Trading 203: Mission Hub Stocking

Overview

This guide is indented to use a Highsec mission hub as a trading example.

I wanted to use a concrete example and disclose methods that I have developed over the past few years on how to seek out items to trade. Every trader has a technique, and I am no different. The following process is meant to guide you through the technique of selecting an item and gauging its profit potential.

Example

Product Source: Jita
Product Destination: Mission Hub of Dodixie
Weekday 02:00 Eve Time population: 349 Pilots
Item: Cybernetic Subprocessor – Basic

Item Selection

Every market is different so you need to due your due diligence.

For mission runners you might want to look at common mission ships such as the Raven or Dominix. Think about the entire package beyond the ship. Mission runners will need ammo, rigs, drones, and salvage equipment. In a PVP market, you will want to take a look at High Volume PVP Items.

For this trading example I picked a very common item. Almost all pilots have, at any given time, a Cybernetic Subprocessor of any grade in their head to improve training time.

The Market Window

The purpose of scanning the market window is to give you a ‘feel’ for the item.

Is obvious manipulation attempt obvious? Is the volume so low that you should not bother trading the item? Using this tool will help you weed out the error prone trades and focus your efforts.

I have a long list of items to browse through ranging from modules, ships, ammo, to even special high meta items. When you have 200 items to review, you should only be spending 5-10 seconds on each item to get a feel for the market. Quickly work down through your Quickbar in both regions, comparing results.

Market Window Using the Example

1. Price Trend

The Jita price has been rather stable over the past few months. Yes, there was a price increase from ~6.5 to around 8 M but remember that LP payouts were adjusted in a previous patch so I would not worry about the price raise to 8. Consider it a patch market blip.

The market in Dodixie is more volatile, as expected; a smaller group of traders is stocking the market and trying to make a profit. The range and period of the price waves don’t seem to bother me.

2. Volume

Rough guesstimation shows that around 50 move a day in Dodixie with larger spikes when traders are buying out the market to raise prices.

You can clearly see two major spikes in the Dodixie market where the price was ‘reset’ as I call it. This is normal behavior and I see it across the board in Highsec, Lowsec, and Nullsec. A larger trader will buyout all the items to a certain price threshold and then attempt to sell off stock at that newly established price. If your items were bought out at a profit, then you can ride the wave and restock at the new price hoping that it doesn’t crash back down (I’ll detail this process later).

3. Market Window Conclusion

Both the trends and volume pass the sanity check for me on this item. At this point I would look to use further tools to gauge profit potential.

Spreadsheet Time

Since our implant passes a sanity check, you can move on into more number work to see the item’s true potential.

1. Cut and paste a month worth of history from Eve into Excel. Ignore the most recent trading day as the numbers are not final and will throw off your calculations.

2. Do a find and replace on “ISK” to “” to get that extraneous text out of your sheet.

3. Adjust column size and add column headers. You should have something that looks like this.

Getting Useful Data

1. If you SUM the Quantity column, you can get a view into how many move in the region in a month.

For this implant we are are looking at 1,702 items/month. This figure will help you estimate how much you should buy at your source system. Based on your scale, you can buy a full month of items or small increments as liquidity allows.

Since a full month of implants to stock this region would come out to 13.694 B at Jita sell prices, you will opt for small portions.

2. Gauging profit potential is rather easy. Take the current Jita price and the last average price you have in Dodixie. Use the movement of the region of the month

(Jita Price – Dodixie Price) * Movement/Month = Region Movement/Month

3. The region potential doesn’t show you the volume in the system that will be your focus. For this you look at the Market Data tab to see where the orders are located.

We can see that the majority are concentrated in Dodixie with a smaller concentration located in Bourynes. This informs me that the majority of trades are going to be concentrated in the Dodixie IX – Moon 20 station. This is where you should setup shop.

Closing Notes

Hopefully my method will help you see how to operate and fine tune your operation. I haven’t touched on logistics or item diversification — I have to save topics for other posts.