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!

The Future of Guidance Systems

Posted: 2010-10-12 | Author: | Filed under: market | 5 Comments

Over the past few months, I have become involved in the trading aspect of Eve. The change of NPC seeded items into player made ones via the PI method has fascinated me. The infinite supply has been removed and now the market is open.

Note: This information is based on my own research and as such, your results may vary.

Quick Research:

  1. Average daily consumption at around 373,000 units/day pre-Tyrannis
  2. Total of large market buyout at NPC prices that occurred before Tyrannis launch at around 162,951,000 units over 10 days (wild!). Reports indicate that Goons were the major purchaser.
  3. Estimated date for stockpile to return to normal: 407 days (~ June/July 2011)

Right now it costs about 25,987 ISK to make 1 Guidance System via the PI mechanics so I hope that you are not producing them and selling on the open market.

The Forge, October 12, 2010

Predictions:

Price of Guidance Systems will slowly climb up and crash as people who have stockpiled millions of units take profits. Eventually when the pre-Tyrannis stockpiles run out, we will see the price climb to the expected 25,000 ISK.

Questions:

Q. Are you posting this information in an attempt to manipulate the market to cause a short-term spike to take some profits?

A. Nope. If you had read my blog at all, you know that it is all about sharing information. I started by sharing my experiences in WH space to help other people understand the mechanics.

Q. How did you arrive at the 25,000 ISK/unit value?

A. I used the price of the Tier 1 Products (P1) in my estimation as they have reached a stable value over the past few months.

Q: What if CCP changes some of the ratios?

A: Then my predictions are f***ed.

Q: I’ve read about some impending changes to the click-click-click nature of PI coming out with Incursion. How will that effect prices?

A: PI is already run by macro’ers. I believe that it will have little to no change on PI prices.

tl;dr. Guidance Systems are a great long-term buy if you want a guaranteed investment. Selling at ~4,100 now and projected to 25,000 ISK in June/July 2011.

Thanks for the Billions PI

Posted: 2010-08-12 | Author: | Filed under: industry, market | 5 Comments

I bought a lot of Mechanical Parts at NPC prices, 646.00 ISK, before Tyrannis hit the shelves and have made a killing on this poorly implemented expansion.

I read the dev blogs, Akita T’s posts, and played around with extraction rates on the test server. All my Excel sheets showed Mechanical Parts costing around 8,700 ISK to make. Once the actual Jita price hit that level, I dumped my stock.

I have my fingers in 3 other PI items and they all have at least a 1,200% increase as of today. They have not reached my expected cost of production, so I am not selling yet.

August 12, 2010. Jita 4-4 prices for Mechanical Parts:

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