Market Discussions

Hi

Nearly 3 years off-and-on with Eve and most I've ever had in my wallet was 100m (from donations from old corp members no less). I'm not particularly active nor am I entertained in grinding on anything in a game, so I figured I go casually station trade. Done so since December and now it seems I'm hitting a bit of a wall. I've read The Search for More Money and managed to cover quite a bit of it already, but there's a number of questions that I don't believe it has answered and would like some experienced perspectives on em. Anyways, here goes:

1. I'm confused about the volume graph in Eve. I would often see very little to no sell activity in a region and yet the volumes indicate otherwise. Am I missing something here? Does volume include both buy and sell orders? I also know it doesn't coincide with the numbers in 3rd-party sites like eve-central. Speaking of which, what does Eve-central mean by "Movement" of an item, and if it means number sold/bought in a time period, how long is that time period?


2. I dunno, but shortly after the relatively big hit on bots recently I've noticed the average price for all items I'm currently dealing with has drastically reduced. My profit margins have been cut pretty bad. Is this coincidence?


3. In addition to this, I've noticed that I am being far more aggressively undercut in all my market items, both in buy and sell. How do I cope with this, being a casual market player? The region I work in has been pretty lax but since the bot event a lot more activity has occurred (again, probably coincidence). Should I pack up and change to another region, or *gulp* cross-region trade?


4. I seem to be hitting a level where while my overall balance has been tapering out at around 70mil (this includes escrow, buy orders, sell orders, and wallet). I would like to venture into greater-valued items but there appears to be a huge gap in values of items (as well as volume traded) to where it looks like unless I have several hundred mil isk available I'm reduced to marketing small stuff that still doesn't get sold often. Should I pursue another method of income until I have enough initial capital to work with the larger stuff?


5. What's the definition of "liquid assets" and "liquidity"? I have read outside definitions when googling but I'm trying to wrap my head around them in how they apply to EVE market.

A preemptive thanks for anyone providing information on any of my inquiries.

1. The graphs for items combine data for buying and selling. This can lead to some confusion if people are only buying or only selling the item. You can set the time period for the graph wit ha drop down menu under the box... Its something like 3 days 10 days month 3 month.. ect

2. Probably, CCP stated that they did not ban that many market bots. Most likely the new devblogs and upcoming patches are causing some price shifts. In the short term, you might of just run into someone trying to manipulate whatever item your trading in.

3. There are items that you do not need to constantly update prices on and still make isk. You will make less isk probably, but it is doable. Your best bet to not have to update orders often is to not be in jita or amarr or a huge trade hub, these places attract traders and will provide more competition. One thing you could do is find mission hubs or one of the smaller trade hubs. You can trade most of the same items but will have less competition. Also, feel free to try out different types of trading... Do try to give each one at least a few weeks though, trading is not a fast paced activity.

4. Unless you are a big time trader, you will always have to supplement your income with other activities. The benefit of trading is that you can do other stuff while your goods are selling. Also 100m is relatively small amount to start trading with. It can be done, but the more isk you start with the easier it is to start trading. If you wanted to try trading a larger item, you could just buy and sell 1 or 2 at a time... this is more risky since you have all your eggs in one basket, but if you want to... go for it.

5. Assets = items, not isk. Liquid isk = pure isk. Liquid assets are not well defined. They are assets that can very quickly be sold without crashing the items market. For example, 5 battleships would be liquid assets if they are packaged and not rigged. 50 battleships would not be liquid because if you were to sell all of them at once, the price of that battle ship would drop as you fill all the buy orders. Liquid assets are usually valued at the current highest buy orders for that item. The buy orders must be able to cover the amount you are selling for you to value that asset as liquid.

I'd suggest maybe trying out a new trading style. I started playing eve in December and realized I wanted to make my "living" by trading fairly early on. I've gone from a gift of 50m "to buy implants to speed up training to run level 4s" which I used as my initial capital to roughly 1.5-1.7 billion. My goal is to end up not paying for my account and still have enough isk to get blown up on a regular basis every month. To this end I've tried a lot of different styles

A lot were centered around hauling, but recently I realized that people will take all the risk from me for peanuts as a reward.

Station trading however is one I have not tried in depth, but I assume you chose it because the time spent was low? Just update your orders once or twice a day? I also update only 2-3 times a day, but spend roughly an hour or two once a week moving stuff into piles to make my courier contracts. I find as a new trader this has better margins than station trading while the effort is only slightly more. I think that when my knowledge of the market grows the margin/effort gap will close and I will move towards it, however as I learn this is getting me farther. Station trading seems much more unforgiving than other methods. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Ive always made my Iso from trading especially in station as well as bulk trading across a region. In my experience, 100m is not enough to start with but if you are willing to put all or most of your eggs in one basket, you could sit in a good hub like jita or amarr, you could deal in mid range high volumle items like standard implants and make around 10% profit per trade.

I typically don't bother with an item if it ill net me.less than 10%. Id recommend against cross region trading until you have more ism and experience.

Another trixk once you have your trade skills up is to place a region wide or 40jump range buy order at a greatly reduced price and then pick the items up and bring them to a hub and then sell at market. People are lazy and love to get rid of surf easily if they can. You can profit from this.

Lastly, don't be afraid to lose a little bit of money while learning whatdoes and does not work. If you lose 10m but learn from that loss what can make you money, it was worth it.

Niko

Ps sorry for typos, writing from a tablet in class.

@Ozzie

Thanks, that gives me a better visual perspective.

@Niko

Appreciate the thoughts. I've been trying to avoid hauling anything as much as possible, but I realize if I'm pushed into a position where I need too, then I'll do so. However, I'm wondering if it's better to consolidate the items and sell them at specific nodes in the region as opposed to having them all right in the the market hub for that region. I remember reading up that the average amount of hops per trip people make in Eve is 7, so I figured if I dump the goods at specific points that are 7 jumps away from each other, that I might improve my chances at selling (maybe even for higher than hub price). Is this preferable to selling all of them straight in the hub? Note that the region I'm in is relatively low in activity, because it helps me avoid aggressive market traders when I'm trying to casually alter my orders per day.

As for losing money on trying stuff, I remember having fun with a cheaper item I've worked with earlier on. I had the money to buy off everyone that's selling in that region, and then went ahead and sold them back for triple their price. I did gain a lot of profit from it, though it didn't take long for the market on that item to stabilize again and I had negative profits on the rest of my inventory for that item (not nearly enough to make it a loss). In retrospect, I was wondering if it would've been best to have set up a much higher buy order in the region as well, to prevent people gaining more inventory of the item to push onto market for a lot cheaper than what my pricing was. Ah well, again it was a learning experience, I got profit out of it, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

In regards to profit margin, maybe it's because of how cheap the items are that I'm working with, but I get anywhere from 150% to 1000% profit per item sold, compared to your 10%. Should I expect this margin to drastically dwindle as I start to work with more expensive items?

Trading is heavy time consuming and you can quickly go down.

In general it's pretty hard to make money station trading in Jita. Smaller hubs like Dodixie, Ren or the like it's a bit easier. Keep in mind the keys to trading are location, and patience. You need to know where things are valuable, and be willing to wait long enough to either buy or sell an item.

Location- ( It's amazing how the price of an item can vary from area to area.)
- In a mission running area looted components sell amazingly cheaply. So cheap in some cases it's possible to make a profit buying them to break down.
- Like wise missiles, and missile ship are cheaper in some areas.
- I make a good profit on skill books by flying them 2 to 3 jumps to a trade hub then throwing them on the market with a 10-20% mark up. (This really pisses off the guys selling at a 30-40% markup as I do 3 month sell orders, which means they have to beat my price for 3 months or buy me out.)

Patience- (It's amazing how cheaply people will sell/but just to have it now.)
- You can general save 10-15% on virtually anything if you put in a buy order for it and are willing wait a week or so. (Personally I view every thing I buy as an investment. Even if it's a ship I figure I'm going to fly until it explodes. )
- Mission runners are crazy about their isk/per hour ratio. Thus they tend to view time spent selling stuff, or running to get ammo as lost isk. (Often they are right if they have their mission running down pat.) So you can buy their loot, and sell them ammo/repair paste/hull&armor repairers for a massive profit. Even the guys who melt all of their loot down will sell the results cheaply.

The problem with patience is it only works well if you have liquid assets to spare. I've got the isk to have 1-2B isk tied up in 3 month sell orders. So I can afford to buy 300 skill books of an obscure skill book and put it up for sale at a 20% markup and only sell 2-3 a week. (Skill books are nice in that they can't be worth less than you paid.)

Right, a specific example is the fuel block BPOs.

The base price for the fuel block BPOs is 9M ISK. But because the sell orders were constantly being cleaned out by buyers, every time the NPCs re-list, they raise their prices a bit as the new batch goes on the market. So by the end of the first day or two, the NPC sell orders were up to around 11M ISK.

There is an upper-cap on how much extra they will charge, but I don't remember what that limit is (probably around 25% based on observations of the fuel block BPO prices). They will also drop their price every day at DT if the previous batch did not sell out, so after a quiet period prices will fall back down to the minimum.

Again, splendid tips and thanks for all.

One question at the moment that I've been meaning to settle. What is the benefit for establishing remote buy orders, including incentive in pointing skillpoints towards Visibility? When is it preferred to make buy orders cater to very small regions as opposed to just simply making a full region buy order that tops everyone else?

Marvelous. That explains enough for me. I was aware of greatly increased buy orders at market hubs with short ranges, but I always figured by setting up a buy order that is far less expensive than what the hub offers, I could grab everyone in the region and leave the hub out to those involved specifically in that area. Maybe that's why my buy orders wasn't being depleted as quickly as I'd like. Thank you for the insight.

That is all the questions I have for now. I seem to be getting a nice improvement in income so far. I'll use these tips and continue researching. Thanks again everyone for expounding their knowledge.