Trading 205: Regional Arbitrage
Posted: 2014-06-26 Filed under: market 2 CommentsOverview
One of my favorite trading techniques is to buy items in one area and sell them in another area at an increased price. Source your goods in Jita or Amarr and sell them in another area that has a unique trait. What is a unique trait? Well, some examples are systems that are hard to reach, high traffic areas that border lowsec/nullsec, alliance home systems, known centers for PVP activity, or major PVE areas.
Gathering Data
The following will demonstrate how to construct a spreadsheet to gauge market potential.
- Jita = Price in Jita
- Target = Price at target station
- Difference = Jita – Traget
- Margin = ((Target/Jita)-1)*100
- Move =
- Switch to the Price History Tab in the Eve client
- Switch to 3 Months
- Select the Table view
- Select all the data with Ctrl + A
- Paste into your spreadsheet program
- Create a cell that has an Average of the Quantity column
- Use this number for the Move(d) value
- Potential(d) = Difference * Move(d)
- Move(m) = Move(d) * 30
- Potential(m) = Potential(d) * 30
Filtering Items
As you develop your spreadsheet, you can start to notice outliers. Certain items will have nice margins, but will never move. Some items may move, but have a poor return. It is your goal to find the ones that have good movement with a nice return.
Performance
I wanted to test out my market research so I setup shop in a station and started to import items. In my test region, I’m successfully getting 59% of the total traffic for the region given the items I am targeting bringing in on average 103.8 M profit/day, or around 3.1 B/month.
k162space 
Yes – inter-regional trading i have found to be a real winner. I stick to the slow moving (selling 2 a day to 1 a week) but high margin items to earn my living. I have a buyer in Jita and sellers in the other trade hubs. If i log on for 45 minutes a day for under half the month i can earn profits of 10bn that month.
With the historical pricing data being regional, how does a product selling in Region 1 at a profitable price compared to Jita translate into sales at a specific station? You mention setting up shop at a station and also looking for areas (unsure whether this is region or system or station) of uniqueness but given that uniqueness, it is natural that certain items in a region will sell best at Station 1 vs. others at Station 2, etc. By the same notion, an item selling in Station 2 might be completely unprofitable due at Station 1 making the regional historical data a bit misleading when it comes to setting up shop?