Market Discussions

I thought this question was best posed on this forum over the others. I am looking for it all, most efficient ways to generate income, most reliable ways to generate income. The most risk and risk-adverse ways to generate income and generally whatever generates a nice income stream whether it be passive or direct. I am of the mindset that people will be reluctant to give up the best and most lucrative income methods as it's there gravy train however I am curious as to the methods and means people use to generate modest to absurd amounts of ISK, this is of course subjective as having tens of billions in the bank isn't much to some these days. I eagerly and curiously await your replies.

No not at all, you misunderstand my intentions. Why I mentioned people may be reluctant to give out such information, I am more after generlisations rather than as you put it concise being 'spoon fed'.

Best way to get your first five billion is corp theft.

Best way to go from five billion to a hundred billion is trading.

Best way to go from a hundred billion to a trillion is informed patch speculation.

Biggest earners:

1. Speculation in general

2. Data mining + speculation (if you have programming knowledge). For example when a new patch hits SiSi, you compare the new code vs. old code to see what changed in terms of drop rates, etc. But I don't have any programming knowledge so I'm not able to do it.

3. Organize an alliance, take over space, charge rent.

offer an rl service and rake in the isk

Find areas that have barriers to entry. The higher the barrier is there will be less competition. As is with all things, barriers come down over time, so exploit while you can.

Hope this helps.

Hi there,

Making ISK as a new player is not as easy, but once you get your hands on 1 billion or enough liquidity to enter the market and trade then you are in business and the only bottleneck is your thirst for ISK.

Any PVE activity (see mission/mining/incursions/exploration) should only be considered for the first few months as a new player (plus it's nice to explore the game), but if you really want to make money, aim for the market.

It is true that if you live in 0.0 and you like to play a lot and probe nice complexes that drop a a bil or more, then a few of those per week and you have more than you need. Incursions are also easy ISK, but boring as hell.

Now from my 8 years experience, at least for me, the only limit in how much ISK you can make is your motivation and if you want to bother, there is no limit TBH. Once you reach a certain milestone (50 bil, 100 bil, 1 trillion in ISK) you are likely not going to bother to go further since if you need more money you know what to do, and the easiest way is... to use the market.

There are many ways to make ISK using the market if you have ISK to invest:

1. Station trading, I hate .01 games so I never do this, but if you have 10h/day to update orders then you can be rich. Pick a hub fit for you. You can also study market trends and such... it's not bad, but you need experience.
2. Regional/local trading, less .01 games and chill, you need some nice liquidity but once you get going you can basically absorb and sell everything that happens in one region... which is tons of ISK, the level of profit only depends on your time.
3. 0.0 market hubs, every 0.0 alliance has a capital, stock it with all their doctrines and become rich.
4. You have too much liquid ISK? Buy say 100 plexes (120 bil) and in 3 months you have 138 bil... the current inflation is about 5%/ month. That is 6 bil/month doing nothing.
5. Set region wide buy orders (pick one that suits you) and sell in said region, you can have ridiculous profits for some items. Some people like to liquidate and sell their stuff, even if they get 10% of it's value (don't ask me why they do it).
6. Create a market hub in 0.0 from scratch... people will go where they can buy stuff, invest say 50 bil in a no-name station and see the profits (make sure there are people there).
7. etc etc...

There are tons of other ways to make money on the market... even selling one system away from Jita on the local market can bring you a decent profit (hint: look for lvl 4 agent stations).

Alternatively, you can be like The Mittani and have 16k people to tax. But we can't all be alliance executors, so your best bet to make too much ISK is to trade. TBH I lost my motivation after a certain point and I just sit on Plexes now and do some small time trading to keep some ISK flowing for regular expenses.

The beauty with trading is that it scales quite nicely up until a point, after that a constant passive income is just beautiful. You wake up and there you go, you made another bil. You can't do that with classic PVE (missions etc...).

Let me know if you got more questions.

TLDR: Buy low, Sell high, ???, Profit.

Do what you like to do most in the game.
Do it well.

I've seen videos of people blitzing Sleeper sites with a Naglfar, I've never been involved much with PvE so I'm not sure about the isk / hour - but I imagine it could be pretty lucrative.