Nuri Aderynn
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Posted - 2006.03.26 01:41:00 -
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This guide has been very helpful to me, so if you don't mind Herko I will outline how a new player might use it without getting overwhelmed.
If you've just started at trading, you're probably confused even with the help of this guide. You might read the explanations here and they make sense, but when you get in-game you forget which ones are which or don't know which ones you should focus on. Well as it happens the skills have a built-in restriction on the order you can use them: their cost. Yes, some of these skills are very expensive, so if you're a newbie with only 300,000 ISK in your wallet but you want to start trading right now, forget about the complicated skills like Margin Trading, Procurement etc. You can't afford them, you can't use them.
Here's a rough guide to how you might progress in your trading career. I'd recommend reading Herko's posts a few times, then referring back to them as you reach a new stage in your career:
1) Trade (18k), Retail (90k), Broker Relations (90k)
You can buy these skills immediately, if you didn't already get them at character creation. Train Trade to Level 2 as that's what the others require, then train Retail to 2 or higher and Broker Relations to whatever level you can comfortably take the time on. A few levels of Trade/Retail will give you more order slots than you need right now and Broker Relations will cut down your costs. At this point you can't set remote buy/sell orders so you'll be doing everything in-station. You'll probably be hauling NPC trade goods, or buying player goods in the big hubs and selling them in regional ones at markup. Use this time to get to know the market screen, tables and graphs, until you have enough money for:
2) Accounting (4.5mil), Marketing (3.15mil), Procurement (1.35mil), Visibility (6.75 mil)
When you train Accounting is up to you. As someone said earlier it will take time to recover the cost, and its only dependency is Margin Trading. So if you have Trade 2 and you can afford the Accounting skill right now, you may as well train it a few levels, otherwise you can leave it until (3).
The other three must be trained in order. Marketing only requires Trade 2 which you already have, but Procurement needs Marketing 2 and Visibility needs Procurement 4. If you're getting confused which one is which - don't worry about it. Just get all of them to Level 4 and you'll never have to distinguish them again. Now you can start setting remote buy/sell orders from 20 jumps away and make dough just sitting in a station. For your maximum order ranges see the bottom of the "My Orders" screen on the market or your wallet.
3) Daytrading (11.25mil), Margin Trading (18mil)
By the time you can afford these two skills you'll already know that you need them. You'll have gotten sick of having to travel to a station to change an order, and you'll have realised how your cash flow would be improved if your ISK wasn't locked up in slow-moving buy orders.
4) Wholesale (31.5mil), Tycoon (90mil)
The final step in building your trading empire. Now the limiting factors are not just the big price tags but the time it takes to get those Level 5 prerequisites. Even with learning skills maxed it'll take a good week and a half/two weeks to get Retail to 5, and up to a month to get Wholesale 5, then you can finally start on Tycoon. Even these skills may not give you enough order slots to achieve your goals (and you will find plenty of advanced traders who complain of exactly that on these forums) but that's it, there are no more trading skills. Now all you can do is go back and train the previous ones a bit higher, or experiment in different markets, or get into manufacturing, etc.
I hope this has helped!
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