It takes ISK to make ISK

Posted: 2011-02-08 | Author: | Filed under: market | Tags: , , , , | 5 Comments

Here’s a description of 30 days of trading activity:

+41.02 B Gross
-0.227 B Taxes
-0.378 B Broker Fees

= +40.415 B Net – Purchases = +7.684 B Profit / Month

Custom Wallet Manager

Posted: 2011-01-21 | Author: | Filed under: market | Tags: , | 23 Comments

A few months ago, a corp mate and I started trading and we needed a centralized method of monitoring our activity. We tried a few programs such as eve commander, but we wanted more out of the system.  My corp mate James has helped me design and code up a custom wallet manager.

James picked the framework, introduced me to the coding methodology, and wrote a lot of the database queries given his strong programming background. I helped out by defining what we should report on, what stats were the most valuable, and a little theme design.

What we have now is a pretty solid beta of our wallet program. We do not currently have any plans to publicly release the code, but things might change as we finalize the project.

Overview

ISK Movement – Income, taxes, and broker fees
API – Timer update stats for API feed
Characters – summary of wallets
Movers – top 30 items sorted by profit for the past month

Transactions

Shows where, to who, and how much for each item.

 

Item Report

See how each item is performing.

Stock Report

Custom defined groups (fuel, Battleships, etc)
Lists if you have any orders for that item including remaining / total of the original order
Volume that has sold over the past 30 days
Profit for that item over the past 30 days

Profit Report

1 day, 5 day, and 20 day averages

Sale and Volume Report

2 Month Trading Update

Posted: 2010-12-28 | Author: | Filed under: market | Tags: , | 5 Comments

Things have been going really well in tradingland. My partner and I have written a custom wallet site that pulls in our data from the Eve API based on the Yii framework.

We’ve developed some nice graphs to show historical sales data, reports on the top items, and how well certain groups (Battleships, Fuel, etc) are selling.

Sample Item Graph

2 Month Profit Graph in M of ISK

Liquid ISK: 5.4 B
Freighters and ship assets: 5.53 B
Character 1 Sell Orders: 6.18 B
Character 2 Sell Orders: 1.42 B

Net Worth: 18.53 B

Trading 102: Location, Location, Location

Posted: 2010-11-15 | Author: | Filed under: industry, market, ships | Tags: , , | 4 Comments

You want to be close to the ocean? That’s 11% more. Close to three subway stops? That’s 9% more on the asking price. With trading, just as with real estate, location matters.

People go to Jita because it is the place for items. But why do people flock to Jita?

  • Price: the volume is high and the margins small, so the price of the items will always be very competitive. Whenever reaction numbers are adjusted or new modules/ships released, this is the fastest market to adjust to the new price.
  • Volume: if I put a buy or sell order up, it should sell faster than any other location in Eve due to the sheer amount of trading volume that occurs in Jita. Now do keep in mind that high volume means that a lot of other traders are also working in the same market. Don’t be surprised to see your order get undercut by 0.01 ISK within a few minutes.

In this post I want to describe what happens at the “T2” and “T3” markets as I call them. What do the price and volume look like is other areas?

If you are a visual learner like me, the above infographic should explain it all. In the other markets, the volume decreases while the margins increase.

These volume and margin differences mean that you can make money. Take mission runners for example. These are people that run L4 missions one after the other. When they get a stockpile of salvaged loot, they will most often reprocess it and sell it right at the station.

Take advantage of this laziness. Put up buy orders for modules and minerals and when they stockpile, haul them to Jita to sell. What else do missioners need? Ships, modules, guns, and ammo! Load up Excel and take a look at the price differences between Jita and your test market.

As always, research your market before investing. Mission runners are just one example of a location differential that you can exploit.

Trading 101: An Introduction to the Basics

Posted: 2010-11-08 | Author: | Filed under: market | Tags: , , | 12 Comments

Time brings change; careers and interests change over time in Eve as they do within all our lives.

I started my Eve career off mining in highsec, then lowsec, then mining in WH space. Later on I moved to nullsec and recently trading has peaked my interests. Below are some general tips that hopefully will spark your interest in trading or, if you are an already established trader, will help you refine your skills.

Blake’s Advice for Trading:

  1. Review the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition (yes, I have seen every episode of ST:TNG).
  2. Buy low, sell high.
  3. Find a market. This can be T1, T2, meta, fuel, PI, ships, etc within highsec, lowsec, a mission hub, a nullsec market (they do exist!). Recently, Chribba took sov in Providence to make 9UY4-H a open trading station.
  4. Get your Accounting and Broker Relations skills to IV to reduce taxes.
  5. Have some start-up capital,  any amount will do. I started with 2 B.
  6. Watch the Market Forum on eveonline.com for anything written or commented by Akita T.
  7. Beware of advice on the Market forum due to people wishing to artificially inflate a product.
  8. It is not called Spreadsheets in Space for nothing, get Excel (or Open Office for you people) open and start your research.
  9. Use a program to track your profits. I use Eve Trader since it can aggregate multiple wallets and produce pretty graphs. The original project has been abandoned; however, due to the open source of the code, the project has been picked up and had been updated. Not all features work, but the core ones of aggregating multiple wallets and doing the math (sell – buy – taxes = profit) work. Updated project here.
  10. Minimize Jita local. It is terrible and will give you a headache.
  11. If you are wardc’d, use Red Frog Freight to move your goods around. It costs me around 5M to move up to 900,000 m3 13 jumps with a max of 1B collateral.
  12. Get at least two monitors. You will want to have your Jita/Amarr alt on one screen, your research, and your new market on the other screen.

So how am I doing?

I’ve been trading in a new market for the past 22 days and am averaging 62.4 M / day in profit.

Want to know more? Send me any amount of ISK and I will send you double back!

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