orders, as soon as something lands in their hanger they throw it up on a sell order - profit follows pretty soon after as the difference between those two prices.

The other function of the market that "if you know it, it is easy to make ISK from it" thing is - Markets are regional. This is possibly what you discovered on your own... still unsure based on all the [redacted] bits.
Even if its just two jumps, if it crosses a region border you can't readily see what an item costs in the /other/ region. This can lead to all sorts of awesome (albeit temporary) opportunities for making ISK... Demand and hence prices for widget X rises in Region A (or supply drops, and hence prices rise... whatever), hop across to Region B where they are still at yesterdays price, buy a stack, two jumps back over and sell them for double...
... back to my original point, the only constant is that the market moves... and it constantly moves towards equilibrium... until someone upsets it... and then it moves back - Just how long it takes to move is where you make your ISK (that or being the guy who actually moves the market) by shuffling items from Region B at low cost into Region A at high cost you are actually an agent of the market who is actually bringing it back into balance... Increase supply at B and the price will go down there /whilst/ you decrease supply at A and the price there goes up... soon enough the price at A and B is roughly the same, and you will then need to go find something else to trade.

Plenty of resources out there on specific trading techniques; some revolve around how to find the 'best' items to trade - however *all* of the forum posts on the same subject *will* be 'if I told you the most profitable thing to trade, then it would no longer be profitable for me to trade it'... so, um, go forth and work at it - but don't ever rely on someone else telling you what to trade - instead ask "how" to trade.

Oh and for the love of all things revolving around helping newbies from hurting themselves - I can see from your other posts that you are working on buying an industrial to do your own freighting... Don't! (or specifically, do it but only for only so long as it takes you to acquire sufficient capital to afford to pay someone else to freight your goods for you {courier contracts are your friend} - Do not freight more than a couple of dozen M in your own industrial. You will get ganked. You will lose all of your capital. {see point on courier contracts})

In summary:
Trading is easy.
Trading is still effort.
Trading is profitable if you are willing to put in the effort that someone else isn't.