Market Discussions

(posted on behalf of Amarr Citizen 155)

NEW MARKET DISCUSSION FAQ ON THE EVE WIKI

After reading the discussions and arguments over how and where new players can ask questions and get answers, I had an idea for a new thread. Please read this entire post before responding as I hope to address everything all at once.

Purpose:
Ask any market related questions you feel you can’t find in the stickies. If you ask a question that can be answered by reading a specific sticky then I’ll simply post a link to the appropriate sticky and I encourage anyone else reading the thread to do the same if they know the location of the specific resource that will answer the question. If you read a question and know the answer, please feel free to answer it in a polite manner. If you don’t think you are capable or don’t want to waste your time….then don’t. It’s that simple. This is an attempt to create a central place for new players to ask questions and find quick solutions.

What this is not:
This is not the thread where you abuse someone asking a question or flame an answer. This thread will have noob questions most likely asked by new players, if you have a problem with that then please avoid this thread. You have been warned. If you don’t want to participate in the question/answer process then please avoid this thread.

Why:
The biggest complaint I’ve seen is that new players aren’t reading the stickies and are starting new threads to ask simple questions. After looking around the forums at the information available I came to the conclusion that the problem may not be entirely related to laziness as we previously thought. There is A LOT of information provided in the stickies at the top of this forum and A LOT of information contained in the threads on the first several pages. As a recent college graduate I can say one of the most difficult parts of most of my classes was writing papers over topics that had tons of resources available on them. It was very difficult to sift through all of the information that could easily be a 30+ page paper and try to write a 20 page maximum length paper.

We have to remember that we have been along for the ride and have taken in most of the information as it became available. New players are hit with all of the information at once and are expected to be able to go through it all and make sense of it.

Basic Guidelines:
Obviously there is no way for me to enforce any rules for this thread other than to report the posting so I’ll call this section “Guidelines”.

1. Don’t flame/troll/break forum rules
2. Please be polite when asking/answering questions, if you can’t handle this please avoid this thread.
3. Don’t post asking for investors in this thread, that type of thing needs its own thread.
4. Please avoid topics that would be better left for their own thread so that a full discussion could be had. If you want lots of feedback about an idea, do that idea justice by giving it its own thread. Or ask if a specific topic/idea should have its own thread, there may be 15 threads that thoroughly cover that topic that we can point you towards. If you read them and have something new then a new thread might be appropriate.
5. Avoid this thread like the plague if you don’t want to see noob questions or questions that you think are noob questions. There should be no question as to the types of things you will see here.

Example Questions:

Example Question: How much should I be charging to do courier contracts?

Possible Answer: Several factors can go into answering such a question such as how much are others charging? How much is your time worth? How much collateral do you have? You should start by checking the Sell forums to see what others are charging and to see what the requirements/features are of their service. Taking that information into consideration along with the value you put on your time you should be able to come up with a pretty good idea.

Example Question: What banks are there in Eve?

Example Answer: You can find the list of banks in the stickies at the top of this forum under “Market Discussion Resources”

The Goal:
The goal of this thread is to be able to provide a place for new players to ask questions without having to start a new thread or be afraid of the responses. As new players ask questions they will start to see that most of the answers can be answered by stickies or information that is on the forums and they will get used to using those resources. One could argue that this will become a crutch and make people not want to use the stickies but I think the opposite effect is more realistic. I see it as a way to point people to the stickies and other resources found on MD in a nice way rather than beating them up the first time they make the mistake of not doing research.

Probably, but he does have a point.

alts, alts and more alts.
the fastest way to get good market data is to access those markets yourself. moving large volumes of material from region a->b may be a good way to gain isk but its time consuming and occasionally you get ganked. some people sit on stocks of supplies and wait for the right time to sell, others drop a lot of cash and buy up all the lower cost items they want to sell and resell them at higher prices.

market manipulation is an expensive hobby and there may be someone else waiting for you to try a move like that, then undercut your sell orders by 0.01 isk. watch most market hubs for this sort of behavior. buy orders are another great source of income. set up one on a mod that you think has promise and resell it when you get some in. this is also tricky as the mod you choose may get nerfed, or drop rates changed, or even in very rare cases, mineral value changed with the added expansions.

most things have buy orders at mineral values and sell orders at drop rate or demand prices, (arbolast missile launchers are a prime example of this demand price)

there are people that claim to have made billions of isk market trading without a week of skills down, others get chewed up and lose everything in an hour. its not quite gambling but its close sometimes.

SO to answer your question, start with watching price fluctuations in market hubs. beware of the really fast isk opportunities most of them will take your shirt and try to sell it back to you for a premium.

buying and selling habits, mineral values, alliance shifts, warfare FOTM, and your local pirates are all other things to consider.

Least you asked in the right thread rather than making a new thread.

If you've lost those ships cause they were hauling. Just avoid hauling yourself all together. Use courier contracts. If you are going trade hub to trade hub you can get away with any price you want for reward. Make sure you set the collateral to a suffecient amount but not too ridiculous.

If you want reliable haulers check out Red Frog.

Station interface, should be a noble exchange icon there.

Apologies for the late reply, guessing you've already figured this out but no, the only way to tell the buyer of something is to sell them a unit and check the transaction log in your wallet. Similarly with sell orders, only way to find out who they are is to buy a unit.

Keep in mind that you might not want them to suspect that you're testing the market. For example, you can use an alt or buy/sell a larger quantity. For example, if you sell 1 trit, there's a good chance the buyer might suspect you're checking on them. Reprocessing a shuttle and selling that looks less suspicious.

Classic answer of "it depends". Auctions, in Eve as in real life, tend to work best when there exists a variety of factors affecting the value of an object, where individual objects are not completely comparable, or when volume is such that a defined price point is not set. This is why you see auctions for houses and cars (alongside fixed price sales) yet you buy a pint of milk at a fixed price in your supermarket.

In Eve objects are completely comparable - one ship, unit of trit, whatever, is exactly as good as any other example of that good, regardless of it's age or manufacturer. As such, auctions tend to work when the price is not particularly well defined by significant market traffic - T2 BPOs are a good example.

With your example of minerals the price is very much set by significant market traffic - your hundreds of millions of units are likely to form a drop in the ocean of billions of units flowing through Jita every single day. Likely result of an auction here would be that buyers will only bid upto the current buy order price.

One significant exemption I can think of would be location. If your goods are situated someplace away from a major trade hub but within easy reach of (eg) several big customers you may be able to engineer a bidding war and find an auction viable.

Howdy. Happy new year.



The margins on many goods (but by no means all, and certainly not at all times) is often insufficient to support buying from a sell order in one place and then selling to a buy order in another. But you've noticed an opening already - the sell orders are higher than the buy orders - so set up a buy order, let other people sell things to you via that; then turn round and sell those things via a sell order and folks can buy from you. You can do this entirely in one station if you prefer, you need never leave the station again and become an agoraphobic pod pilot; if you do this best to go for one of the hub stations, Jita/Amarr/Dodixie/Rens etc. The trick is finding items that turnover relatively rapidly both on the buy and sell side. Also make sure the margin you're getting is enough to cover sales taxes and broker fees (as a very very rough starting point with no skills or standings consider these to be 3%).



This is the other thing to look out for, market moves downwards whilst you're holding stock. Experience is really the main help here but you're helped by the market graphs - look at the price history, do you think those rising prices might keep going up, do they look like they may be headed down? What is the volume being traded? Is the price just currently high because someone bought a massive spike of goods yesterday? Everyone gets caught by this sooner or later, minimise your exposure by spreading your trading out among many different items - ie. don't put all your eggs in one basket.



Work out your sales costs - there are other threads for that but as said, a very rough starting point with no skills or standings is to assume 3%. So when looking at a potential price to buy items for, take that price and multiply it by 1.03 - the result is your (rough) break even point - do you think you can sell for more than this?

Oxygen isotopes have recently been high due to a concerted effort to disrupt the supply by exploding the ships mining it (ice in Gallente systems) and not a small amount of market speculation on the back of said campaign. There is nothing intrinsically more valuable about oxygen isotopes than nitrogen isotopes, hydrogen isotopes, or helium isotopes - it's all suppy and demand (and speculation). Given that, take a look at the price of those other isotopes and at the graph of oxygen 'topes over the last 6 months or so.

Now that research should give you enough information to ascertain that oxygen isotopes are uniquely (and perhaps unnaturally) high right now, given that the explodey campaign mentioned above is allegedly now over one would perhaps expect to see prices settle back down to a 450-650 range in the future.

Short term however that may well be a great deal but beyond advising you to not put all your eggs in one basket I can't tell you what to do.


As for a "specific good that is sort of in demand now", there are thousands of items on the market, and huge numbers of them turn over billions of isk per day. Minerals (Tritanium, Pyerite etc) are bought and sold in vast quantities but will typically have very slim margins as a result. I'd advise doing something else in Eve you enjoy and note what items you come across and you need then look up those items - if you're missioning do you keep stumbling across loads of meta items to sell on the market? Do you need constant supply of ammo at your mission station and would be prepared to pay above average price for the convenience? Are you PVPing and need a constant supply of Rifters and warp scramblers? Is your corp setting up in a wormhole? What items do they need, what items are they pulling out of that wormhole? Look up all these items for market opportunities.