Market Discussions

The title may be a bit misleading, but it's the best short one I could think of.

Recently gotten into trading, and am having pretty good luck with it--better luck than I would've expected. However, As I'm shifting goods around, editing orders, spending some time with a foreign alien device known as a "calculator," I start to see a few things in the Market system that make it difficult for many to enjoy trading, as well as making it even more difficult for someone who is not a dedicated, pure trade player.

1) 0.01 ISK Wins. Simply put, I can sacrifice 0.01 ISK per sale on goods to ensure that, until someone else does, I can get ALL of the sold items to my buy orders, and nearly guarantee all sales on my items in a particular station or nearby stations in the same system. Paying 0.01 ISK to take ALL sold items of the type you are able to afford purchasing with buy orders? There needs to be something a bit more consequential for that type of market dominance.

2) Micromanagement. Whoever has the most time to sit and refresh their market orders will also inevitably win the day. Undercut someone by 0.01 ISK, and unless they have as much time as you do to constantly check up on their orders at all times, you will have a monopoly over the station or nearby areas you are buying and selling. For part-time traders such as myself, this is probably the biggest annoyance. Plus, it makes profits depend on time zones as well. As with the 0.01 ISK issue, there needs to be a way to offer the same rewards, but not base it off of refreshing market windows and who's awake / asleep before the others in their region.

These two things make trading the boring activity many players don't want to deal with. I've had considerable profits off of it, but I fight with the above, as does every trader here (Unless you've found a goldmine system where you have no competition) The success of a player in the market is entirely dependent on how much time they spend on the Market pages. There is no real marketing to the EVE trading system other than the initial purchase and estimated sell price calculations. After the goods are where they need to be on the market, it becomes a one-hundredth of an ISK game of leap frog with competitors, and the one with the most time will win at the end of the day unless, again, you found them for a ridiculously low price.

Just a few observances.

Calling broken "what I can't succeed at" is not something that will gain you much agreement.


Anyway, trading is not broken. Even in RL there are high frequency traders (also known as "scalpers" even if they don't really do the same strategy) who sit hours a day indeed.

Then there are those who can't or don't want to commit substantial time to trading and trade price swings, buying at lows and selling at highs.

EvE implementations:

The Slow Sell System for Lazy Marketeers

My first adaptation to the above:

Experiment #01: RL finance analysis applied to EvE. A large part of the first portion can be easily done using in game tools.

Experiment #01: RL finance analysis applied to EvE (continued). For the few who feel bold and want to go beyond the game.

I'm not against rewarding those who dedicate more time to something, but the reward is total and exclusive. If you have more time, you will just about ALWAYS receive the transactions that otherwise would go to those in the same station / region as you. You also get to establish that dominance for 0.01 ISK.

For 0.01 ISK and constantly refreshing the market page, you receive utter and total monopoly over the market in which you are operating unless there is a trader doing the same thing in your area. Anyone who cannot commit the time necessary to keep up is not going to make nearly any ISK unless they have a goldmine of goods for ridiculously low prices that their competition cannot contend with. Yet, that is a very, VERY rare ccurence.

Also, I'l have a look at your links Vaerah. At first glance they seem quite interesting.

I think a timer which would allow for a price correction only let's say once every hour, could be a good idea. Buyers would buy a bit more expensive, sellers could sell for a bit more ISK, it would hurt nobody and would open up the trade profession for the more casual traders.

I don't see how somone can have dominance of a station. For starters there are several thousand items for sale in this game from PI materials to fricken laser beams. Last I looked I can't possibly have enough sell or buy order slots available to me to dominate an entire station. Could I dominate say the market on Enriched Uranium and Mechanical Parts, maybe, or at the very least I can modify my order on those items as often as the timer allows to keep my sell order the cheapest and make it painful for everyone else, but your talking about a fraction of the station market, not the entire station.

It sounds to me that you are selling popular items that people like to move for fast cash and spend a lot of time manipulating and micromanaging their orders to maximize sales. My advice would be to find something else to sell, or prepare to compete.

Toku, yes. Perhaps I should correct myself. By dominance over a station or market, I mean an item within a station, system, constellation, etc. If your order is the cheapest, it will almost always be bought first unless the buyer is looking to buy it in bulk and you do not have the quantity. There are thousands of items, yes, and I don't disagree that there's always a niche that you can fill, but if someone else decides to move in on that niche, and they have more free time, irregardless of other factors, you will lose the market war over that item. Play time should not be the main factor as it is now on how quickly you can sell items.

As for your reply, Tom, not quite. I have this toon as a highsec logistics pilot for my other characters who live in lowsec. I'm not a miner, so I can't really respond to the AFK mining statements. I'm not looking for AFK ISK making off trading, but I do other things in EVE on my other toons and can't devote the time required to be on the markets every 15 minutes updating my orders. I check them once every hour or two, but I'm undercut by 0.01 ISK within 15 minutes of putting the items back at the top of the list.

Immediately after I update my orders, I get quite a lot of business. However, 15-20 minutes after it sluffs off to nothing because I'm 2nd on the list, and nobody buys the 2nd cheapest item in the same station unless it is needed in bulk. Trading is only viable for those with the blocks of time required to micromanage their orders, and is a closed profession to many players who do other activities in EVE except in some niche markets and certain cases (As the slow-sell article above demonstrates one of them)

I'm still making ISK, but it is irritating to know that I only make it for a short while after updating my orders and then I'll be making next to nothing unless I switch back over and update them all. Kinda' hard to do when you're chasing people around in lowsec.

I think your looking at this from the wrong angle here chief, although you did say it yourself. Trading is a profession in this game.

You are stating that you want to do other activities in EVE and be competitive in the market place as a trader. Thats like saying you rat for 15 minutes and then you decide to go mine ore and that your not making money killing rats while your mining ore. If you want to excel at any one faction of this game you have to commit. Your either a trader, a miner, a miner/industrialist (these go hand in hand), a mission runner, an anom runner, an explorer, or a pirate, or whatever else you can think of. Either way its those that focus on the one thing that excel at it and will be better suited to the task.

Trading in eve as a profession is like being a stock broker. Your not really handling the merchandise, you probably don't even know what most of it is for, your just buying low and selling high. There a lot of toons that never undock from Jita 4-4, I know, I keep one there just for days when I want to play the market and don't want to do anything else. I will spend hours buying, selling, buying more, selling more, modifying orders, modifying again, and again, and again. Its a profession, it's a part of this game that some people enjoy playing or at the very least excel at making money at it.

You seem too inclined to want get the best of trading without doing the work of staying on top of the market, and somehow you think that isn't fair that you should have to sink time in it to being successful at it.

He is of, course more than welcome to buy everyone out. And then set the price as he so desires ;) ;) ;)

This isn't what happened in Procurers. Essentially, an EVOL je..trader went head to head with me. Got smashed, then I held it down for giggles inviting more buyouts. I caught him mid market clear when I had many 444 quantity orders up. While he was in the process of clearing market I kept relisting more and more stacks. He ended up buying 5500 from me + what other stacks were on market in an attempt to take it to 10m+ at the time. I wanted initial capital back for GFC/GAZE and so wrecked him. So only 1 of those 3 big stacks were mine (the low one) the others were ones he bought out trying to clear and relist, not realizing 10's of thousands from the Cabal would smash him.

What remains is pure profit, so will let it go up a bit.

PS. For those attempting relists of markets, at least have a good idea of how much got built/supplied. He didn't and paid a pretty nasty lockup for it.

The mechanic is not broken, but it could be better.

In the real world traders don't update prices by $0.01, but instead they setup types of automated orders (limit, stop, etc) and then let computers handle the execution of those orders. The highly automated nature of real markets results in tiny spreads and high liquidity in every commodity. EVE markets by comparison are dysfunctional with most commodities greatly lacking in liquidity and with huge spreads. This is great for the amateur trader who wants to make some money, but bad for everybody else who has ever needed to buy or sell something in a hurry. If CCP ever wanted to grease the economic wheels and make it easier for people to buy and sell on the market without getting scammed here are a few ideas:

1) Remove order limit when skills are maximized (more liquidity in every commodity)
2) Remove broker fees and increase sales tax to compensate (more freedom to change prices)
3) Make market data available realtime (faster and more accurate than eve-central)
4) Allow the placement and modification of orders through the CREST API, perhaps with a 6 hour delay

Number 4 may seem extreme, but the benefit to industrialists who have to sell large volumes would be great