This is meant to be a moderate guide for anyone looking to try and make some money station trading in Eve. I will not go into arbitrage, which is buying in one region and hauling to another, nor is this about industry. The main focus is making money in stations. Station trading is the act of placing buy orders above the competition, then selling the goods from those buy orders as sell orders. The profit is the margin between your (high) buy price and your subsequent (low) sell price.
Time Required
I am a graduate student.
This means I have the luxury of being able to carry a laptop with me all
day and periodically (every few hours) log in and check my orders on the
market. At minimum you want to check
your orders in the morning, once or twice during the day, and in the
evening. I personally like to check my
orders one last time before bed, as that lets you get below or above other US
TZ players that may have already turned in for the day. This obviously changes based on your TZ. The more you can update, the more successful
you will be. Updating orders takes about
5 to 10 minutes.
Research
How much do you know about Eve? If you know what most of the modules do, you
will be in a good position to understand which modules to buy. If you do not understand modules, I suggest
you enter the Eve blog community or talk to your corp mates. Understanding how many units to sell and how
many an individual buyer might buy is good.
Weapons usually go in sets, for example 7 missile launchers fit on a
Drake. Propulsion mods are only needed
once per ship. Learn this stuff.
Once you understand the mods, there is a wonderful feature
in game called Market History. There are
two views, a table and a graph. The
graph is not very useful in my opinion, outside of looking at the historical
trend of an item. What Large Shield
Boosters sold for last January is not useful for a day trader. The direction it is trending is. The table shows how many items sold each day,
and the low and high values that item sold at.
The quantity traded should be over 50, and the margin should somewhat
reflect the spread you see in the buy and sell orders in normal view. Also pay attention to the high and low
values. If they are near each other, and
near either the current buy or sell price, odds are the action on the item is
slanted towards either buying or selling. You don;t want to go in on an item that is only selling or only buying. You cannot flip that item.
WTF? Useless...
That's useful.
This brings us to margin.
Simply put, margin is the difference between the highest sell order and
the lowest buy order. The spread is
probably the most you profit on the item.
In reality profit will be less, as you will raise the buy order price
and lower the sell order price over time, and eat away at that initial margin. Taxes and transaction fees will also reduce
the margin. In my estimation, margin of
less than about 10% is probably not going to make you much unless you have
amazing skills.
Skills
You will need, at minimum, the following:
- Trade 4
- Retail 4
- Accounting 4
- Broker Relations 4
Trade and Retail get you more orders, up to about 54 or so
at level 4 in each. You need enough
order slots to have buy and sell orders up to cover each item, give or
take. The reason for this is once you
starting flipping orders it helps to be able to list your inventory as you get
it. Accounting and Broker Relations
lower the overall cost of making orders, which is not huge, but you can cut it
down so that relisting and canceling orders will cost you less. Handy when you see someone dump 10 modules
for a sell order 500k less than everyone else and you want to buy them and
relist all your inventory as one order.
Strategies
Here is the meat of this beast. How do you actually make money? First, start small. Buy 5-10 of items with good margins. Even if you have billions of isk lying around
and think “Hey, I can do this market thing!”, don’t invest it all. Start with low value, decent margin items and
learn the speed of competition, watch a few piles of inventory get reduced to
nothing as a big fish crashes the sell value, and learn to watch the
market. By watch the market, I mean stick
with a few items for a few days. You’ll
start to get a feel for how the market can ebb and flow. Flip buy orders of 10k to sell orders of
50k. Get your feet wet.
After a few days, you should have a fair bit more money off
your starting investment. Keep
cool. Expand slowly. Buy in small amounts that can be flipped
easily and quickly. Remember the 50+
volume number I talked about earlier?
Don’t get suckered into investing in something with a huge margin and low
turnover. You’ll fail to make
money. Get familiar with the idea of
“velocity of money”. More small orders
moving faster makes you more money.
At this point you may have a few tens of millions to work
with. Start increasing the value of the
items you buy. Upgrade from 10k modules
to 100k modules. The margins might get a
bit better. I shoot for a margin of 10%
or more. This can vary, but a decent
margin leaves you less vulnerable to dramatic changes in the order values. After a few more days you may be getting
close to 100m or two in total capital.
Again, be careful!
Keep limiting your inventory. A hangar full of modules is a pile of isk
that is doing nothing! You are better
off keeping that isk liquid than holding stock.
I rarely buy more than 10 to 20 items at a time, unless they are low
value and very high turnover (in the hundreds of orders per day range). Pretty soon you should have a handle on what
to buy, what times of day are good for flipping items, and you should be
getting a feel for the market. Only
increase your investments in small increments and keep your eyes on whatever
your goal is.
Modules
What to buy? I focus
on meta items. These are items that
cannot be manufactured, and have the “weird” names. Industrialists produce tons of tech I and
tech II items, and the volumes look great, but the margins are low and the
competition is fierce. You will likely
never get to buy or sell the “vanilla” items unless you can sit in front of
your computer screen for hours every day, and that rather defeats the purpose
of this whole endeavor. If you do not
believe me, go look at the market screen for Large Shield Extender II. I am willing to bet your screen shows a huge
list in the buy and sell orders, they are all .01 isking each other, and the
margin is so low your taxes and fees will eat any potential profits.
Once you start buying your meta items, you’ll notice margins
change. A lot. Don’t worry.
If you bought at 300k, intending to sell at 1m, and the sell price drops
to 500k while you got your stock, you have two options. Sell at 500k, and make 200k profit, or hold
your stock for a day or a few hours and wait to see what is happening. Once you get enough isk, you can start
looking for sell orders that are driving the price down and buy them, relisting
at a higher price. These are orders
where someone lists a small quantity, say 5 units, at a large markdown. So low that you can buy and relist and make a
marginal profit. As your isk pool grows,
you’ll learn how you can manipulate the market prices by doing this. Sometimes you’ll find a big pile of items selling
for way below the next highest order.
This is a profitable opportunity!
Non-Module Items
There are ways to make money off items that are not ship
modules. I have not dabbled in this all
that much. But know this: You can set remote orders specific to mission
hubs to buy cheap mission loot and haul it to a trade hub. You can buy skillbooks and bring them to a
market hub and try to resell them higher in order to take advantage of
impatient players. You can dabble in PI
goods, materials, and pirate tags. All
you need to consider is how much time various strategies will take, and if it
is worth it to you to branch out from your trade hub and add hauling goods to
your trading business.
Location
Where should you set up shop? At the time of writing, the obvious choices
are Jita, Amarr, Rens and Dodixie. These
are the informal trade hubs of Eve. Jita is the biggest, and also has the most
orders and players to compete with. Also
keep in mind that many times the weapons that are traded in these hubs relate
to the rats nearby. Dodixie has a lot of
Hybrid turrets. Rens has more
Projectiles. Amarr has a lot of Energy
weapons. Outside Jita margins can be
better, but volume is lower. This may
help or hurt you. I recommend you try
out each hub and see which you like, which is more to your pace of play.
Bots
They exist. Market
bots that simply update every damn time you try to place an order. You can’t do too much about them, other than
cancel your buy orders and try to move your sell orders. Alternatively, you could ladder up the price
of the buy order buy setting a few small buy orders and cranking the price slowly
up. This works by slowly, over a few
hours, incrementally raising the buy price until the bot stops matching
you. If you can get it high enough, sell
your inventory to the bot and find solace in the fact that you gamed the bot
for a bit of isk, and hurt the bot’s bottom line. You won’t make as much, but it can be
satisfying.
Is this the game you want to play?
Conclusion
This is not the end-all, be-all guide to market
trading. It is not a guide to market
PvP, as such. It is simply a basic guide
to get you started in the market with a few guiding principles. I like to trade in modules. You might want to look at something
else. Here are the core ideas in this
guide, restated for your edification:
- Learn about what you are trading so you recognize the reasons behind trends and useful quantities.
- Learn the various in game market tools, the price history graphs and tables.
- Watch your margins, and cut your losses if needed.
- Train your skills appropriately to take advantage of the markets.
- Start small and organically, and take time to learn the market, there is a lot going on besides the numbers.
- Stock not trading is isk not growing.
