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Station Trading 101
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Alkazahm Fidard
Cosmos Industrial
Cosmos Origins
#1 - 2011-09-20 12:09:30 UTC  |  Edited by: Alkazahm Fidard
Station Trading 101

This is a little guide about station trading and how I started with station trading. I know that some of you do this better and in a more advanced level, but
this guide here is for beginning players, who have no idea how to start with station trading.


Skills:

When you begin, your the most important skills are 'Trade' and 'Retail'. These two skills increase your number of market orders. This is the most important
part when you start. Without any trade skills you have 4 orders, which is next to nothing. So it is important to increase your orders as fast as possible.
First you train 'Trade' to lvl 4 and after that you start training 'Retail', which you should train all the way to lvl 5.

Other important skills for a trader are Accounting and Broker Relations!

Accounting:

This skill decreases the taxes you have to pay. Each lvl decreases the taxes by 10%. Without this skill you pay 1% of your profit in sales taxes. You might
be wondering now, because this sounds like nothing, but believe me this will add up. Also there are a lot of items, with a very low profit rating, so a
profit of 3% to 5% for example minerals. These items usually have a high daily movement (billions of minerals are traded each day for example). So without
Accounting you loose a big chuck of your profits. For starters lvl 4 is enough.

Broker Relations:

Every time you create a buy or a sell order you have to pay the 'Broker Fee'. Without skills this is at 1% of the value of your order. Every level of the
skill decreases it by 5%. Now again 1% is not much. But think about this: You have found a nice item, which gives you a profit of 10%. Now you create a buy
order and buy the item. You just payed 1% of the items value in 'Broker Fee' and your profit decreased to 9%. Now you have to sell it, so you have to create
a sell order. You will have to pay another 1%. So after selling the item, your profit went down to 8%. No think about what will happen if you trade minerals
or stuff like that. You wouldn't make any profit at all. So train this skill to maximize your profit. For now lvl 4 is enough.

Daytrading:

Another important skills. This skill makes it possible to change your buy and sell orders from a distance. Lvl 1 makes it possible to change your orders in
the local solar system and every other skill increases it by 5 systems, to a max of the whole region at lvl 5. This is very interesting, if you do stuff
while trading. Sure trading can be fun, but sitting at a station all day long? That would be boring. But normally you would have to go back to your station to
modify your orders, with Daytrading you can do this while you are mining or running missions. It is a very nice skill if you are doing other stuff.

These are the most important skills for a beginning station trader.
The next steps would be to train Wholesale and after that Tycoon, to get the highest number of orders and to train Accounting and Broker Relations to lvl 5.
I seriously doubt, you would need more than Wholesale to lvl 4 for a long while, so there is no reason to train this to lvl 5 as soon as possible.


ISK:

Well the more you have, the easier it is. When I started, I just did the business tutorial and had my first million ISK in my pocket. So I moved to Jita and
started trading (Before you ask, this is not my first character, so I knew what I was doing). At my first day I went from 1 million to 10 million. So even if
you have next to no ISK, you can still start trading.
Another thing. This guide mainly focuses on people with ISK lower than 1 billion. If have one billion ISK, this stuff here isn't really what you are looking
for. You can still read it, but I think its probably way to tedious for you and there are better places to invest your ISK.


Now for the real trading:

Well then lets got to your station and start trading. Heh ok, not just any station of course! Go to a trade hub. As a beginner you might find out that Jita is pretty overcrowded with people. It depends on how active you are. If you have a lot of time and can change your orders every hour for example, go to Jita, if you are only doing this once or twice a day, go to one of the other Hubs, for example Rens or Amarr.

Ok now that you are at your station you can start. But wait, don't just start trading random items. It is fun at first, but believe me if you want to earn a nice profit, you need planning and research! A lot of research. Market research is the most important part. But lets take it slow.

The first and most important rule when trading:

Diversity! Diversity! Diversity! Don't just trade one or two items, instead trade as many items as you can. The reason for this is simple, prices vary. They vary a lot. Many people tend to think, that when they found a nice item with a 30% profit, they have found the Holy Grail and start trading only this item. It might work for a while. But then sometimes, when you bought 50 of this item, the price changes and now your nice profit of 30% went down to 3% or you might even have to sell your items with a lose of 30%. You never know what happens and who else is playing the market. There are people with hundreds of billions, who are trading at the same station as you. And some of them 'play' the market and manipulate prices. So going for only one item, will always end bad. So trade a lot of different items.
Also another thing. Ten small orders are faster fulfilled than one big order! Keep that in mind.
Alkazahm Fidard
Cosmos Industrial
Cosmos Origins
#2 - 2011-09-20 12:09:49 UTC  |  Edited by: Alkazahm Fidard
But what should I trade? I am kinda lost here! :O

Well there are some rules and a lot of different opinions and you can't really say who is wrong and who is right. So I just tell you what I did:

When I started I went for the items that give me a HUGE profit. I was looking for items that would give me a profit of 50% or more. And yes, these items are out there! They might not have a high daily movement, but if you don't have much ISK, like I had back then, you won't by many of them anyways. So your orders should be fulfilled quickly anyways.
So now you have to find this items... The hardest part. Open the market and start going through the Item list and look at all the items and find out which ones give you a high profit. This will take very long, so get your coffee, your favorite movies or a nice series to watch while searching the market. (There might be Applications for this out there! I haven't searched for them back then, so if anyone who reads this, knows one, feel free to post it here!)
If you have found an item with high profit, right-click it and add it to the Quickbar.

For me, the Quickbar was and still is the best ingame tool for a trader, so use it!

Another little thing is, you can create folders in the Quickbar, which is quiet useful.

Now let's say you found 100 Items, that are worth trading.

A little remark, you shouldn't only trade the big items, small items, you can buy for 10.000 ISK and sell for 50.000 are nice too, especially if you don't have a lot of ISK and are just starting out.
Another little tip, don't trade T2 stuff. Sure this stuff has a hugh daily movement, but also a lot of people who trade this stuff. That means a lot of competition. You will most likely end up modifying your orders every single hour to even have a chance at buying some of these. So for now, stay away from this stuff.

Now back to the items in your Quickbar. What do we do now? Start trading? We could, but there is another little thing that will help us out! Lets divide these items into groups. You will see why this is nice a little bit later.

You have found a lot of items with a nice profit, but what is also interesting is there daily movement.
To see that, you click on one of these items. Now you see the tables with all the buy and sell orders. Got to the top and click on the tab 'Price History'. You should see a graph, which for now is not really interesting for you. Instead go to the bottom and click on 'Show table'. In this table we have every information we need, but what is really interesting for us now is the Row 'Quantity'.
This shows us the overall movement of the item (sold + bought).
For now it is important to not bind your ISK in 'dead items'. There are items, that give you profits of 100% or more, but that not really traded or not traded at all.

For now, all items, that don't have a daily movement of at least 50 per day, get deleted. Yeah, just delete them, nothing good will come from these items.

Now create some folders in your Quickbar:

- folder 1: 200+
- folder 2: 100 - 200
- folder 3: 50 - 100

Now you place all your items in these folders, depending on the daily movement. So all items that have a daily movement of over 200 get into folder 1, all items that have a daily movement between 100 and 200 go into folder 2 and so on.

Now lets start trading! Another little remark: If you don't have a lot of ISK it is pretty easy to bind all your money after a few orders, so be careful. When I started, I bought only 3 or 5 of every item. Sure it is more work, but you don't have to worry about price crashes. There is nothing more discouraging, than loosing money in your first trade. So lets say, buy 3 of the big items and 5 of the smaller ones for now.

Ok, so now I have 3 folders, but what exactly should I trade? :O

Ok, our most important folder is folder 1. These are the items, that are traded a lot (well at least for our ventures). So take a look at this folder and see which ones give you a HIGH profit (lets say 50% or more). For now we buy this items. The we take another look and see which items give us a profit of 30% and buy those. After that, we repeat this with the next folder, folder two.

Another thing, don't delete the items you have in your folders, just because the profit went down! Like I said, prices vary a lot. If you can't cash in on this item right now, you might be able to do so in a few days. So let them stay and just ignore them for now!

A last piece of advise. The max number of items you should buy, is about 1/4 of the total daily movement. You can buy more, but most of the time you will end up waiting a while for your orders to get fulfilled and like I said, diversity is most important. So small orders that get filled quickly are the key for a nice and fast profit!

With this strategy I was able to earn my first 500 million ISK in my trial period and activated my account via plex. Right now I am playing for 4 month, paid every month with plex. I own a freighter, a number of other, smaller ships and still got around 1 billion ISK left for trading.

Well that’s all for now! So start trading and earn your money!
But be warned, when you reach one billion ISK, you should look for other, better ways for trading. At that point it will just get tedious, managing a lot of small orders. But at that point, you should have a rough idea how to earn bigger profits better. So have fun with trading and earning ISK!