Market Discussions

Ya gonna hate me for this but buy low and sell high theres really no secret to it other than to find items with decent margins and reasonable turn over rates quicker than others.

Patience is the key element that drives alot of people out of station trading. Update orders every 20-30 mins don't make it tedious for yourself updating the first second that your able to do so, take a relaxed approach.

Take advantage of every oppertunity not just those that present themselves at Jita, Try Dodixie, Amarr, I'd go as far to say Hek too, Try seeding busy low sec / faction warfare zones, try seeding around mission hubs, high sec system leading to null, Youll find the speed of moving items vastly reduced but the margins in most cases will increase and can balance it out to some degree.

More alts , more projection across EVE, somthing to consider if you can afford this IRL or when you get good at the station trading and can manage the additional accounts with ingame ISK.

Use the quickbar as a way of keeping tabs on flavour of the moment items by adding, and removing accordingly when they turn sour. Keep your quickbar nice and full and your orders plentifull.

Keep track of your history for your future self, i'm not a spreadsheet fan myself i prefer a good old notepad with my daily profit.

Keep an eye on Jita local and sift through the scams, occasionly you can snatch some really good deals.

Join the SCC Lounge chat channel, lots of moguls and space rich there with plenty of market speculation to keep you entertained.


I cant mentor you and doubt anyone could or would but hopefully the above gives you a lightly better start.


Ra

You have to UNDERSTAND the game. This may sound obvious, but people often forget that. There are reasons for price fluctuations and increase/decrease in trade volumes, etc, etc, etc. Traders tend to love numbers and % margins and all sorts of data you can get from studying the market, and there are comparative tools that show you price differences in different hubs/time periods, etc. You could probably make decent profit off doing mostly number based analysis, but where big ISK is made is by understanding why some items are priced the way they are at that given time, what materials and intermediary products are used for such items, how the resources are gathered to make that product, what game mechanics or in game politics are having impact on such conditions, etc, etc.

I'm pretty terrible with numbers and only use basic excell stuff to track my buy prices vs. sell prices later & how much ISK I made, etc and stuff. But when it comes to deciding on what items to trade where, that's mostly dictated by understanding of what's happening/what are the conditions in the game world.

I'm not even talking about needing to be an oracle and predicting upcoming patch changes & speculations and things like that. Sure that's big too, but you really need to know the basics. What ores/minerals are available where? What do FW pilots use most on their ships? What do high sec missioners want? What moon goo goes into what T2 components that gets used to a common T2 mod/ships?

People usually talk about being a 'trader', but you won't get too far with a narrow definition of a 'trader'. Try to be a business person who understands the resource harvesters, producers, market, logistics and consumers. Buying and selling on the market is just a tiny part of EVE business management. You need to develop understanding, strategy and vision. Just placing low price buy orders and selling them when bought is no more intelligent 'grinding for ISK' than shooting mission rats for bounties.

When you are starting small you want to flip stuff quickly so you will baby sit your orders a lot and do fair bit of 0.01 ISK game probably, and you don't decide anything. Your buy price is always 0.01 ISK higher than the highest buy order and 0.01 ISK lower than the lowest sell. That's no pricing strategy. It's a "Game of Chance" (lol) based on whether someone sells to you/buys from you while your oders are at the top for the limited time period.

Pricing strategy is looking at the market and placing your orders at the price level that you think makes business sense for all parties involved. That's why I say try to be a business person, not a 'trader' in a narrow definition of the term. I know many traders have different mind set and they want to squeeze every little bit of extra ISK as possible from everyone else. But both IRL and in game, I never did business that way.

This year I actually had an RL experience where a new project manager was being such a d1ck to one of our key partners trying to squeeze out minuscule amount of discount on the supply price. He was proud of the pennies he pinched and X amount of $ extra profit he made but that was a business disaster in the grand scheme of things, so much so that I had to fly across to different continent to visit this partner in person to straighten things out again and do the damage control.

Well that's probably a bit off topic & not literally reflective of EVE market, as you play with lots of random/faceless people on the market. But I cite this as an example that looking at things from business perspective is different from just looking at numerical values and %.

As a personal 'in game' example, I lost 120b+ that I did not have time to withdraw from the recently closed IWI gambling site. That's 120b pure ISK loss over night because of CCP's decision. But at the same time I have a fully collateralised bond running (which is also incidentally 120b in value lol) with reputed Third Party and when I did a quick survey with the investors whether they were concerned about my ISK loss/if they wanted to end the bond & pull out early and stuff, ALL of them decided to stick with the original bond scheme. That's because I put up proper collateral to Chribba to get this bond and the collateral value was taken as evaluated by Chribba himself. Although I was a known gambling addict the business deal I made followed proper procedures that were acceptable to people.

So you see, if you are screwing people around for pennies & do dodgy scams & steal a billion or 10 billion or even 100 billion here and there from people, then you'd not be able to operate like this. It's just not worth it. There are some corp thefts that run with 1~100b ISK ish and think they've 'made it' in EVE now. But that's petty ISK to screw people over (unless you are doing it as a RP thing...)

Treat your NAV growing project as a 'business' and do it properly, with structure and connections, not just looking at the ISK profit value per day, etc.

Sorry for the long write up, but I just wanted to give different perspective to a new 'player' in the market. o7

Great post, Toobo, thank you! Coming from someone that's been gone a long time and just coming back to the game, this is very insightful for me!

o7

you all have been great help with the tips and tools. i'm currently doing my best to become a businessman. Toobo i added you as a contact in game to see if we could possibly chat in game for a bit. i look forward to hearing back from you. im currently doing small stuff in jita but im looking to expand my knowledge and take risks investing elsewhere.