Market Discussions

... when you can put the same effort into studying RL markets and make real life dollars?

Is making monopoly money that important to you?

For the same reason not many players want to be RL miners or outlaws.

And for real RL market and EVE market share some things but remain very different; one of the two is much more risky and hazardous than the other

False premise.

Who says some don't do both?

EVE introduced me to detailed markets.
It peaked my interest and I am actually now an Investment Assistant and going towards being a broker in a few years.

As for the comparison to real life market trading - it's bogus. Eve trading requires a primary school level of mathematic ability. Incidentally so does RL investment banking - the myth that it's much more complicated than, for example, brain surgery or rocket science, being perpetuated by investment bankers to justify pay packets orders of magnitude greater than far more useful individuals such as brain surgeons and rocket scientists.

Ahem. Nevertheless, Eve trading has as much similarity with RL trading as Eve mining has with RL mining.

As for why people do it - it's pixels on a screen, people like to see numbers go up. It's no different to a kill/death ratio. Games are ultimately pointless endeavours which provide entertainment and by providing a means to shoot other people in the face perhaps prevent us from becoming a serial killer in real life. And if Eve trading can prevent just one otherwise well adjusted individual from becoming an investment banker in real life then society as a whole can breath a sigh of relief.

Because I don't actually have 40 billion dollars in real life.

Not quite true.

RL markets are far, far more complex, for starters.
Also, for RL economies, it's borderline impossible to accurately predict some future conditions which will affect them, whereas in EVE, you have devblogs and SiSi to tell you almost exactly that.
And finally, because acquiring a significant "seed capital" in EVE is trivial, and the consequences of its total loss are minimal, but in RL it's pretty hard to get the capital and losing it all would be horrible.

IRL, give me some obligations-free cash and a way to predict some types of events that will happen in the near future, and I'll totally switch my RL job to a RL trader !

Akita T with the best post in the thread. Now there's a rare sight.

VV the funny thing is that if you take the average ratio of return(in %), all those huge hedge funds and trust funds and insurance companies havn't made any profit, well, not anything higher than the actual market changes.

In the long run(10-15 years), even those who are paid to predict, with the a sea of people and comuters, fail to provide a real expectency for profit, and provide only market profit.