Market Discussions

Just looking for ballpark figures on how much you make a hour/day/week with your capital and how often you worm on it so i can kind of see what kind of investment range would be ideal for me once i decide if i enjoy trading or not.

I know it all depends on how you do it, your strategies, whether you ship to different regions, haul yourself, skills, dedication time etc.

Again looking for very rough numbers so i can decide if i want to start trading, please only post helpfull info (i will not invest all of my isk i will start small and learn the ropes before i go big)

Thats great! Im proud of you (in a non creepy way) i plan to start a similar way, but i dont want to find out once i invest 5b that you only make 10% profit a month or whatever because i can make 100m an hour doing PVE and if id have to invest tens of billions to make it worthwhile then idk.

Thanks for your post!

FWIW -if- you are willing to grind the market for the same amount of time-in-game that you would have to do for PvE, you'll make far greater returns (assuming you don't make terrible mistakes) - and if you're up for that kind of grind, you'll have to station trade in Jita. Most people, I think, trade so they can do OTHER things rather than work in game for their gametime/funds; for example, most of my trader friends outside of MD are heavy PvPers who spend less than an hour a day trading, and they probably only make 5-10% a month on 10b, but it keeps their ships fitted.

There are indeed many variables to this question and I've found that for time invested, station trading is one of the best, if not the best in the game for generating isk if the investment capital is available. I've spent many years in finding the most profitable areas in the game for my play style, including sub cap, module and capital production and then exploiting the hell out of them by finding and creating the most efficient method of delivery . The stats below are readily available from my previous bond threads, through both performance audits performed by VV and LA and interpolation of bond performances between those audits. I won't say these are the highest expectations out there either as I'm sure there are higher numbers from other traders and indeed I know of a couple who deal in arbitrage trading.

For my style of play, including time availability and capital:
• consistent 40-60 billion per month with 30b starting capital and ~2-3 hours at the keyboard
• 15 weeks: 100m to 50b (post #42) first 4 months in Jita
• 175 billion over 8 weeks with ~50b starting capital and ~4 hours at the keyboard (trading and manufacturing)
• An old post detailing an outline of a 120b+ profit on 200b investment per month

I've found station trading to be the most viable with my game play style where I can quickly jump between my trader and my pvp character making that 3 hours at the keyboard seem not so tedious as well as spreading that time out over the coarse of the day. The years spent doing this has yielded solid methodology and an ability to quickly ramp up trading which is nice considering I enjoy doing other things in the game

I usually tell people that 6 for state and faction are good for general trading and 8+ for both for those who are doing it for the long haul. I'm currently at 9.98 and 8.84. These numbers are of course debatable.

Edit: is this standings broker fee graph still good? It's a GREAT graph if so. Thanks Thoraemond

That 0.02 left over from state standings is going to bug me now. Time to get on that!

Well am not able to do the Faction standing at all (as i will be paying a mission runner for me to leach corp standings, but you cannot leach faction), but would I see a benefit to getting corp standings for caldari navy up to say 5? or would it not be worth it? Its looking like it will cost me around 1.25bil for that standings boost upfront, however I will receive some isk back through the 50% payment of mission isk and lp. Thoughts?

Thanks alot :)

My apologies, didn't see the standings graph linked :)

Will check out the cosmos data centers.

thanks

Wow those are some impressive stats. First let me tell you when I was trading, my returns were nowhere near as good.

Your statistics show that you are making over 100% return per month for the first 4 months in Jita. And then for another investment, you made 200% in just 4 months.

Which means at this rate, you have easily surpassed 1 trillion ISK mark already, and ISK no longer means much to you because it's so abundant, and it comes by so easily.

Your kind of return on capital puts most Billionaires to shame (both in Eve and in real life), they cannot even dream to achieve this kind of return in their lifetime.

For example if we talk about real life, Warren Buffett's annual return in real life is only like around 20%? And he's one of the richest/smartest guys around. It took him decades, and he's not even close to a trillion dollars yet!

I am curious to learn, exactly what did you do to make such stellar returns? I've read your posts, and they all say: You did some stuff, using some strategy, to produce the stellar returns. But they don't say exactly what you did. Thanks.

I have several different trading operations that I've been running continually for many years, tweaking and perfecting them over time. Each one uses a different trading strategy and each is administrated separately. Most of them involve some kind of production, rather than pure trading. Here is the information you requested, for one of those trading operations that doesn't include any production...

Multi-Region Non-Hub Trading

This is my favorite trading style and I've been doing it continuously for about five years, prior to that I did something similar but on a much smaller scale and only sporadically for a few months at a time.

For this I currently employ 13 traders, each with the maximum of 305 orders, level 5 in all applicable trading skills and the ability to fly a freighter.

I've invested approximately 90B in the operation, 80B in stock and market fees, 10B in freighters. The 80B is spread fairly evenly between the 13 traders, for about 6B each. Characters trading in the same region share the use of a freighter.

Performance has been steady. Over the last 12 months I've averaged 13B per month, or about 1B per trader per month. Giving a ROI in the ballpark of 15% monthly.

Activity required is of two types. I have to spend 30 minutes once per week updating orders, any less and the trading style doesn't really work, but spending more time doesn't appear to scale the income effectively enough to warrant the additional effort. Once every three months, I spend the better part of a day buying, distributing and listing fresh stock to replace what has sold in the previous three months. I put up large numbers of units on my sell orders when compared to daily traded volume, so that I don't have to re-stock them more frequently, but this comes at the cost of investing quite a lot of isk in stock that will not necessarily sell.

The trading method, such that I'm willing to share it, is to dedicate one or more traders to a region and stock up stations in that region with a basket of goods that are frequently purchased locally by players, rather than heading to the local hub. Since traded volume is low and the infrequent order updates make you totally at the mercy of your competition, you work on the basis that you have so many orders up over so many different stations in a region that something is always selling. Mark ups have to be fairly large, at least double Jita, but you are acting as a convenience store and price accordingly.

An example of products that are in my basket of goods and were until recently very high performers, is Cynosaural Field Generators and Liquid Ozone. Obviously these were a perfect case of something that people want to buy frequently, locally, quickly, at the nearest station and are happy to pay well over Jita price for it... or at least that was the case until jump fatigue was introduced. I still have old stock of both of those products up, but I probably will not be replacing those orders when they empty/lapse next.

I felt this example would be useful, since most people tend to be fairly hub-focused when trading and I wanted to point out that it's possible to make a trading operation work fairly well, without excessive effort, while staying well away from any hubs.

Somewhere in my posting history there is at least one massive wall of text where I cover this issue exhaustively.

So if you feel you can handle a bit of EVE-search and reading my drivel, then you could easily save yourself the isk the standings service will charge you, but also make a couple of billion on the side from the process.

EDIT: I ended up having to find it for someone else, so here's the most recent thread...

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4646847#post4646847