Market Discussions

What do you expect from someone with such a terrible haircut?

Offer Withdrawn

This post has now run for nearly 5 days without a single investor showing interest, which leads me to believe these terms are not currently possible for me to achieve. I am now withdrawing this offer.

I have been reflecting on many things discussed recently on MD regarding loans and the health of lending culture here. I will expand on one or two new ideas in a more appropriate thread.

Mods, if you could kindly close this thread, I would be much obliged.

Not really, hence the title of the thread. :p I am partially glad it did not work out, as it shows that lenders value their ISK enough to demand better rates. After thinking a lot on RAW23's words in a recent thread, I think I will at least match my last loan's rate in my next offer. I will also be much more conservative in my requested amount, so I can prevent raising exposure to investors too much.

My experience has been quite different. I stockpile materials to avoid having to wait to restock anything. When one of my sell listings is sold out, I already have the materials ready for the next batch, most of the time. It is true that holding onto materials for a long time involves some risk, but EVE manufacturing is rather easy to win at.

I always check historical prices for materials and finished goods before starting work. I have only had a few instances of incurring a loss in the past, and those were easily absorbed by my overall margins. My spreadsheet automatically updates prices using EVE-Central, and when I see an item's ROI dip to low or negative, I flag the item so I know to be careful about making it.

Even items that see fluctuations will often raise back up to acceptable levels. You just have to pay attention, research the price histories, and restrain from panic selling during dips. One risk management strategy I employ is to limit my production of any specific item to a set amount of ISK and a certain quantity relative to that item's historical sales volume.


The most profitable way to play is to do both - manufacture and trade. I have made some trades before with materials or items I already understood well. If I noticed strange prices when setting up my orders, I would check to see if I could take advantage. Sometimes people sell items for bizarre prices, even below material costs. I have purchased items like that before, waited a week, and resold them once the prices improved again.


Again, I have to disagree, especially if you take into account reduced POS manufacturing times. Last night, I started 2 runs of a certain T2 item which took about 10 hours each to complete. I listed them this morning and was surprised when they sold within an hour. This is definitely not always the case, but if you choose your items wisely, you will be able to turn them around in an acceptable amount of time. I only deal in items with strong demand, because it means less 0.01 ISK'ing to get them sold. That said, the more effort you put into 0.01 ISK'ing, the easier it is to get your items sold quickly, just as it is with trading.


It is different with every patch, but one thing I always look for are items with increasing demand due to the patch. For example, when the exploration changes came out, there were some new scanning modules released. There was a nice period of insane margins, even with some of the raw materials being hyper-inflated (I'm looking at you, Spatial Attunement Units). I made a ton of money from those.

Some very old items are currently seeing big spikes in demand already due to changes in game mechanics. Lots of players need them and are buying them more often, which is naturally going to lead to wider margins and higher prices. There are also old items with roles being changed or improved, which has started bringing their prices up, too.


I appreciate you providing a lot of detail in your criticism. You are wrong, though. I have not lied about anything, and I can prove everything I have said with objective evidence. I am not the greatest expert of the EVE economy, but I have successfully amassed a small fortune purely from industry. I do my best to learn about and understand EVE economics and gameplay. I am sure I will suffer from attribution error sometimes. However, I am what I say I am, and I will continue having fun building things for profit. I may even expand how much I trade in the future. But for now, vive la industrie.