Market Discussions

I recently took some advice from the collective knowledge that is Eve Forums, and I've got back into trading. My first go at trading was not pleasant. I spent a lotta ISK and a lotta time and ended up losing a little ISK (I wanted to say "a lotta ISK" for consistency, but the truth must prevail).

The ISK I lost wasn't the most frustrating thing (it wasn't even second). The biggest issue was the amount of time I wasted on that fruitless endeavor. The second biggest was being ABSOLUTELY broke between buying (for what turned out to be "high") and selling (for what turned out to be "low"). Buy low sell high my ass, only do that if you want to make ISK

I digress (did you know digress was formed from the Latin words "di" [aside] and "gradi" [to walk]), this second go into trading started a little more successful, with some gains that I was pretty pleased with. It probably helped that my attempt at trading started the same weekend "Burn Jita" was going on.

But fast forward a week or two and the trading success has severely slowed. The main issue is this, I keep having to get into 0.01 ISK wars with people to keep my product at the top of the list. I should clarify, I do mostly regional trading. I was really hoping to avoid this sort of thing (I was pretty sure "day trading" and "station trading" revolved around the penny game, but thought regional trading was free of it. Wrong. Sad)

I figure I can probably avoid penny trading by not issuing sell orders for items that are decreasing in value at the time, but the nature of regional trading makes that hard. It requires finding an item with big gaps between regional prices, which often means the system you'll be selling in has high prices. High prices tend to decrease in value a lot more often than they increase. So more often then not I'm working in a decreasing value market.

Anyone have any patented advice on how I can avoid this exercise in penny leap frog? It is definitely not the way I want to spend my gaming time.

Set and forget. It rhymes so I'll give it a try

Learning the right price to set will be the next step.

The more familiar you are with the market history graphs the better. They will give you expectations for how often and by how much the item varies in price, and how violently the swings can appear.

Typically I aim for my orders to complete within 3 days.

I don't update them more than that.

I also doubt the accuracy of it.

When I'm actively/semi-actively updating orders (when watching a movie for example), I pretty much always increment by .01 isk. Why? Because it's the intelligent thing to do. If you have a high volume order and you bought it with a large profit margin... moving the product quickly is more important than maximizing profit but moving the product slowly.

In eve... unless you lower the price BIG, there's no good reason to ever beat someone by less than .01 isk. If I want to get to the top of the list... why would I do that by 1 isk or 10 isk or 100 isk instead of .01? That doesn't discourage anyone on say a product selling for 50K isk per unit. They're still going to get to the top of the list. All you do is hasten the decline in profit caused by people jumping to the front of the line.

People occasionally WANT to do that... in order to perhaps lower the prices and then buy up everyone's stock to re-list at a higher price. I love when they do that (as I both liquidate my stock into isk I can reinvest and can then put up my next order back at a higher value)... but that doesn't change my behavior.

I pay the least that I have to in order to put my orders at the top of the list. And that's .01 isk better than the best order out there. The idea that people actively trading are bots is just not likely in my mind. When I run into others who are jumping my orders immediately... a few hours later they are not doing that anymore (although other orders may be doing the same thing). I've never run into a product where I couldn't find a time to update an order and stay on top for a few hours. That simply wouldn't be possible if I were battling bots.

Bots do exist but they do not account for the majority of the 0.01 isking, you literally are just paranoid.

(better report me as a bot for disagreeing with you there champ)

Returning player here after many years. I had 178mill in my account when i logged back in 3 weeks ago.
Now im sitting at 1,071bill after daytrading in Amarr. Logging in twice a day, very quicly in the morning before work and again later in the evening when i`m bck home.
I`m happy 0.01isking everytime as i`m online.

No regrets

1.071bil. Its not that hard you know. just find the right items and there`s plenty out there. I`ve hit a roadblock now, i admit but i`m diversefying as we speak.

The only reporting and issue with microbidding is that CCP has designed it to be a feature and the winning strategy.

If you have issues with this you should try to explain to CCP that bigger volumed orders should have a scalable reduced price, and that there should be sales volume minimums just like there is on the buy side. The key argument on that is that if there is "a price finding issue" arbitrage will fix that.

When you call your real life broker to buy or sell shares, you do not get the same fees if your trading a volume valued 1000 dollar as if you trade 1.000.000 dollar. The pricing drops to near nothing per share when dealing in huge volumes. That is what encourages "orderly" queueing of the market when its "stable"..

The second factor is limitation in number of outstanding orders per character, which creates "holes" in the market both floor and ceiling side. The only way to have better coverage and granularity is to allow more orders per player. To balance this against abuse CCP would and should introduce a "Tobin" inspirede wealth tax of like 0.072% per week on total order values for sellers.

#calebsflogsthenecrohorses

Like any activity in EVE, the more time you put in, the more you get out. For items with big margins, you better believe your competition is putting in the time before the margins disappear. If you really want to milk it, pop in a movie and keep pace. Otherwise, sometimes a few deep undercuts in response to a shave can get your competition to back off (they would rather not see the margins vanish). Your mistake may have been to enter a market that everyone else sees... more competition. If you do more research, you may find items with smaller margins but less competition. Don't be afraid to fail... as long as you know why you failed, you can get a deeper understanding of the market and make shrewder trades in the future.