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.
vrijdag 25 januari 2013
woensdag 9 januari 2013
Understanding the market
Eve's market can be difficult to understand for newbro's.
In this article I'll try to provide some clarity into how the market actually works.
Let's start off with some basics, just to make sure the groundwork is in place:
There are buy orders, and there are sell orders. A sell order is relatively simple, you have an item you don't want so you put it up for sale at a price you deem fair.
Someone buys the item, you get money. You don't actually get 100% of what you put the item up for sale for though.
First, there's transaction tax. This is a flat fee of 1.5% that is paid to 'the market'. This money does not go to any other players, and as such basically leaves EVE.
With the accounting skill, you can lower this tax to 0.75%, meaning you lose less money each transaction. If you spend much time using the market (I.E. you make a living as a trader) you will obviously want this skill maxed.
Second, there's the broker's fee. This is the fee you pay to place an order, which basically represents you as a capsuleer paying your broker to buy and/or sell goods for you. The calculation for the broker's fee is the following:
Simply put: The better your standings to the corporation owning the station that you're buying/selling in, the less you pay. The Broker Relations skill takes, at maximum, 25% off the amount you pay before standings come into play.
Long story short: When you sell an item, if you have neither of the trading skills outlined above trained and the corporation owning the station you sell/buy in does not have standings towards you, you lose 2.5% of the total selling price.
The broker's fee can be lowered as far as 0% with standings of 6.7 to faction and corporation and Broker Relations to 5, bringin the loss down to 1.5%. The Accounting skill can then lower the tax down to 0.75%, making your total loss 0.75%.
So now that taxes and fees and selling items is handled, let's look at buy orders.
Anyone can place a buy order for any item, at any price they desire. this is not indicative of the item's actual value in any way!
Example, I could put up a buy order for a Titan for 1 ISK. There is nothing preventing players from placing extreme, outrageous buy orders. When looking at what something is worth, don't look at buy orders. 9 times out of 10, buy orders are tools for traders to get an item cheap so they can then 'flip' the item, and resell it for a profit.
The entire station trading game revolves around this concept.
What a buy order is, is basically you handing money to your broker (When you place a buy order the money is withdrawn right away and put in 'escrow') and telling him to buy an X amount of Y for Z per unit.
So now that this distinction is in place, there's one last thing I want to cover, namely the interaction of buy and sell orders.
If you sell an item to a buy order, you always sell to the highest buy order.
Likewise, if you buy from a sell order, you always buy from the cheapest sell order, regardless how much you offer to pay.
This is best explained with an example:
I put up 10 Oracles in a sell order for 1 billion isk total. I'm the lowest priced Oracle on the market, so mine sell before any others. Someone comes in and buys 10 Oracles, but makes a typo and accidentally buys them for 10 billion isk in total.
What happens now is that he gets my 10 Oracles, because I'm the lowest seller, and I get his 10 billion ISK, because he wanted to pay 10 billion ISK for 10 Oracles, as far as the system is aware.
These mistakes happen more often than you'd realise, and are often the cause for great hilarity.
After reading all this, you should have a fairly decent understanding of how the market works in EVE. If you want to know more, there are many guides out there explaining every aspect in much more detail.
For now, fly safe and use the market well o/
-Ymir
In this article I'll try to provide some clarity into how the market actually works.
Let's start off with some basics, just to make sure the groundwork is in place:
There are buy orders, and there are sell orders. A sell order is relatively simple, you have an item you don't want so you put it up for sale at a price you deem fair.
Someone buys the item, you get money. You don't actually get 100% of what you put the item up for sale for though.
First, there's transaction tax. This is a flat fee of 1.5% that is paid to 'the market'. This money does not go to any other players, and as such basically leaves EVE.
With the accounting skill, you can lower this tax to 0.75%, meaning you lose less money each transaction. If you spend much time using the market (I.E. you make a living as a trader) you will obviously want this skill maxed.
Second, there's the broker's fee. This is the fee you pay to place an order, which basically represents you as a capsuleer paying your broker to buy and/or sell goods for you. The calculation for the broker's fee is the following:
Simply put: The better your standings to the corporation owning the station that you're buying/selling in, the less you pay. The Broker Relations skill takes, at maximum, 25% off the amount you pay before standings come into play.
Long story short: When you sell an item, if you have neither of the trading skills outlined above trained and the corporation owning the station you sell/buy in does not have standings towards you, you lose 2.5% of the total selling price.
The broker's fee can be lowered as far as 0% with standings of 6.7 to faction and corporation and Broker Relations to 5, bringin the loss down to 1.5%. The Accounting skill can then lower the tax down to 0.75%, making your total loss 0.75%.
So now that taxes and fees and selling items is handled, let's look at buy orders.
Anyone can place a buy order for any item, at any price they desire. this is not indicative of the item's actual value in any way!
Example, I could put up a buy order for a Titan for 1 ISK. There is nothing preventing players from placing extreme, outrageous buy orders. When looking at what something is worth, don't look at buy orders. 9 times out of 10, buy orders are tools for traders to get an item cheap so they can then 'flip' the item, and resell it for a profit.
The entire station trading game revolves around this concept.
What a buy order is, is basically you handing money to your broker (When you place a buy order the money is withdrawn right away and put in 'escrow') and telling him to buy an X amount of Y for Z per unit.
So now that this distinction is in place, there's one last thing I want to cover, namely the interaction of buy and sell orders.
If you sell an item to a buy order, you always sell to the highest buy order.
Likewise, if you buy from a sell order, you always buy from the cheapest sell order, regardless how much you offer to pay.
This is best explained with an example:
I put up 10 Oracles in a sell order for 1 billion isk total. I'm the lowest priced Oracle on the market, so mine sell before any others. Someone comes in and buys 10 Oracles, but makes a typo and accidentally buys them for 10 billion isk in total.
What happens now is that he gets my 10 Oracles, because I'm the lowest seller, and I get his 10 billion ISK, because he wanted to pay 10 billion ISK for 10 Oracles, as far as the system is aware.
These mistakes happen more often than you'd realise, and are often the cause for great hilarity.
After reading all this, you should have a fairly decent understanding of how the market works in EVE. If you want to know more, there are many guides out there explaining every aspect in much more detail.
For now, fly safe and use the market well o/
-Ymir
zondag 6 januari 2013
Putting EVE into perspective
Lately the blog has not been getting much attention due to our corp moving from one alliance to another and the subsequent effort of moving from one arm of the galaxy to another, logistics-wise. Add in new year's and I feel that's enough of an excuse for the delayed update.
Today's update is actually a simple mail exchange with a corp member, but I felt it is something that wouldn't hurt from some more exposure. New players can easily get overwhelmed and discouraged by EVE's vastness and the ease with which an unprepared player can lose everything. The following is some simple perspective that will hopefully make EVE a bit easier to handle for our newbro's.
Today's update is actually a simple mail exchange with a corp member, but I felt it is something that wouldn't hurt from some more exposure. New players can easily get overwhelmed and discouraged by EVE's vastness and the ease with which an unprepared player can lose everything. The following is some simple perspective that will hopefully make EVE a bit easier to handle for our newbro's.
Re: Planetary Interaction tutorial
From: [Corpmate]
Sent: 2013.01.06 17:45
To: [Ymir]
Thanks for this Ymir! I've been wondering how Planetary Interaction works. :)
As you've been playing longer than me... did you ever get frustrated with losing ships and not knowing how to make money on your own?
Something I spoke with Sec about when my friend, [Scruffy McGee], and I joined the corp, was the issue of mentoring. I'm one of those players that learns by doing so reading manuals and watching videos doesn't do much for me. I'm hoping the corp will start that program back up soon.
- [corpmate]
---------------------------------
De nada amigo, EVE is huge, so a simple little explanation covering basics can help get people started, decide if they want to go down that avenue and such. When I noticed most newbro's not even knowing what PI is I figured this would be the best start ;)
At first, yes. But there are certain fundamental things to consider in EVE. First and foremost is the simple 'don't fly what you can't afford to lose'. Basically try to have at least enough ISK to replace your ship and fitting twice. If what you fly is more expensive than that, losing it will be a huge setback. If you have that buffer, you can recover easily enough.
As for making money, there are more ways to make money in EVE than you realize. It's vital to remember that EVE is a sandbox, you make your own game. There are people who make money ingame doing anything you can imagine, from hosting TS3 servers to setting up pre-made corporations to resell, to setting up coloured overviews... You name it and it can make money. While some things take a starting investment, many things can be done with only a minor cash infusion. The trick is finding something you enjoy, and extracting as much ISK from that as you can ;)
Example being PI, you can build a basic PI installation for under 10 million isk, and that will generate almost completely passive income for you. The investment repays itself in a matter of days.
Another thing is a secondary account for anything from factional warfare to incursions to exploration to wormholes. I honestly believe EVE becomes better with a second account, as you can train a complete second set of specialised skills.
Also, something I still have to tell myself at times: EVE is a long-term game. Don't look at your daily earning of 10 million and think that is nothing, look at it as 300 million in a month which will let you invest into bigger things. Your earning power increases exponentially with not only your available skills, but also your available investment.
Lastly, in EVE more so than any other game, knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you can do and do well. Researching your chosen path and learning as much as you can about it lets you become alot more efficient and by extension, wealthy.
Remember, EVE is a cold harsh unforgiving universe. Mistakes will hurt you, but that makes the successes all the sweeter. Don't get discouraged whatever happens, everything is a lesson, everything will let you grow as a player.
And at the end of the day, it's also just a game so nothing worth getting discouraged over ;) Just learn what you can from fuckups and carry on wiser.
Oh and lastly, I have been looking at that mentoring program too, I will be looking at starting it up for industry in the coming days now that I am the indy director so keep your eyes peeled. In the meantime, I am always available for questions :)
o7
zondag 30 december 2012
Jita PITA
About a week ago I took my first furtive step into stationtrading.
A few minutes on google gave me several guides that cover the basics of stationtrading,covering how to interpret and read the market interface, how to determine what items to buy and how to make things easy on yourself (Market quickbar, I'm looking at you here.)
I started off with my industry character, parking her in Amarr and giving her 100 mil to play with and basically wrote off the money as a learning experience. I had the skills to place 45 orders in total and none of the cost reducing skills, so it was hardly the best start.
Imagine my surprise when a week later I have around 400 to 500 mil between my liquid isk, escrow and active sell orders. Apparently reading guides before jumping in works out!
What I started as a simple experiment turned out to not only be hugely profitable for very little input, it was actually the most fun I've had in EVE in ages.
Many of you will most likely call me crazy, as 0.01 ISKing, babysitting orders and staring at graphs and tables is not generally considered to be fun. That's okay, I realise it's a very niche kind of fun. Perhaps I am a little weird too.
Emboldened by my success in Amarr, I've done 2 things:
I've made a new account and started training that as a dedicated stationtrader (my industry character will soon be redirected back to industry) and I moved my current trading operation to Jita.
Let's face it, if you say trading hub you say Jita. Like it or hate it, it's where the big boys play, and where the big trading takes place. So, I packed up my operations in Amarr, put my last tradables into my Viator and flew out to Jita.
I figured that, worst comes to worst, I would find Jita to not be to my liking and return to Amarr. All I'd risk is a bit of ISK, and perhaps more importantly, moving out of my comfort zone. That's an integral part of EVE though; moving out of your comfort zone and trying something new.
Flash forward to today. Slightly hesitant I open the Market in Jita, and start going through the items, one by one. First impression is that the profit margins per item are lower than in Amarr. This is only to be expected obviously, as there are alot more competitors, but many items I see have such small margins that with my current skills I'd end up losing money per transaction. Oh dear.
Not to be dissuaded I keep plowing through the itemlists, marking interesting items in my quickbar, putting up small test orders here and there.
Before I know it I've burnt through my order total (53 at time of writing). My liquid ISK was also running low at this point, so a good stopping point for now I felt.
Apparently I underestimated the Jita market, because in the time it took me to log on another account several of my test orders had been filled, and alot of my stock I brought from Amarr had sold.
At this point, if I had been a cartoon character you would see dollar signs in my eyes. Items move fast in Jita. Where in Amarr I had to resign myself to orders no larger than 20 or so for most modules (I do not feel confident tying up my limited liquid ISK in large/long-term options at this point, hence me keeping my orders small and spread) in Jita I can move the same modules in hugely increased quantities. And that is where Jita trumps Amarr, even if the profit margin is bigger in Amarr: Moving 10000 items for a 100 million profit per day is better than moving 1000 for 75 million.
At the time of posting it is 1:20 local time. My day is soon at an end, so now would be an ideal time to look back at my first day in Jita. I came into system at about 15:00 local time with about 300 million isk liquid and a small assortment of items.
Currently my balance is as follows:
62 million liquid
In escrow: 326.310.645
Sell orders: 85.157.581
Add in the 20-odd million in modules sitting in my hangar and I'd call today a succes. My first day stationtrading in Jita and I've managed to not lose any money (yet) and even managed to increase my total worth by a fair margin.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
A few minutes on google gave me several guides that cover the basics of stationtrading,covering how to interpret and read the market interface, how to determine what items to buy and how to make things easy on yourself (Market quickbar, I'm looking at you here.)
I started off with my industry character, parking her in Amarr and giving her 100 mil to play with and basically wrote off the money as a learning experience. I had the skills to place 45 orders in total and none of the cost reducing skills, so it was hardly the best start.
Imagine my surprise when a week later I have around 400 to 500 mil between my liquid isk, escrow and active sell orders. Apparently reading guides before jumping in works out!
What I started as a simple experiment turned out to not only be hugely profitable for very little input, it was actually the most fun I've had in EVE in ages.
Many of you will most likely call me crazy, as 0.01 ISKing, babysitting orders and staring at graphs and tables is not generally considered to be fun. That's okay, I realise it's a very niche kind of fun. Perhaps I am a little weird too.
Emboldened by my success in Amarr, I've done 2 things:
I've made a new account and started training that as a dedicated stationtrader (my industry character will soon be redirected back to industry) and I moved my current trading operation to Jita.
Let's face it, if you say trading hub you say Jita. Like it or hate it, it's where the big boys play, and where the big trading takes place. So, I packed up my operations in Amarr, put my last tradables into my Viator and flew out to Jita.
I figured that, worst comes to worst, I would find Jita to not be to my liking and return to Amarr. All I'd risk is a bit of ISK, and perhaps more importantly, moving out of my comfort zone. That's an integral part of EVE though; moving out of your comfort zone and trying something new.
Flash forward to today. Slightly hesitant I open the Market in Jita, and start going through the items, one by one. First impression is that the profit margins per item are lower than in Amarr. This is only to be expected obviously, as there are alot more competitors, but many items I see have such small margins that with my current skills I'd end up losing money per transaction. Oh dear.
Not to be dissuaded I keep plowing through the itemlists, marking interesting items in my quickbar, putting up small test orders here and there.
Before I know it I've burnt through my order total (53 at time of writing). My liquid ISK was also running low at this point, so a good stopping point for now I felt.
Apparently I underestimated the Jita market, because in the time it took me to log on another account several of my test orders had been filled, and alot of my stock I brought from Amarr had sold.
At this point, if I had been a cartoon character you would see dollar signs in my eyes. Items move fast in Jita. Where in Amarr I had to resign myself to orders no larger than 20 or so for most modules (I do not feel confident tying up my limited liquid ISK in large/long-term options at this point, hence me keeping my orders small and spread) in Jita I can move the same modules in hugely increased quantities. And that is where Jita trumps Amarr, even if the profit margin is bigger in Amarr: Moving 10000 items for a 100 million profit per day is better than moving 1000 for 75 million.
At the time of posting it is 1:20 local time. My day is soon at an end, so now would be an ideal time to look back at my first day in Jita. I came into system at about 15:00 local time with about 300 million isk liquid and a small assortment of items.
Currently my balance is as follows:
62 million liquid
In escrow: 326.310.645
Sell orders: 85.157.581
Add in the 20-odd million in modules sitting in my hangar and I'd call today a succes. My first day stationtrading in Jita and I've managed to not lose any money (yet) and even managed to increase my total worth by a fair margin.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
zaterdag 29 december 2012
Introductions
Hi, I'm Ymir and I'm an EVE-aholic.
I've played EVE on and off since 2009, going from completely clueless and joining a completely clueless corp to being in a major nullsec alliance, from building ships at a loss to researching the most profitable thing to build, from not knowing how the market works to making money with stationtrading.
I've been scammed, I've been ransomed by pirates as a fledgling pilot, I've exploded gloriously in pvp, flown missions in a Tengu.
I have tasted much of what EVE has to offer, yet there is always more to experience.
In this blog, I will give an account of my experiences on a day to day basis. Running 2 to 4 accounts at any one time, this can range from 'a day at the office' with stationtrading to our corp's move from Tribal Band into a new frontier, to my plans of setting up my own little industrial wing.
Make no mistake, I do not consider myself a 'good' player, or even very experienced for that matter. There's more to EVE that I have not experienced than what I have. I suppose the best way to see this, is a recounting of average Joe Spaceman and his findings in EVE.
The things I intend to write here may not be fascinating to older, more experienced players. It might be self-evident to them, and as such no longer worthy of note.
However, for people like me, who are fascinated by everything EVE has to offer, and who enjoy the vicarious experiences that blogs offer, this might very well turn out to be an enjoyable read.
That's what I hope to achieve.
In my next post, expect a recounting of my latest pet project: Stationtrading.
For now my friends, fly well and experience all that EVE has to offer.
o7
I've played EVE on and off since 2009, going from completely clueless and joining a completely clueless corp to being in a major nullsec alliance, from building ships at a loss to researching the most profitable thing to build, from not knowing how the market works to making money with stationtrading.
I've been scammed, I've been ransomed by pirates as a fledgling pilot, I've exploded gloriously in pvp, flown missions in a Tengu.
I have tasted much of what EVE has to offer, yet there is always more to experience.
In this blog, I will give an account of my experiences on a day to day basis. Running 2 to 4 accounts at any one time, this can range from 'a day at the office' with stationtrading to our corp's move from Tribal Band into a new frontier, to my plans of setting up my own little industrial wing.
Make no mistake, I do not consider myself a 'good' player, or even very experienced for that matter. There's more to EVE that I have not experienced than what I have. I suppose the best way to see this, is a recounting of average Joe Spaceman and his findings in EVE.
The things I intend to write here may not be fascinating to older, more experienced players. It might be self-evident to them, and as such no longer worthy of note.
However, for people like me, who are fascinated by everything EVE has to offer, and who enjoy the vicarious experiences that blogs offer, this might very well turn out to be an enjoyable read.
That's what I hope to achieve.
In my next post, expect a recounting of my latest pet project: Stationtrading.
For now my friends, fly well and experience all that EVE has to offer.
o7
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