Hot Trading Leads

[Draegan]

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.

[bhodi]

I want to buy stock in Trouble's corp.

[Trouble]

I want to buy stock in Trouble's corp.

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

[Thrawn]

I want to buy stock in Trouble's corp.

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

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

....oh, no one.

Will 2.5mil ISK but you out?

[Raging Turtle]

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

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

[Thrawn]

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.

[Draegan]

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

[Trouble]

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Trouble]

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

[Trouble]

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.

[Reg]

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.

[Endie]

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.

[Reg]

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.

[Slayerik]

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.

Invest in a Vindicator for me, please? :)

[Trouble]

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.

[sanctuary]

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

[Trouble]

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.  There's actually very few systems that meet my criteria in all of empire and it took a lot of work to find them.

[JoeTF]

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

[Slayerik]

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

[Trouble]

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

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.

[Viin]

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

[MahrinSkel]

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

[Trouble]

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.

[sanctuary]

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[Slayerik]

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.

[Trouble]

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.

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.

[Gets]

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

[Slayerik]

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

[Trouble]

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.

[Gets]

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.

[Slayerik]

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.

[Trouble]

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

[Endie]

Tell me you at least have an alt scout!