Market Discussions

if you need to more work than shooting red crosses your doing something wrong ether wrong product wrong market or not enough alts

Your doing it wrong.
the whole point of what your doing, and I have a very good idea of exactly what it is that you are doing, is to gain influence on the market prices.

2 words
Market manipulation

that and "What your doing" is the right way,

P.S.
the daily tipoff is "Zydrine"

Hmmm...



I see where this is going...now if I only increase the invested capital as to be 'resistant' to fly-by speculative trading and build up a varied stock of items on the market that are to sell over a longer period of time (say 1-2-3 months).

... and repeat that over several regions as to not over-saturate any given market ... in a few months/ to 1-2 years I could end up rolling several hundred bil isk/month ... and at 5-15% markup over jita that will eventually make a profit of 10-50 bil isk/month.

that, and place lots of buy orders in various regions for some items, make courier contracts to have them shipped to a central location and other contracts to have them shipped to various regional markets to be put on sale at x% markup

I can see this becoming quite a full time occupation



Must train more alts :(

This is pretty nearly how I would put it, although my experience wasn't that you had 10x as much after a couple weeks.

Even spending lots of time, it took me longer to find the winners and most of the stuff didn't scale in a way where I could suddenly do much more of the same.

BUT, even if it were only 2 as much a month later, that is quite a growth rate.


ALSO

don't forget to HAVE FUN ! .... what sort of minor OCD type repetitive behaviour is fun for one is often a slightly different flavor for another.

RE the manipulation: not only is it often profitable but it can be very fun. I don't think it is that easy until you have enough capital so that you can be indifferent to how quickly something sellss those times it doesn't work right away. Bailing out would be very costly in many of the markets that have thin enough supplies to make an impact with what capital you have.

RE market influence... I found it really fun to begin to dominate the trade (both buying and selling) in a non hub region. Playing with mutiple clients that was time consuming in one sense yet not terribly so if my main activity were being in a pvp fleet with all the waiting inherent and the moving and price updates could be done while I was "hury up and waiting" on my pvp character.


RE train more alts
I disagree with this pretence....while a second account (and eventually a third, less certain about the 4rth and 5th i hade in terms of increased time efficiency) is a major boost when it means you can dual client as I described, I found that very lowly skilled traders (10 days or less even.. needed daytrading for some types.. 2 days could work some places) could be quite profitable. My jita trader is of course very highly skilled AND equally importantly, has high Caldari Navy and Caldari faction standing (gaining faction standing does take a LOT of time played unless you can party with some guy that likes to run missions 12 hours at a time and stay logged in in system with him).

That being said, the very profitable trading opportunities that you could just log in once a week to that you haven't been undercut and restock once a month were usually such high margins that losing 30 million a month on 1 billion in sales (with likely a 600 million profit) really wasn't a meaningful impact unless you had far less capital than you had opportunities and human time to exploit.

IRR (internal rate of return) calculations are fairly meaningless in this game because your human time factor in trading is so often the limiting factor, not your lack of capital. At the cusp, yes it might add a few weeks to a flat out rush to 50 billion isk, but most people are going to find that the time Your describe of discovering markets comes in little spurts and that you'll often have more capital than you've taken time to find ideas for.

Also, as you get richer, one of the surest ways of increasing your Isk/hour rate of return is to deliberately sacrifice IRR by bringing 2 months of inventory to sell instead of 2 weeks worth .... much higher rate of return for the 2 week cycle but 4 times the work associated with shipping and often lost sales due to low inventory more frequently.

I think that with 2 accounts, 5 characters trained two days to get 45 orders (and many can make due with only 9 in all honesty...depending what you're selling or buying) and 1 highly trained dedicated trader, you'd have all the tools to focus your time well. Having a 3rd account helped most for me to get a freighter/orca pilot trained who could be delivering stuff while trading on the main trading account and not needing to worry where i left him when i logged out to manage his own orders. Having your jita window open at the same time as a trader who you're using in a different hub or mini hub you've established makes it easier to restock without jotting down what you need too.

15% markup is not worth the time if you're looking to make real returns. I can set buy orders and make better than that without the product leaving the station in most places. If I am transporting something I am selling it anywhere from 200%-35,000+% (yes really) more than what I paid. On many modules I deal in, 1 sale is covering the entire purchase cost of the whole order

As Diomedes mentioned, it helps to trade in bulk to save yourself frequent deliveries. There is another benefit to this as when you have a buy order in bulk you will occasionally benefit from picking up either a large quantity cheap and fast from someone dumping a bulk stockpile, or, in rare cases, someone placing a bulk sell order and screwing up (say, forgetting a zero at the end of their sell price) netting you a large chunk of inventory for next to nothing that you otherwise would never have gotten. To elaborate - you now have for example qty 100 of something for 10% its price as opposed to qty 10 filling your order then the next buy order picking up the other 90 (Big thanks to whoever accidentally sold me 15 T2 ships for 30k/ea last week).