Market Discussions

Ok – reaching out for some advice from MD. I’m fast reaching a point of the logical conclusion of my trading strategy. On the metrics, ISK per hour and return on ISK invested per day, I’m putting up reasonable numbers while operating both ISK and order limited. But by October (perhaps November) I expect that to dissipate. At that point I hope (plan) to be close to 1 billion ISK/hour in profit. But where next?

I feel like I’ve put myself in a box. I can easily see a lever, increase the profit per hour but only by reducing the return on ISK invested. So for example - if I spread a trillion ISK on sell orders across the galaxy, I can get billions returned at little effort beyond an occasional resupply. Is that the only path available to me?

I’d love MD’s input on two things:

- Trading strategies that yield high ISK per hour. I can see a number of opportunities but all involve significant capital invested – like 100’s of billions, perhaps trillions. Are there other ways? No details needed, just whatever people are willing to share or have already shared in some post somewhere.
- What other ISK making opportunities am I missing? For instance, can an integrated PI / trading strategy work? Or does that yield no improvement from an ISK per hour? How about T2 manufacturing combined with trading. And yes, I understand the BPO investment would be severe.

Some conditions (yep – more of that box I talked about):
- Needs to have a reasonable profit per month, 10’s of billions.
- Provide the ‘requirements’. For instanced - needs to have 27 trade characters (yep Bad Bobby, looking at you). Or has to have 1 trillion invested to attempt, many characters on this forum are there.
- No scams. There are whole other threads devoted to that - market scams / manipulations, bad contracts, joining and looting corps, etc. That play holds no interest for me.

If it helps any for some background, I’d planned to maximize my ISK early in the game (because I enjoy trading and logistics and do it in every MMO I play) and then ramp down the hours invested in that to focus on other aspects – with pretty much unlimited money to do it ‘right’. Sigh…this real life timer on skill advances means my explorer and PVP characters are slow to develop (yes I know I can buy characters – but then they aren’t really mine).

Again, any input is welcome. Thank you.

Darion

You forgot ''and flakeys coming in to make a totally not on the subject related bad joke about not getting laid'' ....

Once, I did a thing, and it was good. Now I don't do the thing anymore, and I regret not having the patience to do the thing, because I blew the ISK from the thing on hookers and blackjack.

The tl;dr: at the higher echelons of trading, marketeers generally hold their cards very close as they seem to become more focused on one aspect of the market meta game that they still enjoy doing after so many years, one that still creates the income they’re accustomed to, that they’ve become very familiar with in terms of viability and information mining and can do pretty much blindfolded. Giving away that information, especially in a public area, is akin to self destruction and you may not get the information you’re looking for.

The lengthy and perhaps not very useful answer:
My highest metric I believe came during the performance audit by VV while doing manufacturing and market manipulation alongside station trading earning ~1.2b per hour game time over the course of the month. Some good strategies that have increased total isk and isk per hour ratio are manufacturing/manipulation operations, straight manipulations in both moving markets higher and crashing markets for profit, profiting on item volatility and profiting on known or unknown issues with game mechanics. The main goal here is information. Have a very good understanding of the item or items to be manipulated, intel on the main players are in that area of trading and manufacturing that item, keeping up to date on dev blogs and generally knowing your market inside and out. At the higher levels of trading, information is just as important as technique for maximizing profit and preventing losses.

You happened to state “I can easily see a lever, increase the profit per hour but only by reducing the return on ISK invested” and that’s usually the paradigm, usually referred to as diminishing returns and is not necessarily a bad thing so long as you’re isk per hour and/or total isk are increasing.

My ending input would simply be to keep doing what you’re doing, refining and expanding along the way toward growing goals; finding new areas of the market game that you may think is likely to be profitable, diving in and seeing what happens. Somewhere along the way it may be that you find your market niche, settle in and then find a completely new aspect of the game to try out with a completely new set of goals.

I can't really pull off the helicopter thing. And Rykker Bow has already posted. So all I can add is a superfluous observation about progression in the Eve markets.

If you are hungry, and can grasp a few fundamentals, and are willing to put in the time and endure the tedium of order maintenance, you can make a pretty phenomenal return as a trader. But as your wallet grows, a couple of things happen. The first is that to continue raking in the same profit margin on an ever-increasing pool of capital, you have to expand - either in number of orders, or value of items, or areas of operation. There is a scaling problem here, and for more than one reason. One is that the items you now need to trade have more sophisticated competition, since they are the things other successful traders need to trade. Another is that the total market volume in Eve is not really all that large. Another thing that happens, at least to many traders with "normal" pain thresholds, is that you become unwilling to continue working quite so hard at order maintenance, and you look for easier ways to work, even if they don't pay quite as well. You can easily see an extreme example of this when you look at the going interest rate for "safe" secured loans, which is something less than 2% per month. It ain't much, but it's easy, and it's apparently "enough" for some of the capital deployed in the game.

Now all that is pretty obvious, but the point I want to make is how fortunate we all are that this is the way things work. A newbie starting the game today can begin trading with no more than what the career agents gave him, trade in items most bitter vets would not fool with, in places like rookie systems or minor outlying hubs, and with a little hard work, amass enough of a stake to head to the big time and rub shoulders with the pros. And if you manage to fail, you can do it all again. By the time you do progress to the point of bumping into the scaling problem, you will hopefully find a niche that you don't find unbearable, or maybe even stop caring about isk for the sake of isk. Believe it or not, some people play with no thought of ever making any isk in game, preferring to work an hour or two at a real job to fund their play styles.

Just watch out for those rare birds that can manage orders like bots and keep on doing it for years. Something just ain't right in their heads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pi7gwX7rjOw

Helicopter **** at 2:37

Rated PG-13

Careby - great post. I love your comment on scaling. I suspect many in EVE have hit the same wall. You can get bigger and bigger. But eventually you hit a time invested vs perceived gain wall. When you have 5 billion to your name , the rush of doubling that is great. Eventually the difficulty (read time) for doubling outweighs the rush. I'm hitting that point. I can see a couple more doubles but then....hmmmm....either steady state or change.

Thank you for your time.

Darion

Just like in real life, there is a broad spectrum of trader behaviors, and a great deal of disagreement on what is "good" and what is not. Some look at day traders in the stock market as parasites on the economy, extracting gains without providing any benefit to society. Others see their role as providing needed market liquidity - no matter whether you want to buy or sell, there is someone there who will take the other side of your trade.

I like to feel "good" about my trading. I like to think I add some value to the market. I generally try for "reasonable" profit margins. But what I find reasonable may look like extortion to someone who thinks I am making my profit for doing nothing. And I have a dark side, too! When someone buys one of my sell orders for 50% more than my asking price, I don't actually track them down and return the difference. I just don't have the time for that. I know, I know - typing that makes me feel positively sleazy.

So I would never engage in market manipulation. Which is not to say that if prices aren't where I personally think they belong I won't step in to "fix" them. Of course I would do that. Or if I think margins are too low or too high, then yes, I might change those, too. Or if I am just not happy with the current market value of my inventory, or if the materials I need seem to be too expensive, I don't see any harm in adjusting those values to something a little more, uhmm, fair. But market manipulation? No. Just no.

Sometimes you need to take what is rightfully yours. This is why I see Hamburglar as the hero.

We all play this game for a unique and "sandboxy" goal. Whether its 8/9/10 digits in your wallet, certain amount of money per hour, or hearing the lamentations of your enemies. How you approach this goal matters only to you, and as you can probably already tell by the attitude of MD, we wont judge.

As far as strategies go, there are plenty of blogs detailing every single possible combination of trading and industry/PI/Hauling/NPC hauling. Personally I would recommend Mynnna's blog.

I think we like it as much as your wife does.... Rim shot!