Market Discussions

Yeah no. Coming from your competition. Who wants to see the little guy succeed. For obvious reasons.

Erotica 1 doesn't do much trading these days. The stupid people that fail at her game provide more ISK than she knows what to do with.

We are talking about the person that gave 1600 tech 2 Catalysts to the New Order a while back, and something like 2500 of them to the Caldari Ice Interdiction.

Just about the only useful advice in the thread so far!

I'll add another possible approach (cutting and pasting some of my old posts here): hauling.

1) Create a new character on your account and place him in Jita as your price checker. You can then fly around with your main and be able to rapidly compare markets with Jita prices (when you're more established you will want a second account so you can do this without logging out).

2) Reflect on the directionality of trade in eve. Raw materials flow in to Jita and finished products flow out. You want to be moving things largely in accordance with this cycle. Fly down to Amarr and check the prices of salvage, for example, and compare them to the prices in Jita. You will find that there is a margin to be worked moving salvage to Jita. Similarly, compare ship prices in Jita to Amarr and you will find that many ships are cheaper in Jita and can be profitably moved in the other direction.

3) Avoid moving low end minerals to begin with. You won't have the cargo capacity to move them in meaningful quantities.

4) Try to establish an efficient cycle whereby you have half your isk in buy orders at one end of the loop and half in sell orders at the other end. This is much better than sinking all your cash in at one end and then waiting for everything to sell at the other as you should be able to keep a constant flow of goods moving.

5) Always focus on your most profitable items. Sink as much of your capital into your best market as it will take on whatever periodic cycle you use (e.g. one cycle back and forth per day). Once you have as much of that market as you can, place any remaining isk in your next best item, and so on. Squeezing every penny you can from your best markets is important. If memory serves I only hauled about 6 different items for my first three months and about 50% of my earnings came from the top one.

The basic model of hauling between one hub and Jita can be expanded easily to take in the other hubs as well, since most of the margins reflect convenience/inconvenience and I have found that if there is a margin moving something from Amarr to Jita there will be a similar or better margin moving from Rens and Dodixie as well (although lower volumes). So, if you have a few accounts you can place one character in each of Rens, Dodixie, and Amarr, all gathering the same goods from their respective regions and then periodically move whatever they have picked up on buy orders in to Jita. If your cycle/wallet can handle further expansion you can then also, once a day, send you regional hub guys just over the border into nearby regions and place regional buy orders for the same stuff (also in the hub region itself), picking up your winnings once a week or so (you will get much better margins on the regional buys but will have more hassle with the logistics). Amarr is particularly good for this as there are four other regions within a five jump radius, allowing you access to a very large chunk of space without having to move your trader very far.

A critical thing to consider is how much time you intend to devote to this business. The model I presented - running stuff from the hubs to Jita and back - is ideal if you have plenty of time to burn because you will be able to pick up high volumes of goods by focusing on the primary and secondary hubs. But if you don't want to be 0.01ing your buy and sell orders for long periods of time then you may want to take smaller quantities of items to lower level hubs where there will be less competition from other traders. You won't move as much product but you will move it with far less effort and you can expect higher margins the further down the food-chain of hubs you go because other pilots will pay premiums for convenience. If they can buy something in their mission hub for a little bit more than it would cost six jumps away in a regional hub then they will pay to save themselves the time and the more time you can save them the greater the margin you can expect. But the volumes will be lower because the lower level hubs will be less densely populated. My preference has always been for volume over margins but this has been due to my personal play style and will not suit the more casual hauler.