Account renewed and ready to pew pew.
I spent the weekend trying to make enough through trading to PLEX the account again but I ended up spending more time drinking and socialising than flying internet space ships... crazy I know. I got into the habit of only updating trade orders a couple of times a day though. There's very little point in playing the 0.01 ISK game and I'd definitely try and turn people off it.
The reasoning behind it is that buy and sell orders are 90 days if you set them to max, therefore as long as you don't enter a ridiculously high (for sell) or low (for buy) price there's a really good chance your stuff will sell regardless. It just requires patience and focusing on the long game rather than trying for the immediate sale. Which, lets be fair, if you need the money that fast, sell to a buy order. There are some people who advocate station trading as "passive income." While it's certainly something you can set up and leave to run I think there are very few items that have steady pricing making it something that you do need to pay attention to on a regular basis and not exactly passive.
However you can limit yourself to updating a couple of times a day and still keep up with the market which is just what I've been doing. I've also been buying stuff in starter stations and hauling it in bulk to the hubs which is surprisingly easy. All it takes is the relevant industrial ship skill trained to 1, a cheap t1 indyship, a decent fit and a bunch of buy orders. Once you've bought enough just fly a couple of jumps to pick up the goods, load up and fly back. Generally I'm only carrying between 2 and 5 million in value but I still use safe undocks just in case. And although it's fairly low value stuff, I'm selling at usually 2-300% mark up which is awesome when first getting into trading. It works out at at least 2 million ISK per 8 Jumps, more if I've built up a good stock of ship modules.
The hardest part of trading is knowing what to buy and you'll find very few guides that actually give you any examples. Mostly because the market changes so quickly with people dipping in and out of certain items as margins change. An example of this is Data Analyzers. I spent the last couple of weeks buying them at 30k in Amarr and selling them at 90k. Eventually more people cottoned on to this great margin and they're back down at 40/60. It's still profitable but I personally let my orders fill slowly and didn't update when they ran out. Generally all the data you need is in front of you in the market window in the price history tab. Using the table as well as graph can help you decide what items are good to trade based on price trends and volume sold. No point in trading high margin items if they don't sell after all.
Speculation is also something to take into consideration. Just yesterday there was a devblog article on the EVE launcher about sleeper components being used as hand-ins (well, the blog is from over a week ago but it was only just put on the launcher). I saw it pretty much as soon as it went up because I happened to be around during downtime so I immediately bought all the cheap ones in Amarr and listed them at 3 times the price. 4 hours later and they'd all sold and now the price is even higher. Maybe I should have held on to them for a few hours but with speculation it's hard to know if something is actually going to increase in price or not so I didn't want to push my luck. Get out while you're ahead as the saying goes.
Throughout all of this trading I have ended up stuck with a few non-sellers. The worst of which is a couple of Helios's. Right after buying them the price crashed for some inexplicable reason but I'll just hold on to them until the price comes back up a couple of mil. I can just consider them non-liquid assets for the time being.
Well anyway, that's my thought process with trading at the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to grow my wealth more in the next month and with all my skills at a high enough level to comfortably fly covert ops ships I should be doing some exploration and probably learning to stealth bomb at some point too. Fly safe and see you in game!
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