Market Discussions

Hi there.

Fairly new market trader here. Gave my alt 3bil and tried to feed it into the jita 0.01 market. Worked out alright for my first month - I averaged 70mil a day in profits with babysitting since I work from home. Now... I'm stuck. I've completely pulled out and I'm twiddling my thumbs trying to figure out how to put my new found wealth back into the market the same way I did it before.

Is it simply a matter of having more buy orders ? The stock being sold doesn't change just because I can buy more per day, so I don't imagine just doubling my buy amount is the solution. The problem with adding more orders means babysitting becomes more tedious than it already is.

I'm not here to ask what items you all trade. I'm merely asking how you handle scaling.

Thank you for your time. Apologies for any typos I'm on my phone.

PS I tend to deal in mid volume mid margin items, or high volume low margin items. I've considered switching but I feel that doesn't benefit my babysitting.

Transition into low volume, high margin, little babysitting. I babysat my orders for months while my capital grew, but at a certain point I just had too much capital for babysitting. Diversify your assets. T2 and large ships are great, but not in jita. I think of jita as the end game for trading, where long term market swing, and mass manipulation are better rewarded than the tiresome 0.01 game. Look at the graph data and start riding the waves instead of the order update wait timer.

Where do you think those giant lines of freighters in jita are going?

I thought they were making donations to my alliance. Someone's got to fund all the Brutixes we use.

Inter-regional arbitrage trading is a very different beast to station trading. You need to know the regions you are trading between - who lives there, what their main revenue generating activities are, what they consume, and *why*. That will tell you whether a short term price difference is likely to remain or not.

If you really want to stick with station trading, i think its a better idea to start in a station other than jita.

I follow you quite well up to the 3B choice but I'd still keep trading 1M+ a piece worth T2 stuff.
At 20B I'd not start dealing in slow moving stuff and I'd generally always avoid stuff that does not die often. I.e. I'd certainly deal in the "current doctrine FOTM" battleship even if that means lower margin than flipping marauders or pirate ships.
Also, 20B is more than enough to start flipping some PLEXes.

At 100B I have long left daytrading ... ehm station trading. My 100B+ mutual and hedge funds IPO I did on MD some time ago shows good profits may be achieved by properly riding the markets and it holds true even today.

At trillions... one should have woken up since a while and discovered there's better to do than farming ISK like a sweat shop worker.

Even well before trillions one has to start caring about preserving his wealth against economy shifts. Hedging, investing, meta gaming, getting involved into space-politics... those are higher goals for such people.
I personaly went for hedging, investing and meta gaming (I love the latter!), whereas I only went in "space politics" when I had to defend some properties of mine in low / null.

Interesting insights.

I've avoided the T1 battleship market, mainly because I lack any ability to transport them, high m^3 courier contracts command a premium price, and because I had disappointing results with T1 cruisers and battlecruisers when I had only a couple billion behind me. I should research that market, however.

I deal in Marauders and pirate BSes but only really for interregional arbitrage. The discrepancies are gone now, but for a while Kronos hulls were 15% more in Dodixie than in Jita and I was just buying from Jita sell orders, couriering the hulls to Dodi and reselling there via sell orders. Prices on T1 battleship hulls tend to be more uniform as gamewide stockpiles are larger.

As for PLEX flipping - I have a 0.24% broker fee at Dodixie 9-20 and still feel this is too high to do much PLEX flipping. I could be wrong on this front, but I assumed the standard way to get into PLEX flipping was to earn trillions via other means, then spend 15-20 billion buying a character with incredible standings (for Dodi this might be 9.8 Gallente Federation and 9.998 Federation Navy), then use that character's extremely low broker fees to outcompete everyone in the huge turnover, low margin game that is PLEX flipping, mineral flipping or isotope flipping.

Heh, I really misunderstood that market.

Ah well. If you have something totally and utterly wrong about a market, better to not be in it.

Well, in my case I hit 5B NAV within my 2nd month of trading. That left me with not enough time to have characters with high Caldari standings and still not ISK enough to buy one. At the time I loved missioning, so I got standings doing Cosmos and L4, on my own. That also followed my theory: "if you practice and do everything, you'll know more than your competitors", so I learned about Caldari Navy items, about how to profit with contracts and so on.

@Sabriz, you've got my vote.

As for the topic at hand, I have tried to move into faction/deadspace modules. It's... interesting. I have a few questions regarding this and another area.

Alright, so how low is TOO low for volume per day? I've put some orders up for items that get traded as low as 1 unit per day on average. A lot of the Core-X and what not seem to trade at about 5-8 per day. Is that still too low? Should I be choosing 25-40% margins on 10+ traded per day items? What are your thresholds?
Having the answer to this will definitely give me a boost in my trading knowledge.

My other question is this. I've recently purchased some spreadsheets from /Sellorders/ and I've noticed that a lot of people use these spreadsheets to buy SELL ORDERS from Jita/Other hubs and transport them and sell to other hubs. Completely removing the need for the 0.01 game. Is this speculation wrong? Is inter-hub trading just the 0.01 game in 4 different hubs at a time and using RF or Push-X to move the freight? It seems some items can be just bought at sell order prices (meaning you don't need to tinker with the troublesome 0.01 buy order game) and sell them as sell orders in other regions.

Any input on either of these areas above would be very much appreciated.