Market Discussions

After many years away from the game, I recently decided to have a look at it again and see what's new, and partly to tackle something I always wanted to do, but never got around to doing: trying my hand at station trading, with the goal of eventually being able to PLEX an account (or two). I used to do a fair bit of ship building and freighter hauling back when I played before, and made some decent money doing it, but these days I am too chicken to even un-dock my freighter with the proliferation of hi-sec ganking that's been going on :).

Anyway, I've been reading everything I can get my hands on regarding how to be successful at trading, including a lot of the more recent posts in this forum, which led me to make this post.

First, to say Hello! It seems there's a good community of people that post in here and I'm pleased to see that there's a good bit of information exchange going on.

Second, I wanted to post some of my observations and see if I could get a little advice:

I had about a billion ISK to play around with when I came back, and much of the advice I've seen online suggests starting in a smaller hub (not Jita!), so I set up shop in Hek and began looking for items to trade. I dabbled in a few different areas, and looking for things that seemed to be moving and that also had decent margins. I was investing in a wide variety of things, to attempt to get a feel for which things were working well and which were not.

Everything seemed to be progressing fairly well, but I felt like there wasn't much trade happening. I should add that I'm only able to update orders 2-3 times throughout the day, although the first weekend I was able to babysit my orders a fair bit. After about a week, I think I was up about 120 million ISK, which wasn't bad because I'd only been able to get maybe 300-400 million invested. I made a couple of bad calls on items that probably were moving, but almost exclusively in one direction so I ended up stuck with some items that I haven't been able to sell.

I decided to try to 'cash out' of Hek and move to a busier market, so I've stopped buying for now and am in the process of liquidating my remaining items. Oh, I made a good bit more on the blood raider event items, so I think I'm sitting up about 300M after a couple of weeks, and that's without really purchasing anything in the last week or so.

My goal now is to try to move to a busier market and have another go at it and see if I can find ways to get more of my money 'in play'. I still don't want to mess with Jita, but I'm reading some people reporting that even Amarr and Dodixie are slowing down significantly, but I'll probably move to one of those and try again for a few weeks and see how it goes.

I just don't know how to tell if I am on the path towards great wealth, or not :).

Anyway, TLDR: Hello! I'm an old player recently back trying to figure out how to not suck at playing the market! Any advice is welcome!

With the Citadel expansion last Spring, CCP increased the brokerage and transaction fees to 3% and 2% respectively. These apply to every transaction in an NPC station. You pay both when you create a sell order, you pay brokerage when you create a buy order and people to sell to that buy order pay the transaction fee. So - CCP skims up to 10% on a round trip buy then sell. You can reduce the fees with skills and standing but the lowest possible is 2% brokerage and 1% transaction.

That has had an impact on station trading and inter-regional trade. You need a lot more margin to make a trade worthwhile. Large traders are now "offshoring" where they set their buy orders in a Citadel and pay the owner a reduced brokerage fee. This is easy in Hek - there is a Fortizar in system though I don't know their fee structure.

Markets outside Jita are less active because of the increased trading frictions. As a vertically integrated manufacturer selling in the smaller hubs, I've never had it so good. Less competition from people bringing stuff in from Jita but still lots of customers for a small business like mine.

Thank you all for the suggestions! You've given me a lot to think about.