Ben Harrigan
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Posted - 2009.11.18 12:17:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Sulaxxanna
Originally by: Baka Lakadaka
It's not hard to regularly make 100% or more on certain T1 items......but not if you try to sell in trade hubs.
You need to base your mineral buys on being the highest buy order and your sales should be based on being the lowest sell order. If you base everything on the average prices, then the speadsheet will give you the average answer - which is that if you buy and sell at the average, then there is no profit.
If you base minerals on highest buy order so your manufacturing works, wouldn't you better off just selling the minerals at lowest sell order in the same station instead?  Obviously I'd still buy the minerals at highest buy order, but I'd only manufacture items that make a profit at mineral sell order prices.
I generally agree on that. Basing production cost on buy orders and income on sell orders will give a false result, since it might have been better to just resell the original item.
There's a lot of exceptions though. Sometimes buy orders is the price, since some items almost never sell at sell orders. In this case its not possible to resell, but transforming it into something else may make it possible. Whether a profit like this is based on trading or manufacturing is a matter of definition I guess. Both are needed to make it work.
In other cases its possible to buy materials at buy orders, sell some of them, convert some of them and sell the end result. Manufacturing can be a way to add demand in cases where the market is the bottleneck.
While in general its a good idea to isolate different types of business to see if they turn a profit individually, its not always possible. Sometimes its worthwhile to do part of a production chain to open up more demand, or to make logistics easier, even if that production technically is a loss.
A production chain also adds mobility and more choices. A trader limited to buying and selling the same product is more vulnerable to price movements, than someone who can choose to either resell immediately, or to convert the materials before reselling.
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