Station trading, 4 weeks later

4 weeks ago I posted about my first steps in station trading. Looking back at the post, I've come a long way.
Let's recoup! I started in Jita with 300 million isk, and I ended my first day with the following stats:
62 million liquid
In escrow: 326.310.645
Sell orders: 85.157.581

Since then I've gained some more insight into the market and its fluctuations, learned how to read tendencies more and found a trading niche that fits me well. Another big factor in my succes so far has been Margin Trading. I'll expand on Margin Trading later.
As you can see in my starting post, I had almost no capital to begin with. For a trader, that's a pretty big obstacle. Money begets money, the more you can invest the more you make. With my limited isk reserves I was limited to lower priced items, smaller orders and safer bets.
Let's face it, when you're worth 300-mil you can't easily afford a 100 million mistake.

Obstacles be damned. Succes is so much sweeter when you have to work for it, right? Because of this notion, I decided against giving myself a boost by selling a GTC. I figured I'd go at it with just my ingame abilities, and make the best of it.
Well... At the time of writing I have 1.5 billion worth of buy orders and over 800 million worth of sell orders up. I also have roughly 450 million isk liquid and 100 mil worth of assorted items I've yet to relist.
For the lazy among us, that's over 2.8 billion worth of stuff. In 4 weeks I've turned 300 mil into almost 3 bil.

Earlier I mentioned Margin Trading playing a big role in my success. The reason for this is explained most simply as follows:
Margin Trading allows me to put up many more buy orders than I have ISK for.
While this might seem counterintuitive, or a recipe for disaster, it's actually an extremely potent tool for a low-capital trader like myself.
What I lack in raw capital, I make up for in zeal. I'm not above updating my orders dozens of times a day, while I'm actually playing on another account.
This let me turn around and relist items I bought as I got them, which makes for faster reselling, which in turn provides more isk to cover the remaining cost of buy orders.

A basic example of how Margin Trading helped me:
Without, I had 300 million which I put into buy orders. I put in 300 mil, and assuming a 10% return on investment, I'd get out 330 mil after everything had sold. (I assume the 10% as I try to trade only in items with a profit margin of 10%. While this might be obvious, I felt clarifying wouldn't hurt.) Considering I am/was active enough to make sure my stuff sold quickly enough for me to reinvest the full amount again over the course of the day, I'd be able to get this 10% return twice per full day played.
In other words, I made a profit of >50 mil per day, with heavy activity.

In comes the Margin Trading skill. At level 2, I was able to effectively buy for twice my total isk. Suddenly my 300 mil + few days' profit (Let's say 500 mil for the sake of clarity, as this is just an example) lets me set up not 500 mil worth of buy orders, but 1 billion.
Assuming the same activity I had as before, my daily take just doubled. Thanks to the larger capital and margin trading, I suddenly had a daily take of about 200 million, theoretically. And that take also gets reinvested!

Honesty demands that I give the following caveat though: When I just began trading with Margin Trading trained, my liquid isk ran low at times. Twice I decided to transfer over isk from my main characters in order to not lose any orders, so not the entire current amount comes from pure trading profit.
In total I believe I sent over 300 to 400 million from my main characters. Considering this, I personally still feel my current numbers are quite nice. Even more so for a pretty fresh station trader.

During these past few weeks I've had some highs and lows, when it comes to trading. I've had days in a row where I didn't update orders, where my mains simply took precedence. I've also made a loss here and there, but that comes with learning.
I'm starting to feel more and more comfortable trading, and as my means grow, so does my view. I already have an expansion of sorts in mind for my trading career. Perhaps my next update will touch on that subject some more; for now it's just a pipedream.

This update brought to you by sleep deprivation and procrastination.