Market Discussions

The answer is, as with most things trading related: it depends.

The guide isn't bad, but I do not think that it presents things with the right perspective. In order to get started with the most basic ways of trading, you want to think about a few things, basically:

1) Supply: Will you be able to buy the item at the desired price. In order to understand that, you have to know where the item comes from. If it is a random drop such as Meta and Deadspace item, you are likely to buy it if your buy order is at the highest price, and if this price is reasonable compared to sell orders. On the other hand, it is more difficult to buy t1 or t2 items because manufacturers do not behave like ratters. Most often they need to put up sell orders to manufacture things with a half-decent profit margin. Of course there is still the odd manufacturer selling t2 items or people getting rid of their unused assets, but this doesn't make the most of the trading volume. Faction items are interesting as well, as people will trade their LP for items, but will they trade for the item you are looking to buy? It depends. If you find a faction item with a great margin, it may be that the buy order is so low that no one will trade in for this item. If a faction item goes up suddenly it may be that it was undervalued and will stay where it is, or that it suddenly got bought out and mission runners will now trade in for that item because it gives them more ISK/LP. The takeway is: you can't reliably buy all items in jita, and you should know the underlying price it costs to make said item, in order to avoid bad surprises.

2) Demand: The item has to sell on the other side. This is generally not an issue as most items are bought off sell orders, but some items that are used as manufacturing components (minerals, ore, salvage) will have less demand as good manufacturers would probably prefer to plan ahead and set up buy orders.

3) Margin: You obviously need a good enough margin to justify trading an item. You also need to make sure that the item isn't overpriced compared to LP cost or manufacturing cost so that margins don't shrink while you are holding some item. When it comes to deadspace / meta items, I check the last 30 days average and min price, and avoid buying the items that are too expensive compared to their past prices.

4) Potential profits: Your profits will come from a combination of all of the above. You should check the margin of items compared to their volume, and you can also check how many orders have been updated recently by checking the amount of time remaining on orders to get an idea of how much competition you're going to have on orders.

5) Buy orders: you can surely buy region-wide, but having 1 million worth of items in 100 stations is a lot less interesting than having 100 millions in one station. If you are to buy region-wide, you should do so at a much cheaper price than jita, and even then, it is only worth your time if you can do so with many many items in order to make hauling easier. And even if you get to do that, you'll find the volume of items traded in jita dwarfs the rest of the region by one or two orders of magnitude. Also, some items like meta modules, ore, minerals, and salvage you buy with a 1 jump range buy order in a citadel will often end up scattered, while other kind of items will mostly fill in jita 4-4, so you have to consider that when making that decision. I find that it is still worth using a citadel, but I look for a bigger margin on salvage than other items because of the fact they get scattered and they also have less relative demand compared to other item types.

6) Identifying trends is far less interesting as predicting them. Reading patch notes, constantly calculating build costs / LP prices vs jita prices, checking out what happens in pvp (for example most recently with the horde hurricanes invading perimeter) is going to be much more reliable in predicting price movements.

7) ISK/hr: I started recording profits this week starting with about 30b, and am averaging 1.2 billions per day, spending 1-2 hours updating orders. I wrote my own program to find new items to trade so I don't need to spend much time doing so. On the other hand you do have to realize that I've been researching everything about trading for a year now. Starting trading from scratch with something like a billion ISK and a new character is probably a good way to learn by doing.

About the buyorder range:

In most cases, regional buyorders make very little sense. You will end up with small amounts of items all over the place. Flying there to get your stuff is super annoying and in many cases, not worth your time.

I always place my buyorders for materials in the trusted fortizar in Perimeter. I own random amounts of minerals, datacores, salvage and various other things in pretty much any station within one jump of perimeter. It's extremely annoying.

Trading outside of the big markethubs is a different beast. In this case, things change a bit.

Let's say i want to buy all kinds of minerals and ore in a region that does not have a major tradehub. In that case, i would place two orders. One for the system where i actually want my ore and another one for the entire region.

I would offer 5 ISK for any amount of Tritanium in the place where i want my minerals and 4 for the entire region, with a minimum amount of 1 million for the latter. This way, i can make sure that picking up any amount of tritanium that was sold to me in that region is always worth at least one million ISK. (i'm using example values here, i don't even undock for a million :P )

this works especially well for products that can be found pretty much anywhere (Minerals, Salvage, Ore, PI Stuff, Datacores, ...)

Don't use regional buyorders for things you want to trade in a markethub. it's just waaaay to annoying

If you sell certain items locally you can make good profit for example i noticed that the lowest trit sell order is in xl ec 1jump from jita alot of industrialists will buy from it or will pay extra if they don't have to move tons of trit around themselves.Same goes for any other material used in production.Time is money and you can also save money by using citadels and ec because of the taxes.