Quick Trading Guide

NB: This guide presents a very basic introduction to making ISK through trading. More detailed strategies are left as an exercise for the reader.

One of the least expected bits of the economy in New Eden is that you can often make a lot more ISK via trading than manufacturing. In part, this stems from the fact that we pod pilots can’t make everything – the so-called “named modules, for example – and so we have to feed the market demand. Other factors like convenience and lack of information can also come into play.

The age-old maxim to make money trading is “buy low and sell high“. This means that a lot of pilots spend hours scouring the market for goods whose lowest “sell” order is lower than the highest “buy” order. At first glance, this makes sense, but in reality very few goods have this sort of imbalance. Generic trade goods will have this property at times; the margins, however, often mean you could make a lot more ISK elsewhere. At any rate, those sorts of routes disappear as quickly as they appear.

So, instead, the trick is to reverse that with your own orders. Set up buy orders high enough to bring in goods but low enough that you can resell the items at a decent margin. Your buy orders should cover mission hubs so that you get a constant supply of goods. Generally speaking, you’ll want to set your sell orders in trade hubs, at least when you get started.

Here’s an instructive example. In the Minmatar Republic, the best agent for the Republic Fleet is Vir Honn (level 4 quality 18) in Emolgranlan, which turns out to have a lot of mission-runners due in part to his presence. Minmatar battleships often rely on projectile weapons, particularly artillery, so we look at the market data for large artillery and see the data shown at right:

1200mm Scout Artillery market

Ignoring the one outlier (which will fill quickly), the highest buy order that will cover Emolgranlan is about 3.4m ISK. Yet the sale price in Rens is 3.7m, and in Lustrevik they go for 4.5m (though at lower volume as Rens gets far more traffic). That spread is where a trader makes his money. On the price history, notice that the volume tends to stay between 50 and 100 a day, so there’s enough to make a decent profit.

So set up a buy order a touch higher than the highest one there. Some traders work in increments of 0.01 ISK, while others prefer to compete with larger jumps. Remember, though, that you hurt your own margins first, and that the market will always fill the cheapest available sell order, so don’t set the increments too large.

Once you’ve bought a few, truck them over to your nearest trade hub. In the case of Emolgranlan, that might mean Lustrevik as mentioned, but your volume will improve tremendously (at a hit to your margins, of course) by running them a few more jumps over to Rens.

Trading has many more tricks, particularly when you trade skills like Margin Trading or learn more about the regions in which you’re trading. But the basic path comes down to this:

1. Find a commodity with sufficient spread and volume to generate profits proportional to the capital you will use.
2. Issue buy orders just above the highest that cover the area from which you want to buy.
3. Once your orders fill, pick up the items and transport them to trade hubs.
4. Issue sell orders just below the lowest in that hub.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!

Undocking in Amamake

I hate undocking in low-sec. Actually, I just hate not getting any updates from the traffic controllers about conditions on the grid around the station. That leads to losing a blockade runner and lots of ISK.

Props to the pirates, though, who evidently had a pretty decent operation given the number of wrecks I saw once I did undock (and before I got my pod out of there). My wallet didn’t like the experience, but that’s how low-sec trading goes.

Playstyle Tolerance: Carebears versus PvPers

NB: I had most of this written prior to Helicity’s rant. And I generally with much of that rant, actually, but after further reflection I realized it went too far and I needed to respond. Other worthwhile posts include those from Black Claw, Kirith Kodachi, Kant Lavar, and Luccul.

For all the talk about “carebears” in one direction, and “pirate Nazis” or whatever in the other direction, these folks really miss one of the core points about EVE: playstyle diversity.

Pirates and other PVPers need the folks they call “carebears“. Who else will produce their ships and modules and ammo and drones? Who else will buy the loot they pick up from their enemies’ wrecks so that they have ISK for new equipment and other fees?

And the real “carebears” — not just non-combat players, but those who express total moral outrage at not being left alone — need the PVPers. Who else will buy their stuff in significant quantities, or create demand by destroying other people’s stuff (that will then need replacement)? Yes, individuals might take a loss due to ganks or gate camps, but a bit of care can avoid most of that. And at any rate, we still make profits over time. Rewards require risk, after all. (Related to this, not all non-combat players actually count as carebears.)

Look, this should all be really obvious to everyone. But evidently it’s not, whether due to willful ignorance or an inability to play well with others (meaning sometimes you have to lose graciously).

We can’t all get along in-game, because that would get boring. In fact, we really shouldn’t: EVE revolves around competition in various guises. But can’t we all get along out of game?

Blog Banter 14: Enabling the future

The first banter of 2010 comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: As we begin another year in New Eden, ask yourselves, “What Now?” What will I attempt next? What haven’t I done so far in EVE? Was it out of fear, funds, or knowledge? What steps and objectives will I set myself to accomplish in order to reach my ultimate goal for this year? EVE is what you make of it. So, what is it going to be for you?

Destination : Future by gilderic

I’ve had a rough idea of how I would like 2010 to go (EVE-wise) for a while, at least in some senses though not necessarily others. So let’s take a look…

(more…)

Insurance musings

For whatever reason, I’ve had trouble turning an ISK in trading lately. Maybe I’ve lost my touch, maybe regional differences matter more than I really thought, or maybe the New Eden economy has fundamentally changed lately.

I’d thought to get back into tech II ship production. However, that hasn’t really worked due to intensely volatile moon resource prices causing shortages of key components. Supply and demand: not just a good idea, it’s the law. Never expected so much trouble getting quantum microprocessors at a decent rate!

So for now, I’ve refocused on tech I ship production and some limited tech II activity, at least where the numbers work out. Drones still make really great margins, so I’ve churned out those advanced Hobgoblins and Hammerheads as fast as my staff and labs can work. I intend to get some Ogres moving soon as well, but that might take another week or so before I see real results. Barrage ammo might work as well since projectile ammo has come back into vogue. Sometimes the simplest things still work the best, as an old Brutor boyfriend used to tell me…

Anyway, I have to say that the SCC might qualify as the worst-managed organization in the history of for-profit human endeavor (which is to say, our entire history). Everyone knows that their premiums can’t possibly cover their settlement payouts, so that business line must really hemorrhage ISK into the greater capsuleer economy. Maybe their market management works, because they get a piece of nearly every market transaction and contract out there to manage the data flows and maintain some semblance of order and regulation, but the insurance does not even approach something reasonable.

One case in point: evidently, they base their settlements on a mineral basket price from years ago. As we all know, mineral prices vary wildly (and I should really spend more time talking about the factors influencing those another time). Here lately, those prices have plummeted. This does great things for production costs, of course, but that also means that the supply-demand equilibrium point has fallen, since we can sell our products more cheaply and still turn a profit. In a competitive marketplace (without collusion or other external factors), that means prices drop as well.

That ends up meaning that ship production costs have fallen below SCC insurance payouts.

Said another way, the SCC will actually pay you more than the cost of the ship.

But it gets better. Their contract lawyers must have let their kids write the documents because they will pay you under any circumstances. That includes intentional self-destruction of the insured asset. Yes, the SCC specifically covers scuttling.

When my senior staff brought this to my attention, I thought that they had to have made a mistake. Even as poorly as the SCC economists have done their jobs, I assumed the lawyers would have done theirs. I mean, we’re talking about the human equivalent of slaver hounds, right?

So I built some Drakes in Oursulaert for about 24.4m ISK. The net payout on a Drake at Platinum insurance for 26.6m. (In fact, for a bit, Drake market rates in that system dropped below the insurance payout). I took on just the barest minimum of crew, enough to get us out of the docking bay, and as soon as we were clear, I shut down the engines and had them evacuate the ship back into station.

Then I engaged the self-destruct timer, waited a couple of minutes… and made about 10% margin. (I let other folks grab the salvage, but certainly you could do this at a safe spot and go back for the salvage yourself.)

Now, I could keep doing this all day long and suck money right out of the SCC’s pockets. Even though the market rate for a Drake usually exceeds that 26.6m ISK, you have to wait a little longer for somebody to come along and fill the sell order, so an immediate 10% compounds more quickly than 15% that takes a day or two, at least in raw return.

Really, this kind of feels like insurance fraud. But since the contract explicitly allows this, I don’t think that it actually defrauds anybody. They just made an incredibly bad business decision.

I still don’t like it, though. I mean, I’ll take advantage of somebody else’s mistake, sure, but it seems like an even bigger waste never to let the ship do its thing. Not every ship looks nice, but these vessels represent something approximating the pinnacle of our species’ technical achievements. They should at least get the chance to do their jobs. Maybe pilot error loses them sooner than anticipated, of course, but that seems like a separate problem.

I know this sounds a little irrational. Anthropomorphizing a podder ship? Yeah, my implant probably needs a service visit. But I’d rather see the SCC get its act together, implement some sort of dynamic settlement payouts (and hey, while they’re at it, take a look at payouts for tech II and tech III ships).

Until then, I’ll keep building ships and making them available to pod pilots for slightly better return. No promises when market rates drop completely below insurance payouts, though…

Image credit Boogies with Fish

Google Docs and EVE Metrics

EVE Online has a reputation as “Spreadsheets in Space”, and for good reason: complexity, tremendous amounts of data, and endless ways to get it out and analyze it. For some of us, this holds a lot of appeal. Whether that means market analysis or EFT theorycrafting, EVE players like to play with numbers.

So if you belong to that former group, who likes to work with trade and manufacturing and research, then you really should love EVE Metrics. The site has tremendous amounts of market data, fed by a nice automatic uploader that scrapes your cache as you play (though the lack of a Linux version limits that particular utility for me). They then present all sorts of interesting visualizations of the data, including sparklines and punchcard graphs. I really love that last one, by the way.

While this next feature may not get a lot of public attention, EVE Metrics also turns this back around by providing its own API for this market data. I don’t doubt that some folks have written their own apps specifically to slice and dice this data, but if you don’t have that particular skillset, don’t worry: Google Docs has already done the heavy lifting for you with a function called ImportXML.

Essentially, in a cell where you want a particular value for a particular item, you call ImportXML and pass it the URL you want it to grab and the specific value you want it to pull out.

As an example: say you want to look at Standard Drop Boosters. If you go to the market page for that item, you can see in the URL that the item ID is 15466. You’ll need to decide which data to get: buy or sell, and minimum, maximum, median, or average. So if you wanted to get the minimum sell price in the entire cluster, you’ll enter:


=ImportXML("http://www.eve-metrics.com/api/item.xml?type_ids=15466", "/evemetrics/type/global/sell/minimum")


You can also specify region IDs by appending “&region_ids=10000011″ (or whatever ID is appropriate) after the type_ids parameter.

Pilots with a lot of manufacturing activity can easily see how this can allow you to build a cost model and keep it up to date easily, and even check your expected margins, all without knowing how to code.

Image credit Thomas Hawk

Missions Collide Episode 4

Song Li who, together with Boris Hotch, hosts the Missions Collide podcast, invited another blogger and me to sit in with him for episode 4, though we talked about trade instead of mission running. We had a great time and I can’t wait to do it again.

Go listen and give him lots of feedback! Also, tell him that I am awesome and have a silky voice that simultaneously enthralls, entertains, and informs, thus deserving all the ISK he can send me.

Image credit brtsergio via Flickr

From the forums 2009-09-10

Just a few threads I’ve come across on the forums that mattered to me. Whether they matter to you or not will largely depend on what you like about EVE.

EVElopedia Fiction Portal: CCP Ginger has set up an EVE fiction portal on the wiki. He’s got a vision for a full community wiki project. (I need to figure out whether and how to jump into this.)

Luminaire Block Party: Jonny Damordred is running for President of the Gallente Federation (yes you read that correctly). And he’s invited all capsuleers to come help him take a shot at the titan around Caldari Prime. Will we succeed? I guess it depends on how you define success. Just getting hundreds of pilots to participate in an event like this counts in my book. Bring a big ship and big guns. Probably an insurance policy, too.

CCP & Industrial Expansions: Omber Zombie, a member of the CSM, has started a focus thread on what we’d like to see in future industry / science development from CCP, as well as an additional thread on market-related ideas. From my experience in the SWG Senate, I can tell you that they want high-level ideas, not design documents. Things like “inter-regional trade skills”, not lots of detail about how the skill should work, the training multiplier, skillbook cost, etc. If you have any interest in this playstyle at all, please go tell the CSM what you want.

Anything else interesting you’ve seen?

Trading seminar interest check

After kicking around the idea with a few folks in the “Ecliptic Rift Public” channel, I have started some conceptual work for a series of seminars on trading, market PVP, and related industrial activities in New Eden. The business model still needs some work regarding whether, whom, and how much to charge). But I’d like to find out first whether the community would have an interest in attending such a seminar.

Example topics would include:

• Station trading
• Spread, volume, and location
• Trade skill explanations
• Hauling strategies
• Market PvP strategies
• Contracts
• Investing

If I move forward with this, I expect to invite guest lecturers for particular topics and alternate points of view as well.

So what do you think? Would you consider attending this sort of seminar?

Trading: the solo profession

Pod pilots in New Eden have a number of so-called “careers,” or “professions”. Certain sets of skills and activities work well together. Some of the more well-known ones might include miners, manufacturers, scouts, explorers, fleet commanders, CEOs, pirates, traders, and militia. Typically, a pilot can train a certain path and undertake particular operations that take advantage of his skills. Making a choice to focus on a given profession allows that pilot to excel in that area, although some pilots prefer to do many things poorly. New pilots in particular need to explore the options available to them, for example, so they can understand whether they enjoy nullsec warfare, agent work, mining, or something else entirely. This has less to do with “not making a choice” than it does with “getting information to make a good choice.”

Not that any pilot ever should feel locked into anything, of course, since you can always buy a few skillbooks and get started doing something new. As time goes on, he might choose to add another (possibly unrelated) profession to his skillset, or he may choose to continue to specialize in a given track. Experienced pilots often want to try something new after having done the same sorts of things for an extended time, or perhaps other circumstances have led them to need to look into a career change.

For the most part, professions involve lots of cooperation with other pilots. A pilot might choose to engage in them alone, but he generally can work with others should he desire. Some professions literally cannot work without having others with whom to collaborate (e.g. fleet commanders).

What about trading? This profession — the buying and selling of items on the market — generally classifies everyone else into two groups. To a trader, any pilot is either a customer or a competitor. Customers fill your buy and sell orders, while competitors try to get their orders filled instead.

Other than information exchange, traders have very little room for cooperation with anyone else. Haulers can use escorts, of course, but while these two professions (hauling and trading) frequently overlap, we can’t view them entirely the same. Station traders may never undock during their entire career, and some haulers just work on courier contracts or for agents.

Pilots who intend to fly solo for the most part and have an interest in making a lot of ISK can do quite well for themselves in trading. But they shouldn’t expect a great deal of collaboration beyond information exchange.

Side note: Ecliptic Rift has started to explore this area, so we’d welcome anyone with ideas on how traders can collaborate to make more ISK together. In the meantime, we have plenty to keep us busy in addition to whatever individual trading a pilot may do. If you’d like to work with us, then please contact me via EVEmail, or come chat in “Ecliptic Rift Public”.

Photo credits kozumel and Artotem via Flickr