f13.net

After spending about a month of playtime over the last couple years working on making a miner and constantly getting ultrabored, I made a new account for the sole purpose of being a trader. When I say trader I mean mostly placing clever buy and sell orders to extract money from various commodity markets. I plan to do a little bit of hauling, and perhaps ultimately to train for and purchase a freighter. I don't want to be a career hauler, but I do want to be able to take advantage of extremely good deals I find.

Anyway, I've spent the last few days searching the internet for any guild, tips, tricks, anything with information about trading in Eve. I've been able to find very little to work with and have had to try and figure out myself. I started with a fresh new trader created under the new character creation system, heavy into Willpower and Charisma. I used my miner with a barge and a few hours of spare time to farm up 5m in seed money and I went from there.

The one lead I did actually find was on the Eve trading forums. Apparently there's a guy that has been manipulating the +1 implant market for months now. Apparently he has a billion+ worth of every +1 implant and keeps a presence in every single empire region. He keeps an extremely large spread between buy and sell prices on the market buy filling out buy orders with too high a price and sell orders with too high a price. I started out working in three regions where the buy prices were about 150k for an implant and sell prices were above 700k. Over a period of about 36 hours I was able to exploit this huge spread and turn my 5 million into 15 million. The guy who was price fixing came through and repriced the entire market in all three regions to 350k/950k. He also sent me some sort of threat in my mail which I ignored. Anyway, I decided to I wanted to experiment with some other goods for a while and am not trading in +1 implants at the moment.

The next thing I decided on was Nocxium. Operating out of Oursulaert I have been buying up Nocxium in the system and reselling it at the hub on Our III - Federation Navy Testing Facility. I can afford to buy about 20,000 at 650 isk apiece and can resell it for around 700 isk with minimal in system hauling. The turnaround time is probably somewhere around 8 hours and that nets me about a million in profit. Definitely not as high a rate as what I was doing with the implants. I'm starting to look at the +2 implant market now to see if I can do something with it.

Right now it seems to be the tradeoff between low volume, high margin trades and high volume, low margin. I don't seem to have enough isk to take advantage of the high volume mineral trade business but I'm afraid the turnaround time on implants will be too long. I don't really have enough isk to work in multiple commodities or regions yet so my options are pretty limited. I'm also a really big nub so I have very limited game knowledge to work with to find good deals.

I'm curious if anyone has any general trade advice, knows of any guides, howtos, etc or has any specific markets/commidites that you know to be very good. I haven't been able to find any decent disccusion about trading in Eve so I know I'm probably missing out on a lot of fundamentals that would help me.

I think Mr. Rickey is our resident robber baron capitalist swine...he should have some insights. Whether he wants to share them is another question  :evil:

To me - it has been about finding a balance between the number of systems you go out to for buy and sell orders.  What I tried to do was find an area someone would be grinding up faction for a limited time (Like the only level 2 quality mission agent for a corp) then place buy orders for the likely items the rats would drop. Hopefully I would be the only buyer for small capacitor charges. Or small X guns or afterburners. After I bought them for 1/2th the value of their minerals I would then melt them down and turn around and either make a rifter or just sell the minerals.

I don't like the new contract system, I have a ton of Rifter BPC's and it looks like I have to sell the item for 1M at a minimium. Suppose I could package up like 25 BPC's but at that point the person would be smarter to buy their own BPO.

But back to the topic. Don't discount people being too lazy to move their stuff and just sell it for whatever they can get for it either. (I know I did that when we left -V- space). Then again - I knew I was going to die running out of there. (In a cyclone - I got out fine with my rifter).

I've actually been refining crap loot for ages now. I keep trying to decide what to make with it.

In WHO'S Cyclone?  :-P

Morphite and megacyte are good. Yeg says isotopes have a big spread. Some of the finished T2 production materials are not huge in volume and have a high price, but the turnaround on them can be slow. eve-central.com has a player market trade finder if you want to do some hauling.

One thing I have thought to do is to skim off the cap ship orders where people are buying trit @2.2 in min orders of 200k. If you have the skills, buy trit between the region-wide min order 1 and the region-wide min order 200k, then sell off a stack once it hits. Very low margin, but there's no hauling required. Probably best done with some carefully targeted station range orders instead of a multi-jump order. I haven't tried it yet, so let me know how it turns out if you do.

Well, the best way to make money is to look for inefficiency in the market.  For example, in the case of your Noxcium arbitrage, you're conglomerating small amounts of Noxcium the original owners don't consider worth hauling, moving them a minimal distance (in this case, around the same system), and reselling at a profit.  Your margin isn't very high (about 7%) but your cash velocity is good because it doesn't take you very long to resell.  The opportunity for profit comes from the inefficiency of moving small cargoes for the sellers, vs. your larger volumes.  If you could find one of the regions where Nocxium is still selling for prices in the 400-500 range, you could make serious bank.

Another example is T2 resale.  There are only a few markets where you can reliably find all the T2 items you would need to outfit a ship, compared to the much larger number of systems where you can find ships.  So if you can find a system with a fairly well developed T1 market, but a spotty T2 market, you can fill in the gaps at a 50% markup and make a lot of money (I did this for a while, made billions).  People will pay your premium rather than fly all the way to a market hub where they can get the same item cheaper.  The inefficiency you're exploiting is that the T2 manufacturers don't bother to sell outside of the major market hubs and the region they build in.

Every opportunity for profit stems from other players being either ignorant, or impatient.  If you have knowledge they don't, or can specialize and get economies of scale, you can make money.

--Dave

Excellent advice, thanks guys. I suppose I will continue trying to learn the game (especially the parts I don't partake in) so I can figure out where there is potentially money to be made. Meanwhile I will try to continue expanding my hoard from the 15m it is at now.

The lazy and stupid are soon departed from their ISK?

Nah. It's all relative cost. It might cost me more (in lost time) to drag a hauler to a trading hub for some supplies than it would to pay a premium for buying it in-system. On the other hand, you -- the trader -- find it more profitable to buy, haul, sell.

Time is just another cost.

Ask Solar Storm (if AXE are even talking about what happened yet)  :-D

Oh come on, don't leave us hanging!

Short form:

Solar Storm is part of AXE, and got kicked out of their previous region by BoB. They had to relocate to a crappier sector, and work twice as hard for the same ISK

One of Solar Storm's corpmembers, who'd spent hours and hours each day mining for the good of the corp, asked their corp leader why the corp was selling ships to its own members at above market prices instead of at cost or discounted.

Corp leader replied that it was a temporary measure.

The same corp member asked again, a few weeks of mining later.

Corp leader said that it wouldn't change (and implied that if you don't like it, quit).

The corp member had unrestricted access to most corp hangers & POSes.

...

Corp member ran for Empire (and made it) with 15-20 billion ISK worth of AXE assets (Ships, BPOs BPCs, undeployed POSes, etc), stripped fuel from a bunch of AXE POSes (droping them into reinforced mode) and sent a mail to AAA's leader informing him of these facts. He then joined Goonswarm.

All of that because the corp was price gouging its own members, and because they gave PoS & hanger access to someone who was in the corp for around three months.
Did I mention that Solar Storm is AXE's core logistics company, and supply something like three-quarters of AXE's ships? Hmm, maybe that should be 'was' and 'supplied'.

For the want of a nail....

It doesn't pay to screw the people that essentially make you who you are. (YOU HEAR ME SCHILD!?)

That opens the question of whether the guy was a Goon all along.  Goonies have been getting pretty aggressive about the corp infiltration and theft lately.

--Dave

I make a lot of money as an arms dealer out in 0.0. My alliance is in a constant war, and our station is always in need pvp geared modules. Also, with many POS's nearby, I can make lots of money off POS fuel. Typically, I haul 90% fuel, 10% modules. Don't compete and undercut someone's fuel price. POS fuel will almost always sell, and undercutting just drives the average price down - bad for the traders. All the money in that 90/10 haul comes from the 10% modules, though.

If you can get in good with a group out in 0.0, see if you they'll let you haul goods into their station.

I believe he was; a coworker was reading the guy's summary of the theft the other day (posted something like 5 months ago) on the SA forums. Since he was already a Goon at the time of theft, it's not unreasonable to assume he was a Goon significantly prior to it. Not all Goons join Goonfleet.

Cute.

I aim to please!

I like Corp theft. It makes the game seem that much more interesting.

Well, the spread on ice minerals isn't huge but I had some great success with making buy orders at one-tenth the actual for Strontium Clathrates, and it seems many people did not notice the missing zero.  The buy order for 1/20th, for example, did not fill out nearly as well and I assume it is because "103.00" looks very different from "2006.00" while "200.60" does not.

I don't really invest much time at all in this since time in a hauler is time I could be mining, and the profits on that are much higher than what I am able to do by only trading.

Been making a lot selling drones the last couple days. I'm up to 60 million so far, not doing bad. =D Thanks to everyone on here and in game that have been giving me pointers and ideas.

Edit: make that 70 million.

60 million ISK? God damn I wish I could break 5 and stay there. I suck.

T1 drones?

I am assuming so, yeah. 70M would be a good afternoon for T2 drones I think   :-D

Why didn't I ever try those?! (Probably because I was minmater and my drone skils were nil.)

It was T2 drones.

I gotta say, I am kicking ass at this. Big thanks all around to all the people who have been answering my noob questions. It's been paying off big time. For those interested, here's my networth progress since I started (rough numbers, give or take 5% on any of these):

12/03/06   5 mil
12/05/06   9.5 mil
12/06/06   14 mil
12/07/06   18 mil
12/08/06   22 mil
12/09/06   31.5 mil
12/10/06   48 mil
12/11/06   79 mil
12/12/06   120 mil

And the more you have, the faster it'll keep increasing...

You're just making drones and selling them?

Haven't been making anything. Just trading. This is a fresh character, less than two weeks old, so there's not much I can aside from trade really.

Keep working up your Trade skills, you're going to reach a point soon where you'll have to branch out into either other products or other regions.  Wholesale 4 and Day Trading 3 or 4 will be pretty essential then.

--Dave

Thankfully the new character creation system is awesome. My character came with Daytrading 4 out of the package and I've been using it quite a bit. I've already branched in buying and selling a few different goods so far and it is proving to be lucrative.

Something else you're going to need to watch out for: When you start moving cargos worth more than around 150M, you're going to become a target for suicide BS attacks in Empire.  At that point you're going to need either tanked T2 transports, or well-tanked Minmatar T1's.  You need to be able to take a volley of Cruise missles, about 2500 hp raw damage.  I lost a half-billion isk cargo of T2 modules learning that.

--Dave

Couldn't you train a hauler alt to handle that? As long as no one knew it was you, who'd bug the newb corp alt running around Empire?

I guess I need to explore the trading market....

Cargo scanners and passive targeting.  They'll set up with one guy in an Interceptor or AF scanning every industrial that comes through, when he finds one with a high-value cargo he passes the word to the BS pilot (usually a Raven, the character has been made just for this purpose and gets discarded when its security rating falls too far), and *blammo*, one shot takes you out.  Then another character in an industrial picks up your stuff (giving you clearance to attack them in your pod, good luck with that) and heads for the nearest station.  You're left with "kill rights" on a disposable character and they wind up with your stuff (what survives).  When you look at the "kills in last hour" starmap overlay and Kisogo, Rens, and Oursalaert are the big red spots, that's why.

--Dave

Yet another reason for me to transport things in a Kestrel with cargo expanders. Maybe I'll move up to an interceptor or covops for transport one day.

I'd fogotten about cargo scanners. I suppose my conservative nature actually helps here. I have the urge to find out EVERYTHING about something before I try it. I haven't tried trading yet -- beyond the "hey, this AB is worth 500k ISK, I should put it on the market rather than accept the 15k the station buyer is offering level.

I guess that's one reason I like EVE -- and liked SWG for that matter. I can switch directions, and all it costs me is time. No rerolling or anything like that. And with my job, and my school --- it's not uncommon for me to have four or five days when I'd be hard pressed to log on to switch skills, much less play. (I think I'm doing Science 5 now since I'm working support).

You wouldn't happen to know if there's a way to get detailed historical market data in EVE, would you? I know CCP dumps some stats, but I don't recall seeing that.

I use an Occator for moving high value stuff. Currently I just have the lows filled with nanofibers. Is that good enough or should I put on hardeners to handle these guys?

Detailed historical data like the graphs and datatables in the market views, or do you mean more detailed than that?

Good to know that about suicides. I didn't realize it was so prevalent. I had planned to move to T2 haulers asap anyway but now I have good reason.

Generally they avoid T2 transports, a stock Occator could take your typical newb-corper cruise barrage without dying (might dip into structure, would die if they were using T2 missles but that takes longer to train).  Mastodons are uncommon, so they still take pot-shots at mine occasionally because they don't recognize it as a T2 (with the same resists as a Vagabond, no less).  That I've noticed, it's claimed 4 suicide Ravens (over 5000 shield and minimum 40% resist).  Definitely want to shield-tank, save the lows for either speed mods or cargo expanders.

--Dave

I assume freigthers can surive most any attack before concord blows the aggresors away?

How much of a wrench does warp-to-zero throw into those pirates' tactics?

Some, I'm sure, but they'll catch you while you're trying to warp away from the gate rather than crawling to it, and a lot of people use autopilot.  Fully expanded industrials are a little bit slow to go into warp.  Definitely want to manually pilot through a major "hot zone" like Kisogo.

--Dave

I've been too impatient to use autopilot and I've been operating in a relatively small area so travel time hasn't been an issue.

I suck at Eve :(. You can get numbers like that, and I'm happy to get 3 million in a 1 shot deal that's not able to be repeated.

Yeah, but he's applying everything he earns back into the trade.  He's putting the 48 mil, then the 79 mil, then the 120 mil, in the form of goods, into a ship, and he's flying it around, vulnerable to suicide attacks in high sec, and gate camps in low sec.  He could lose it ALL in about 5 seconds flat.

That's not exactly true. I'm not really a hauler per se, though I do have to move goods a bit. At any given time about 40% of my networth is tied up in buy orders, 40% in goods that are in sell orders, and 20% in a combination of isk in my wallet or items I've recently acquired through buy orders that need to be moved a few jumps.

More detailed. I've been playing with financial data mining, and EVE looks like a very interesting place to attempt to apply it. I saw there was a "save to file" button on the Market somewhere -- I'll have to look into that.

Are there any good tutorials on Buy and Sell orders? I was looking into the contracts system and trying to figure out some of the mechanics that were available to traders.

I don't know anything about the contract system, but placing bull and sell orders on the market is pretty simple. If you want to buy an item, you go to it in the market and then there's a button for Place Buy Order. If you want to place a sell order, right click on the item in your hanger, sell, then go advanced. If you put it up for a price higher than any available buy orders, it will create a sell order out of it. With the skills available out of the box on my trader noob character I've been able to do everything I needed.

Okay, then I place sell orders all the time -- on a lot of higher-end loot (in terms of L2 missions -- not exactly multi-billion ISK stuff).

Buy orders can have a range associated with them, too, and this range is increased by skills.  By default, the range is "station only", meaning that your order will be visible everywhere, but they have to haul their goods to your station before being able to sell.  If you increase the range, they don't have to haul, but YOU do (you have to go pick up all the items that are all over the place, bits and pieces here and there depending on where everyone sold to you).

This is usually used to place blanket buy orders with way-below-the-market-average offers.  Buy battleships for 30 Mil ISK, for example.  A lot of people don't bother hauling their junk and just sell it for whatever's offered, and it's common that the only thing offered is one of these blanket orders.

The rest of the trade skills let you modify your orders without having to go to the station where you initiated them.  You can avoid actually going to Jita this way, by managing your Jita orders from some remote system at the edge of the region.  You can also manage your orders across multiple regions faster; just park yourself at a border between 2-3 regions, and you only have to hop once to modify your orders, instead of having to travel to all the trade hubs etc. 

Modifying orders enters into play when some competitor outbids/underbids you, and you have to re-price your orders to beat him.  It's nice to be able to do it without having to travel all over the place.

The art of re-selling involves not just looking at price histories, but also understanding the map / area / region, knowing where the trade hubs are, where the hunting spots are, where the gateways to 0.0 are.  The map helps somewhat, because you can color stars by faction, by how crowded the systems are, or by PvP, but you might also have to dig for high quality agents and see where they are located if you wanna sell modules to the mission crowd (and buy their "rares" locally at discount prices), or look at how many belts various systems have if you wanna serve the miners.

Make sure you get Broker Relations when messing with modifying orders. They like to take a big ole chunk out of your ass each time you adjust prices. (At least, upwards. They'll charge the minimum when adjusting downwards.)

Oh, I see. So I could place a "Buy order" (over a big area if I had the skill) for, say, Y-S8 boosters. Then anyone who looted one might go into the station, attempt to sell it, and note the "best region price" happened to be mine -- at say 250k ISK. They might sell it to me immediately, or they might place a sell order for 500k ISK (which is roughly the right price) and wait to see if anyone buys it.

I could then round up those Y-S8 boosters (sitting at stations all over the bloody place) and place a big sell order for, say, 400k. I'd make 150k per booster, and undercut most of the looters. But I'd have to collect them all (or, if I had the skills, issue the sell order remotely).

Okay, now this is making sense.

When you find a good unexploited market niche, exponential growth until you fill it is normal.  Most of the largest niches are highly competitive, however.  For example, it's hard to make money on minerals arbitrage on a large scale, because the unexploited niches are all 3rd tier systems with comparatively low volumes.  You can make some decent cash there, but it takes a lot of capital to eke out a decent profit for your time (and a freighter for the cheap, high-bulk stuff like Mexallon and below).

I happened to find an area last night where a surplus of Nocxium had built up, almost 4 million units at prices of 450-550 p/u (Jita price is 650+ right now).  Two fully loaded Mastodons and a night's sleep later, I was 500M isk richer.  Money makes money, I could take advantage of that opportunity because I was sitting on nearly 2B in cash I've been saving for a Carrier, and had two characters with highly-expanded T2 transports (over 100M each, 200M when I put them together).  My actual time investment was maybe 20 minutes, the rest was spent autopiloting while watching TV in the other room or sleeping while the sell orders were filled.

Broker Relations (lowered broker fees for setting orders) and Accounting (reduced sales taxes) do tend to pay for themselves once you're moving large amounts of cash around.

There are various methods of good, old-fashioned market manipulation, like buying up all the goods of a type in a region under a given price and then repricing them, but they take more time actually at the computer than I am willing to commit.  I prefer casting a wide net for good deals on high-value-density goods.

Intra-region trade is generally where the best, most repeatable profits come from.

--Dave

I've been branching out pretty much since day two of my drone trading. It's been a GREAT base income but my other trades have greatly overtaken it at this point. For me so far the trick has been coninually tapping new items. I've been sticking to the same markets so far though. Each day I add 2-4 items to my list of things I trade and I am quickly approaching my current cap on orders. =( But I'm also getting rich so no sadfaces there.

I was just wondering which stats are best for a trader to have up there?

Charisma higher than most bother with helps, but you don't need a great deal of SP investment for all the useful trade skills.  Beyond that, you're going to need to fly those T2 transports, and maybe freighters someday, so all the usual suspects.  Shave a couple of points off the Perception/Willpower of your typical build and put them in Charisma, and you're fine.

--Dave

The "save to file" thing almost gave me enough impetus to write a perl script to parse that into something useful.  Almost.

I'm going to have to see what it does, but I don't think I can get enough data to be useful -- not without more effort than I care to make at the moment. I bet there's the makings of a good paper in that, though. Analysis of the EVE market -- whether from an ecomomic perspective or a data mining perspective -- would be damn interesting.

I think the devs have mentioned more than once that some economic students have done projects/papers on it. 

The eve-central.com market tells you when buy orders are above sell orders, but I'd rather know when buy orders that have been filled are very far from sell orders that get filled (i.e. doing what Trouble is doing).

The save to file button only appears when you pick 1 item to look at, on the market (example:  Bantam Frigate).  It doesn't appear for a category of items (example:  Caldari Frigates), or broader categories (example: Ships).  It exports all the prices you see (basically all the sale orders and all the buy orders for Bantam Frigate) to a comma-delimited text file.


The stationID, regionID, solarSystemID are probably the internal database numbers that CCP uses, and they have exported their Revelations data already.  So, if you want to see names such as Jita on the thing, you'll have to pull them out of the official CCP exports and correlate them into these text files.  Or something.

This (http://eve-files.com/dl/76749) is what that looks like, in-game.

In any case, you will only be able to export the data for one item in one region per click of the button.

Crud. I need to create the EVE S&P. :)

Blah I'm going to start hitting my active orders cap. I didn't realize I'd hit it so quick. This is going to put a stop on my exponential growth for a few weeks while I train up to get Wholesale. That makes me sad. =(

I don't feel your pain. Suck it up! =P

You could always make another trade character and let him handle some orders couldn't you?

In the pantheon of geniuses you will be painted standing slightly apart and above the rest, chatting to casually to God.  That's not in green, either.  To the character generator!

Actually I'm pretty sure there would be no reason that wouldn't work. Genius!

Do any of you guys use marketing (http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/skillsaccessories/skills/trade/16598.asp)? I've been debating picking it up for a while now but haven't done so.

I'm probably going to be picking that and some other remote trading skills up once I finish Astromet 5 and get Scientific Networking up to 3 or 4. I could do a lot more with buy and sell orders if I didn't have to fly all over creation.

It's not tremendously useful, but you wind up having to train it to level 2 for Wholesale and 4 for Tycoon.

--Dave

The only time I get any use out of it is when I'm cleaning up old stations I come across. It's handy to be able to sell old junk without actually having to go there.

I trained it up just to get rid of junk. It lets you be a lot more messy.

I picked it up yesterday because it was the pre-req for some other stuff, as Mahrin said. I still haven't trained it -- I just got science up to 5 and now need to go play "Find the R&D Agents" when I get a chance. (Too much work lately -- no time for EVE).

My combat skills are more than sufficient for the L2 missions, so I'm sort of trying to investigate research and trading for the moment -- see if I can put together something fun to do when I don't feel like running missions.

At the moment, I'm still studying the Verge market trying to figure out where I to focus my efforts.

I use marketing a lot, but that might be because I operate in a small cluster of systems. Normally, I am constrained by the tritanium available, so I make the ships where it is. What I can do then is to run the BPCs around and set up the manufacturing, and then from remotely deliver the ships and sell them where they were made.

I have a general question. How much do people in 0.0 make, just roughly speaking. I keep hearing that people in 0.0 make "lots" but I guess I have no idea what the scale of it is, or even what the average person in empire makes either. I'm just curious what the differential is.

It varies a lot, but you can find systems where the rats are worth 900k-1.5 million and if you are in a BS you can take them down by yourself. Farming this can net you 50 million an hour just ratting if you know to chain them and you are left alone. Loot is also good, and you can mine high-value ore, which pays at least as well if I remember correctly. If you are not at least in a battlecruiser, you cannot do much by yourself, though.

Some places there are good manufacturing/trading opportunities as well - a combination of rich people and not so great markets makes the margins huge, although many 0.0 corps and alliances are pretty good at supplying their own members.

There is lots of money to be made manufacturing in 0.0. But the risks way out weigh the rewards unless your a part of a large organization.

I think I'll be able to make more in empire for now.

Heh, made 9 mil yesterday, lost 8 mil today.  :-(

0.0 complexes, 6/10's and above, tend to average hundreds of millions per run in loot, as well.  Very random, one time you might make nearly nothing, the next over a billion.  One of the biggest expenses in T2 manufacture is the cost of fuel for the POS's you do the reactions in, 0.0 alliances can claim sovereignty of a system and reduce those costs by 25%.

The largest collective asset in a 0.0 region is zydrine and megacyte yielding ores.  An organized minging op with 10-15 participants can pull in a billion or two an hour (figure 100M each).  And yes, people in 0.0 do routinely throw around tens and hundreds of millions, a single fleet battle generally involves billions in losses (not even one with capital ship losses, at 200-250M a ship losing your sniper BS group can be painful).  0.0 is high-risk, high-gain, boomtown frontier stuff.

--Dave

I'll have to figure out what trading opportunities there are in 0.0. My goal is to make all my money through trading, which means no mining, no hunting, and no manufacturing. It seems it'll be a bit more difficult to find trade opportunities in 0.0 due to the fact that the control of it is fractured over so many groups, and if I get in with one I'll be an enemy to others.

I think I've reached near the maximum of the niche I'm in and competition seems to be a little more fierce today than it has in the past, though maybe just a bad day. I hit 200 million in profits yesterday pushing me to 800 million total net worth. I need to find something new to exploit.

If you're making 200M a day in profits, I'd ride that for a while and build up a fat cash position while you figure out where to go next.  Market is fluxing heavily right now as everyone reacts to Revelations.

As for 0.0 markets, down in Providence and central Catch they've got a pretty good open market going with Ushra 'Khan, ISS, and IAC (although we're currently trying to help ISS blow IAC away, their stations will be open again one way or another), and there's always the ISS stations (anyone can dock there as long as they haven't gotten on ISS's shit list).  Otherwise, try to get into a 0.0 alliance and build their market (it takes some very heavy lifting to create a full market in 0.0, but it's very profitable once you have, even allowing for competition emerging).

--Dave

I've been doing a lot of research this whole 0.0 thing out. I saw the ISS stations how they're open to the public. I'm assuming a lot of outposts are not available to the public and that there aren't many npc stations in 0.0 either. There's an ISS station in my neck of the woods and I was planning to make a visit here shortly to see if I find anything interesting on the market...ISS Cassini I think it is. I've thought about and been researching whether I should join a 0.0 alliance as a trader. There's a lot of ins an outs with that and I'm still trying to get my head around it all, but it's definitely a possibility. I'm still mostly in "fact finding" mode despite the fact that I'm making 200 million a day off my "pet" project.

Gah, how much time per day do you spend logged in? If I could make 5M/day I'd never rat again. I think my problem has been my attempts to make the maximum profit on a particular transaction which leads to very slow turnarounds. I gotta get more velocity. I have like 90M worth of morphite just sitting there not selling. I ought to liquidate half of it and move on.

I haven't had anything better to do so I'm logged in a lot, but my actual main business only takes like three hours a day. The rest is semi-afk or doing market resarch trying to find my next market. I haven't found it yet. =(

As for right now, I'm in the ISS Cassini and prices are extremely high for everything. Even 0.0 minerals which I figured would be lower here are also more expensive. The market also seems very inactive. I could make money hauling things out here from empire assuming someone would buy it. I figured I'd be sneaking stuff in from 0.0 to empire but not from the stuff I've seen here. I HAVE seen a decent amount of named items in the contract system that might be worth buying here and selling in Jita, but I have no plans to do that until I can fly a Covert Ops ship with a cloaking device.

0.0 minerals are either really cheap or really expensive, depending on the health of the local industrial base.  Figure that any obvious opportunities, somebody is already going to be on them (selling/buying at ISS is swimming with the sharks).  Coverts and Blockade Runners are a neccessity.  You can make an absolute *killing* bringing in freighters, but you need a big escort just to deal with ordinary pirate threats, and then someone may decide you're a potential strategic threat and steamroll you (or you might just get in the way of someone else's fleet movements).

--Dave

I see my future in hauling faction components and 0.0 minerals into empire in a covert ops or recon ship. Just need the training and to find the markets...

If I have a large isk sell order, is it cheaper to cancel the order than to buy the stuff myself, or is it identical? As I recall, you pay a broker fee when the sell order is set up which is nonrefundable, and a station tax which is imposed when someone buys your stuff. So I believe it is cheaper to cancel the order than buy the stuff myself because you save on tax. Is that right?

Yes, it's cheaper to cancel the order.  On the other hand, you sometimes want to fill the order, if you're trying to manipulate the regional average for that item so your price looks more reasonable.

--Dave

Let's get some new hot trading leads! :awesome_for_real:

Necro for realz!

What's going on with the T2 building materials market and mineral prices?  No chance to play for a week or two and look for myself.  :uhrr:

Damn, so it's so sad Mahrin doesn't play anymore:(

Where did Mahrin's fortune go? :)

That's a bloody good question, actually.

Apparently the t2 advanced material market is seeing prices for certain goods doubling or tripling. 

Here's hoping it keeps going up.  :grin:

Apparently entire POS mining industry got bugged grinding production to stop.

So, production isn't working, and from the other thread, PVP'ing isn't working?  What's left?

Missions?   :awesome_for_real:

PVPing is working fine, and POS war has actually been back for over 24 hours.

...those which haven't been exploded yet, of course.  :oh_i_see:

Indeed. I have 30b of public funds invested in it and a few billion of my own. Things are looking up. ;)

When I started this game I imagined my spaceship going pew pew pew.  Now I realize there is a whole industrial/trading/hauling side of things that is almost just as big.

Maybe I started training the wrong skills.

I want to buy stock in Trouble's corp.

It's too late, all the shares sold out months ago.  :grin:

Time for a corporate takeover!  Who's with me?

....oh, no one.

Will 2.5mil ISK but you out?

I imagine that 2.5m doesn't even cover the tax on a lot (all?) of Trouble's transactions.  :hello_kitty:

Trouble, any suggestions on how soon to dump t2 building materials?  Or would that be telling?

I was always big into playing the auction house in WoW, I can't wait to dive deeper into the much more in-depth EvE economy.

From my perspective as a EVE newb I'm gonna lay down analogy.

WOW AH is to a lemonade stand
as
EVE Economy is to the NASDQ

A lot of stuff is good to dump right now. Factors right now are driving many prices up beyond what they should have been and they will level off at some point over the next few weeks probably. They will no doubt stabilize higher than they were pre-patch, but some prices are just insanity right now.

Do you have spreadsheets with current figures of items and all that crap to manage your cash empire and what to sell these days? What's your total net worth  anyway? It sounds like you could finance wars, personally.

All my stuff is in disarray at the moment due to my old computer dying.

Coming back to 3 weeks of trade orders gone wild is quite painful. Especially when a major patch came out in the interim. Assuming I can liquidate this 12b in inventory that was purchased in that time period, my networth will be a little over 22b. I stand to make about 5b here shortly upon the completion of liquidation of the IPO I launched as well. With this amount of money it's becoming harder and harder to find ways to invest it all and get a decent return rate.

That's the problem I've run into as well. It seems like the only way to invest serious amounts of money is by trusting people enough to invest in their IPOs and that's just asking to be ripped off as far as I can tell.

What about carrier/dread/freighter BPO copying?  With an the BPO in an office near an empire POS the risk is limited to losing the remaining time of a run, after all.

I could do that I guess. It's just that it's such a huge investment and if too many people get into the act the prices will drop and it won't pay off. It's an idea though.

Invest in a Vindicator for me, please? :)

I suppose now,  a year after I made this thread, it's time to put my own Hot Trade Leads in. I've got three, although two aren't technically trading.

1.) This is how I made a good chunk of my money. Very simple. Trading top end named modules (IE mission loot). I buy in mission hubs and sell in Jita. The competition is fierce but so are the margins. The two biggest mission hub complexes are the Motsu neighborhood and the Dodixie neighborhood. I placed 2 jump orders in Motsu, which covers Saila, Aramchi, and Isenairos. That covers 5 big mission stations, Motsu having by far the biggest one. Two jumps from Dodixie reaches Aunia and one or two other big ones.

I really had no idea what modules were big. Simply, I went down the entire list of Ship Equipment, from top to bottom, with two accounts and compared prices. If you don't know what the best item of a particular type is, go to its info, click on Variations tab, click compared, check "Meta Level" on the left list, then sort by Meta Level. You're looking for Meta Levels 1-4. Level 5 is the Tech 2 variant, level 4 is usually the best named version. Learning what items have the margin and volume is more art than science, but generally you're looking for at least 30% and 200k profit margin. After a few dredges through the entire list you'll have a feel for what items are popular and what are garbage. Doing this I could easily have 3-5 billion on escrow with upwards of 15 billion to cover, so there's a lot of room for growth.

Competition IS fierce. You generally want to cover a large breadth of items. You'll get outbid on a lot of them quickly, but hopefully you'll get stuff sold to you and sometimes you'll have an item uncontested for a few days.

2.) Invention. If you play a lot, there's a LOT of money to be made in module invention. The trick is that there's so many items to choose from it's hard to know what's worth it. Well I'm going to tell you! After exhaustive studies and calculations with spreadsheets, the obvious answer is true. Items with the most volume sold daily in Jita have the best margin, AND are easier to sell. The BEST item is Expanded Cargohold II. Daily volume in jita averages around 3000 units. My spreadsheet tells me with current datacore prices and sell prices, you can make about 800k profit per unit. This was how much I made a couple months ago when I was making them hardcore. Build cost is 800k, sell price is 1.6m. That's basically unprecedented for a manufactured item, but that margin has been steady for the 4 months or so I've been watching the market. Prices were a bit higher before (1.2 m build, 2m sell) but datacore prices went down, margin stayed the same.

At the peak of my invention business I was building 600 units per day. That's with 4 science/industry characters. Two doing full time blueprint copyring, two doing full time invention, three doing full time building. Two batches a day. That's 400m profit a day. The downside is the invention jobs take an hour and 15 minutes so you need to be there all day switching the jobs out. Pain in the ass which is why I don't do it anymore.

To get into this you're going to need capital. You will need your own research POS to keep up with all the jobs. You will need a character (or characters) with a large number of science and manufacturing skills.

3.) Reaction POS chain. This is one I haven't done yet but seriously considering it. Basically, you buy raw moon materials off the market, run them through your POS chain of reactors, and sell the final product, an advanced material. I've calculated that if you run a full reaction chain for Ferrogel starting with raw materials you can make about 3 billion a month profit. You'll need 4 large POses, a freighter, and a few billion in capital. These POSes need to be in 0.3 space or lower, so finding a suitable location is key. This requires moving materials from the basic reactors to the advanced ones and bringing in raw materials once every 8 days, taking out finished product every 14 days, and refueling every 18 days. Relatively hands off compared to my other methods of money making.


I have other things I do but these three are the simplest and most reliable ways of making ISK that I have done or come up with.

There's a 0.3 in amarr space (Domain) surrounded by 0.5+. Reyi. Alot of russians there.

I spent a few full days just researching what systems would be best to set up that type of operation in. I came up with a good few candidates, but I'll keep those private as I haven't yet exploited the opportunity.  :grin: There's actually very few systems that meet my criteria in all of empire and it took a lot of work to find them.

So, how exactly are you going to protect your investment without being part of a large corporation/alliance?

If you are looking for a partnership, PM me... I have some options. I have some decent capital to work with as well.

Well that's part of the reason I haven't done it already. I've talked to some people and the general consensus is that if your moon doesn't have any minerals and you put a modicum of defense on it it's very unlikely people will mess with it. I've chosen systems that are out of the way while being near empire so randoms will be less likely to take a liking to the moons I choose. But ultimately it basically comes down to security through obscurity; just hope no one decides to screw with me. They most likely won't, and if they do there's not much I can do about it. That said, with even minimal security, cap ships will most likely be needed to take out a POS.

Even with a POS on a mineral moon in 0.3, we didn't really have anyone mess with it.

Every once in a while, somebody will try to run an extortion racket on reaction chains, putting them in reinforced and threatening to kill them off.  It always fails in the end because either the targets pick up and move rather than pay, or they hit someone who is actually an alt for a 0.0 corp/alliance and get their ass kicked.  Other than that, your biggest risk is getting a freighter popped (takes a lot of manhours to run a reaction chain without a freighter).

--Dave

Yeah that's really my biggest concern. At current prices a month's worth of raw materials is over 8 billion. That's a surefire way to get your freighter blown up. Hopefully Dysprosium and Promethium will come down in price, thus lowering the risk. Either way it'll have to be broken down into smaller loads to be transported safely.

Like Slayerik, if you're looking for investors, I have a few billion to spare. Either pm me or evemail my ingame toon Joran Nexus.

Has anyone done the math on the best race/bloodline to train for frighter hauling? EveMON's skill planner gives me skill suggestions and makes it easy to tell if/how much to train learning skills, but I haven't found a concise answer on which race/bloodline to start out as.

If you are going to be doing a lot of spaceship command stuff, obviously Perception is the trait you want (will secondary I believe)

I think that Caldari Civire are pretty good IIRC.

At the moment I have enough to finance the operation myself. Provided this "trial" run goes well I may be interested in expanding at which point I could probably use investment.

Trade jobs from the eyes of a newbie:

Courier contracts: These are pretty good granted that you can get someone to loan about 50million for most collateral payments. You can view the contents of the packages to satisfy your curiosity on what other players use. I don't even know yet if you're allowed to use some the modules inside to see if they fit on your ship. It's my dream to play around with things that don't belong to me. It's not like you can break anything! Many packages are small enough for a frigate to carry, some are over 5000m3, requiring a better industrial ship than mark I. 300k for a 6 jump haul? Very good for a new player not yet bored out of his skull.

Afk mission mining: I do this simply because it's really safe. Many missions have rooms with tons of good 10% asteroids. Park your industrial next to them, activate your mining laser and go watch Battlestar Galactica. It's slow, no very profitable, but with good mining and refining skills it's still decent for when you're close to your computer all day, as it only requiers to dump the ore in a station and come back. Daily downtime wipes the deadspaces if the mission has been completed, if not they reappear with the same NPC rats, so you have to clear those again every time after daily downtime. I make about 200k an hour doing this. Having a vague estimate of how fast your cargohold fills up and a timer of some sort is good. I use my mobile phone.

Tech II trading: More complicated than the latter two. Requiers two accounts for ease, one preferably a hauler character and the other with penty of trade skills. Send the hauler character to Jita, the trader to another trading hub, like Amarr, Agil, Oursulaert, Rens or whatever you can find for yourself. Look at the market with both characters and type "II" in the search to get started on comparing the prices of Tech II modules. Find something you can sell fast, even though you might not yet know what that is. Expanded Cargohold II is the most popular, hence it should give a good return, but many traders are aware of this already. If you are hauling high priced modules, try not the let the broker's fee and transaction tax eat most of your profit. Over 200k ISK margin with these should start making it worth it.

NB: If you're reckless like me you will just use your industrial, which is easy prey for kamikaze pilots. I'd friendlily recommend a cruiser, most likely with armor and hull hardeners. They have enough cargo space for those profitable Tech II goods. Later, if you devote yourself to hauling enough and get a freighter, which I'm aiming for personally, then you can even start trading Tech II ships! Or if you're daring enough at that point start hauling things into zerozero, but that's a whole subject I have no experience in.

Skill book training: This is rather silly, but fun for a newbie. Buy a lot of those low cost, high need secondary skillbooks from Empire and haul them into 0.0 with a shuttle piloted by a trader alt. They will get sold if you don't ask too much for them.

Rig manufacturing: Newbie manufacturers who can get their hands on a rig BPO can start their career well just by first putting component buy orders in popular mission hubs. Use the parts bought off the markets to manufacture rigs and sell them. It's easy and safe, plus millions should follow.

What I've learned as a new player is that the best source of income comes from the laziness of those much wealthier than you :P

very true....i spent like 5 mil today on a best named remote armor rep, just cause...hell, thats 3 battleship kills in venal.

I just completed my first delivery of raw materials. Leaving jita with 4.5b in cargo in a freighter is a hell of a rush.

I wish I could feel some of that adrenaline. It's wicked to be hauling expensive stuff in low security. Yesterday on the way to a remote corner bordering Empire I passed several containers with gate-camp warnings written on them, a Badger II's looted wreck and a Raven sitting under a jumpgate waiting for prey. All inside the same 10 minutes.

Flying a T2 Astarte does it for me... fuckers are 180 mil these days, before rigs and fit.

Flying between 1.0 and .7 is pretty safe even in a freighter. When we do our freighter ganks, its always in .5 cause concord rapes our face.

I had to go through a couple 0.5 systems but they're pretty much off the beaten path.

Tell me you at least have an alt scout!

I do, I didn't see any large collections of suicide looking people.

For half a year at least, I used a T2 indy to transport 1-1.5 billion worth of high-end minerals from a near-0.0 system to a hub a couple of times a month. The route took me through a 0.3 system, but that was rarely a problem. I'd scout that one first. However, once another corp declared war on my corp, and I had some guy in a BC racing me from gate to gate in Empire, getting the occasional shot off before I jumped through the next gate. Luckily, he never managed to scramble and jam me before I got away. The T2 indies can tank a bit, but it was adrenalin inducing for sure :D.