Market Discussions

I don't usually calculate those daily % ROI numbers because they vary wildly (I can sell and reinvest all my cash several times on weekends but only a fraction on week days), but just for comparison's sake I selected a period over which I only invested 2B at a time in buy and sell orders and got from 4 billions to 14 billions in a month. That's about 333 million profit a day over 2B or 16.7%.

Granted it was over a select few items with good profitability and I was only investing 2B. Now I'm investing more and those items' trading volume is not enough for the cash. I have to diversify to less profitable items and the ROI falls.

About what you might be doing wrong, just don't be "that" guy who is too lazy to babysit orders and try to reserve the market for him by reducing profitability. Like: you see you can set a top buy order that will grant you 100% profit but there is a lot of competition; instead of babysitting it to keep at the top, you set a buy order with only 2% profit in the hope nobody else will keep competing. Wrong: as long as there is profit there will be people competing with you; only it will be for a lesser payout.

People are always looking for easy money. AFK mining. AFK ratting. Skill farming alts. Don't expect that from trading. Profits won't be spoon fed to you, no matter what those idiots who are trying to "get rid" of 0.01 and 5-minute order updates want. You have to be smart AND work for it. Sometimes it's better to spend an hour controlling the market for a few items and get the better part of transactions during that time than setting a lot of orders and updating them sparsely throughout the day.

I'm that guy. My process is optimized toward ISK/hour. I do not consider profit the result of individual sales - it is the result of my process.

My perspective is there are more fun things to do in EVE than trading so I'm going to spend my game time doing other things as much as possible. The market is PVP so if you bid against me, I would prefer to see the ROI destroyed for everyone if not going to me. I am willing to lose money to drive you out of the market. I'm fine with single digit ROIs until the end of time.

Oh don't get me wrong, I don't dislike trading but there are things I consider more fun. Fragging caps tends make less ISK/hr, if any, and involves considerably more risk of loss when done correctly. So I need some way to generate a few billion ISK to throw away per month in addition to PLEXing a couple accounts. The thing I loathe is PvE (all of it - mission running, mining, incursions, etc..). Building stuff is meh, and also lower ISK/hr.



And when I next update my order, I chop off another percent or two of ROI. Market efficiency goes up and the number of competitors goes down! You're welcome!



On this we agree. I would point you to the history of Standard Oil. This company was run by a gentleman by the name of John D. Rockefeller, one of the richest people in history. He managed to monopolize the oil market in the early 20th century by driving his competitors out of business. One of his tactics was starving competitors by selling at a loss. After he was unopposed in the local market, he would jack up prices thus funding additional loss selling in other markets and starving additional competitors. His tactics became part of the basis of Anti-Trust law in the real world. As you may have noticed, New Eden doesn't have a lot of laws to preventing dirty tactics...

Be cautious when taking advice from people who know barely more than you do, because although you are on the same journey and they're a few steps ahead of you, they are still lacking in experience and perspective.

Many traders find a way of trading that works for them, from the dozens of distinct and viable trading styles available, then adopt the stance that this is the only way to trade. With trading it is very much horses for courses, a person may well have found the only method that works for them but another trader may find that method completely unworkable. Neither trader is wrong, they just have different needs and capabilities.

There are so many different ways of making a trading income and the blanket statements that people tend to make about trading are rarely accurate for every viable method.


That's a really broad and inaccurate statement. Bringing down the margins and pushing a lot of volume can be the best way to deal with some items. You may be able to sell 10 units at 100% profit with the same amount of keyboard time as 10k units at 10% profit. If the market can handle 100k daily without flooding, then taking a low unit profit and high volume approach might be the best choice.

Similarly some markets just have an unholy amount of competition (i.e. PLEX trading) fighting over small slices of a massive potential profit. It's not uncommon for people (including myself) to cut the margins for PLEX down to a level where only a small subset of the people who would trade PLEX can do so profitably. The alternative is that during the busiest periods you'll be facing so much competition that your profits will be low, whereas when the margin is tight you can be flipping PLEX constantly for several hours and make far more than you would with the handful of flips you can achieve at a higher margin in the face of many times the competition.


I have always looked for ways to make money with limited time investment (aka AFK), because I like to have fingers in many pies and I cannot afford to let one pie monopolise my time. There are plenty of trading styles that are compatible with very low time investment. You feel you have to be smart and work hard, I believe that being smart alone is quite sufficient, but being wise tends to trump smart and hard working.


Quite right, but sometimes the opposite is true. The skill to learn is the ability to recognise which approach is best for a specific item. If the best approach for a specific item isn't one that works for you, then maybe that item shouldn't be in your trading basket.


This is completely inaccurate.

Interesting numbers but so many missing details, like starting capital, place of trading and rest

What's the average profit margin for your manufactured stuff?

Yea thats it, thx. I asked that since you put numbers of how much you earned over lets say week but its not same earning 5bil a week with 10bil capital and 100bil capital

Interesting, would really like to have a peak in your portfolio I'm doing 2-step T2 production and some T1, if it's worth (>50% profit), and found only half a dozen products with 100% profit at certain times with high enough trade volume.

Fully researched T2 BPOs certainly make a difference (lucky you , hope they get removed rather sooner than later ). This is also why I'm strictly in products without T2 BPOs existing. The rest of your points, my setting is not much different.

I wouldn't stay away from a market segment just because there's a T2 BPO out there. Invention can adapt very quickly with very little capital needed/tied up. Someone mentioned it in S&I forum before - T2 inventions/production is relatively skill intensive but does not require a lot of capital to do it.

If you already have lots of ISK then having some T2 BPOs could help you as it will not be a concern to have a few tens or hundreds of billions of ISK tied up. But if you are operating with less ISK, you will be much better off rotating your ISK in other ways than having T2 BPO take up big portion of your NAV.

For example, let's say there's some nice speculative investment opportunity with patches coming up. You put 20~50b on some mats that you think will shoot up in demand. You could be ending up selling them for double, tripple or even quadruple of your initial investment cost.

You spend 20~50b for more budget/modest T2 BPO, you are not going to generate that big margin of profit in that short time. Even if you buy a T2 BPO for 50b and flip it for 75b a month later, you've made 50% profit on your investment. With things like mats/certain items you could be in for 200~500% profit at times.

T2 BPOs are very nice novelties and I personally like that they are in the game. There are many other things you can do in market/production to stay competitive and make plenty of ISK without T2 BPO (that's how most people made their ISK to buy those T2 BPOs). The current T2 BPO holders, I don't think many of them got them through original mechanics. Most of them made enough ISK without T2 BPOs and bought them with ISK. That's something to consider. ;)