Market Discussions

Well you kinda answered that question yourself.

Setting up buy orders for .01 isk over the best price available in your system with any isk that you have to spare and keep an eye on the order that it stays on top.

As you continue to make iskt he way you normally do, your minerals will gradually build up as people sell to your buy order.

Training Brokers Relations will reduce the fee you pay for setting up orders and training Procurement will allow you to expand your buy order to cover more systems near you.

Well, for minerals, there is no NPC buy order, only for certain tags and trade goods there is. Everything else your competing with other players.

You can tell the difference by how long the order is, Players can only set up an order for 90days, where as the NPC has orders set for a whole year.

I wouldn't recommend stockpiling minerals unless you think the price of said minerals will continue to increase past the date which you plan to sell the end manufactured product.

Unless you are buying minerals well below the standard market rates, hoarding minerals for later production use could be problematic since price fluxuations on minerals and manufactured goods will make it hard to forcast profitability. That is, unless you have confidence in anticipating where prices will be over a longer time horizon, in which case, you could potentially increase profitability with speculation.

If I were just starting to learn production:

-Place buy orders for minerals in high volume trade hubs, namely Jita 4-4, where prices tend to be more predictable and orders will be filled quickly without a lot of fuss.

-Pick something to manufacture with high sales volumes and relatively low price volitility and sell it at the same trade hub. The profit margins won't be great but this will be OK while you get a feel for the markets and things like logistics and timing production cycles with mineral purchaces and sales etc...

-It will be helpful if you have good standings with the NPC corp and Faction that owns the station you are buying and selling at to help improve your margins.

-Once you start needing to move larger volumes of goods between the trade hub and your production station, I would recommend using Red Frog Freight for logistics. Prices are very, very resonable and will save you the time and expensive capital requirements of purchasing your own freighter. When you become successful and rich you can start using Black Frog Logistics for your highly lucrative low and nullsec operations. Shameless plug

If you go ahead with this plan, consider how hard it will be to move stuff around. There are several regions where you could set up cheap orders and pile up vast amounts of minerals in deep low sec or in null sec. But if you can't move it or make something sellable (or haulable) with it on the spot (for example, way back when I used to make covetors in metropolis low sec from purchased rat loot and haul those out to Hek and Jita), then you're stuck with either sitting on it or selling to the next buy order (and typically losing money on the deal). Even in high sec, you could end up with small piles of minerals everywhere.

Second, you probably ought to sell what you buy as soon as you can. Don't just attempt to buy a pile of minerals, buy a revenue stream by selling those minerals elsewhere.

Over the years, the best way that I've found to avoid the insanity issue with multi-system or region wide buy orders is to use an alt who does nothing but maintain the ranged buy orders. You'll want 30-120 buy slots, Broker Relations at IV or V, Connections trained to IV or V and a bit of positive standing with most of the corps in the area. So takes 1-3 weeks to setup you "buy order slave". The margin trading skill is also useful for this.

Give the alt about 200M to 2B ISK and never put up a buy order for more then 1/60th of your total bank balance (assuming you want to maintain about 30 slots). Have a spreadsheet which tracks the mineral value of various items that you want to track and always stay at least 10-20% below the mineral value of the item for stuff that you plan on reprocessing. Raw ore, ammo, drones, ships can all be decent sources of chap minerals. Make sure your main character is capable of hauling them to a station where they can be reprocessed with zero-tax and no more then 0.5% waste.

Now for "how do you keep from going insane" due to a cluttered asset list:

1. You'll need jEVEAssets and an API key so that jEVEAssets can query your assets.
2. Once a day/week run the "update" in jEVEAssets, then use the "Overview" tool in jEVEAssets.
3. Filter on you "buy slave" alt's name and choose the "station" summary view.
4. Sort by the total value in each station, in descending order.
5. For every station where you have at least X million ISK worth of goods, create an item-exchange order to your main character and force your main character to pay market value for the goods.

Now, when your main character looks at their assets list in-game, you know that you never have less then X million ISK worth of goods at a particular station that needs to be hauled. The stations with minor quantities only clutter up your "buy slave" asset dialog, not your main character.

You can do it without an asset manager tool like jEVEAssets, but it's a lot more guesswork.

I wish there was long selling.

Get it?