Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Station trading is kind of the same thing as the stock market. Pick an item, check the price history. Look at the Donchian channel, judge when that item is due for a price rebound, buy when it is low, sell when it is high.

In the real world, when you buy stocks in something such as pork bellies, you are remotely buying the actual tangible commodity commonly known as bacon. It's impractical to transport or keep 100 pounds of bacon, or microchips, or peanuts or coffee, so they are kept in storage and it's simply noted that you are the owner. Later, when the value of that thing goes up, you sell it again and pocket the profit....and of course if it goes down you sell it at a loss.

In EVE, when you buy an item it actually appears in your hangar. You buy or sell it instantly from there. No one is holding your coffee or real estate or intellectual properties in trust for you. Maybe it has something to do with teleporation devices, or automated dumbwaiters, or the fact that no one in EVE trusts anyone else enough to hold the goods they bought in trust for them.

The stock market actually started in Holland as a form of ship insurance. Merchants knew that the goods they exported or imported could make them a lot of profit, or be lost to ocean storms or pirates. They asked investors to sponsor a small portion of their cargo hold in exchange for a share of the potential profits. If the ship came back full of tea from China, your stocks went 'up'. The Merchant sold his tea and your tea, and gave you your profits. If the ship sank, your stock went down...to the bottom of the ocean floor. It sucks a little for you, but it sucks a little less for the Merchant than it used to, since he didn't lose his entire fortune on a risky but potentially profitable trade venture.

I suppose that EVE's station trading isn't identical to the stock markets of today, but it's pretty darned close.

There might be a reason why things are this way in EVE. All we have to do is to point to the Great depression of the 1930s, or the Savings and Loan scandal, or the recent Wall Street crash in 2008. These events caused a lot of chaos and destabilization in society for what are essentially worthless pieces of paper. Certainly the stock market technology would have improved in 10,000 years in order to make it more resistant to fraud, corruption, crashes, etc.

Trading stock in EVE corporations doesn't make much sense to me. Anyone can create a corporation, stuff it with alts, and put it on the local derivatives market. Most corporations in EVE don't own many liquid-able assets, just have people who are lending their stuff to the corporation. The most valuable assets of an EVE corporation are it's members, who are typists behind a keyboard that can't be commodified.

How would stock in an EVE corporation actually go up or down? Minerals mined? Ships built? Killmails? What would you expect if you invested X amount of ISK into corporation? Minerals? Mercenaries?

It's a damn shame that EVE doesnt have a functioning Stock Market - best economy in a game my ass.