Market Discussions

Still attempting to station trade and finding it very hard to turn a decent profit especially in jita.
what i have noticed is that jita is the place to buy and sell quickly, but the hardest to turn a profit as an experiment for my own understanding i bought 36 targeting range scripts, sold 12 in jita almost immediately for a small profit, took 12 to rens they were selling at 48k each sold all 12 over a week took 12 to heimatar where they are/were selling for 146k still have 8 left after almost 2 weeks.
Then my buddy rubs salt in my wounds and says hey i made almost 12bil in 2 weeks trading this that and the other in rens so i decided to watch these items as they were out of my price range they were faction stuff and officer mods and most of the items were selling at double the buying price, however the movement of these items was slower than slow, so am not sure if the 12bil was just a little porkie to wind me up :)
So for now i am in jita struggling to make a living any useful tips would be appreciated.

OK that kind of makes sense to me, why ignore the prices in perimeter for selling but watch when buying, sorry if that sound quite lame but i am a total noob :)
also whats the best tool to watch and compare these prices or is the ingame market ui just as good as any out of game data?
thanks

Your friend was talking bullsh*t. Not that it's not possible, people make way more than that station trading. None the less people always over inflate their income when they talk to new players (and old), it's just an e-peen thing. If he said 12 i think he might have made about 6 or 7, purely at a guess

But aside from that, station trading is the most profitable thing you can do. If you are not making a profit it's because of your plan not because you were lied to when you were told it was good ISK.

What % profit did you walk out of your script trading test with?

1. Increase your buy order range, to increase the possibility that someone will sell cheap to you. Set to within the nearest lowsec area in The Forge region.

Using dotlan, with the security status layout:
http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map/The_Forge#sec

You will notice that the nearest lowsec is 8 jumps from Jita, so place a buy order within that range, (not 8! or the items will land in lowsec areas and picking them up will be a pain!)

2. I first read of the 'burger method' in the eve uni pages:
http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/How_to_identify_items_to_trade
http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Lessons_Learned_By_A_Budding_Trader

Seems to be a good index of how to study the rise and fall of prices in the item history.

3. For small item pickups, use fast warping ships. I use either a:

a. Leopard with a 10m3 cargohold and 20au/s warpspeed
b. Dramiel with a 130m3 cargohold and upto 13.04au/s warpspeed with T2 hyperspatial velocity optimizers
c. Daredevil with a 140m3 cargohold and upto 8.69au/s warpspeed and 1.86 alignspeed with T2 hyperspatial velocity optimizers and T2 inertial stabilizers

Of course, you manually fly these ships and no autopiloting ever. Set your pickup points, add more waypoints, optimize waypoints (all available in the Route info panel plus assets window) and zip along hisec.

4. For bigger hauls, try to outsource your hauling thru Red Frog, Push and the Haulers Channel. This will open up time for you to study the markets and updating orders.

5. Watch eve-central for cheap items in the sell orders. You'll immediately see its on sale because of differences in price range (eg. I bought my Dramiel for 40M in the sell orders which was normally at 42~44M in my region Buy, and 50+M in Sell)

6. Seed neighboring regions with alts for quick buys and checking regionwide prices. Make more accounts/characters and even train some of their trade skills while you're at it. The alpha limitation of one client only is managable because you can log on all your accounts up till character selection, but not full into the game.

7. Watch out for patches, read the forums and log into SiSi. Sometimes changes in the game makes previous cheap items shoot up in prices (eg. Elite Drone Ai). If you can maneuver yourself into a good stockpile early, then you'll be good.

8. Read read and read more :D

First of all, Jita is not a good place to do station trading, i'd totally recommend to place your buy orders in Jita and engage in regional trading, outsource your hauling to one of the big hauling corps, keep in mind hauling cost when you do the math. Check Eve-central, read patch notes and SiSi for potential changes (like stated by Sci0gon).

Also, i'd suggest you get one spreadsheet to keep a track of your work, that's the best tool a trader can get, you can use some other tools out there like eve trade master and NEAT (I use Evernus along with my spreadsheet).

Keep that in mind and you'll be good!

Last three or four years I have made all my isk station trading in jita. Though I have a good deal of capital that let's me do this with plex. Normally there are ~2 regular times to buy and 2 too sell then you have irregular spikes and dips you can capitalise on further if you are watching.

Overall do to the nature of plex it is extremely predictable and so long as you have a basic understanding of buy low sell high there is little risk. Then as you get better at reading markets you can start making alot off it

I made 100b in a few months....In fact I'm prolly still in top 100 on Eve Mogul...not on this character ofc

My previous character had a nervous breakdown and had to be biomassed

I think a lot stuff got melted down with him but he did manage to transfer 75b or so to another of my characters.

I tend to get banned a lot by CCP because I have various mental health problems and sometimes have spectacular blow ups with ISDs

I always have the ways and means to get back on the forums tho

If you think outside the box and have capital, its easy to make a billion isk an hour in the market, the smartest traders probably make as much as 5 billion an hour.

i have made as much as 2 billion isk an hour a number of times, however, there are many hours spent laying the ground work for such a trade operation. once it is set up though the upkeep is easy.

If you are starting small, with limited capital you need to plan your trades. Study the market history of products you are interested in. Eve is a cyclical commodity market - you need to understand the cycle and the volume. The time to buy is in the low half of the cycle and relist in the top half. Eve markets have a tendency to fall gradually as traders play the .01 game and then spike up when they get tired of losing money so don't plan to catch the turn - place your sell order while the market is low and let it come to you. This will require patience and trust that the market will behave rationally. In the long run it will but, to quote John Maynard Keynes "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"!

1. XXX ISK per hour is not very meaningful metric. Let's say I place a buy order for a JF at 6b, and it gets bought within 1 minute of my buy order placement, and I sell it for 7b within 1 minute of placing a sell order. I made 1b in 2 minutes, which equates to 30b ISK an hour. lol?

If you want to really calculate per hour income, you have to include the entire time included in certain period, i.e, if you made 100b in one month, your hourly income should be calculated as 100b / 30 (days) / 24 (hours). This is how you calculate per hour income of production too. People don't calculate based on how many minutes/hours they put into clicing production queues, but the actual time it takes from BPC making to invention to end product.


2. Here's a true story. I had an item listed in Perimeter for 1,250m ish, while Jita 4-4 price was well over 1,300m. My stuff in perimeter for 1,250m just wasn't selling, while I could tell that Jita stocks were being bought and the sell price was going up consequently. Eventually I canceled my sell order of the stuff in perimeter and moved them to Jita 4-4, and sold a few units within an hour.

People really like the one-stop shop idea. Except for a really young pilot where a few mil ISK is a big deal, people don't fly much (even 1 jump) to save a few mil (in general), especially those who are buying stuff that are worth billions. Only way Perimeter (or anywhere else) can become a new 'hub' is to be seeded successfully and be able to act as a one-stop shop, otherwise it will always be just a fee saving haven, with some very niche/limited trade items (like PLEX).