Myriad Blaze
Common Sense Ltd
Nulli Secunda
173
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Posted - 2014.03.16 22:00:00 -
[1] - Quote
Trading is a great way to make ISK... when you know what you are doing and if you are ready to do what needs to be done.
Station trading at its core is flipping items. You buy an item as cheap as possible and sell it as expensive as possible. You could say the delta between buy and sell prices is your EBIT. And if you deduct transaction tax and broker fees you get your profit. The transaction tax can be lowered by training Accounting. At level V the tax is 0.75% which is the lowest it can get. The broker fee can be lowered by A) training Broker Relations (level V lowers the broker fee from 1% to 0.75%), B) by getting better standings with the corp that runs the station (i.e. Caldari Navy for the Jita trade hub) and C) by getting better standings with the faction the afore-mentioned corp belongs to (i.e. Caldari for the Jita trade hub). The lowest possible broker fee is 0.185%. 
It's important to notice, that while the transaction tax will hit you only when you sell an item, the broker fee is due on buy and sell orders alike. Even with the relatively low ammount of ISK you're toying with you've noticed the effect of fees and tax. When you trade with larger ammounts you should get tax and fees as low as possible (this adds up faster than you might think).
The problem with trading in general is your competition. Wherever you can make ISK you'll find someone else who's also trying to get his cut. And here you get into the 0.01 ISK game. Since flipping items is quite easy there are many people who do it. If you don't want to babysit your orders you'll find your orders getting pushed off the visible section of the market UI quite fast. 
However, there is a trait of station trading that takes advantage of price cycles. Most items have more or less reliable price cycles. Often these cycles come in a timespan of a few days, sometimes it's weeks or even longer. If you get a feeling for these cycles you can buy when the price is good (you can even buy from sell orders then), set your sell orders at a reasonable price level and then just wait for the price to come back. There are risks of course. For example unexpected factors (especially game changes - that's why you should have an eye on devblogs and on the testserver  ) could effect the price in a way that ends the cycle the lets the price decrease dramatically. Unfortunately this needs some experience and research and ISK.
If I were you - or to put it in other words, when I started trading myself - I wouldn't start with station trading but with region trading. Region trading comes in many traits. For example you could set up a region wide buy order (or a buy order that covers several systems) either for items like mission drops or maybe for an item that is a bit more expensive. For example when I started trading I had a buy order for several systems (I was a bit afraid of low-sec at that time so i tried to avoid it) for certain ships - AFAIR Zealots eventually sold for 40M below Jita or so once or twice a month, but that was before rebalancing (it's a niche that doesn't pay well overall but goes well together with missioning). Another trait is Region to Region trade. When I started trading I bought stuff in Lonetrak (btw, a very good region for traders) and moved it to Jita. Sometimes only 3 or 4 jumps (in one direction) were enough to make some profit (i.e. among other stuff I bought Sukuuvestaa Herons in the newbie systems and sold them in Jita sometimes with more than 100% profit).
( Hint: Speaking of newbie systems, there's ISK to make by providing items that are needed to complete the tutorial missions. There are several good reasons why experienced players take their pro characters and run tutorial missions - often for a faction that is not their starter faction. These players want to go as fast as possible through those missions and will buy everything needed from the local market as long as prices are not outrageous. The same is true for COSMOS missions but needs more work because agents are all over the region.)
At some time you might start to think bigger. This is a good moment to reconsider everything, remember that there are others who are much bigger than you, and be very careful. My first "big" move was a market manipulation for Nocxium. I was monitoring the mineral market for some time when I noticed a structural shortage for Nocxium although prices were still stable and only slightly climbing in Jita. I liquidated almost everything I had and started buying every single unit of Nocxium below a certain price threshold in four regions including low-sec (actually when I moved the minerals I went to low-sec for the first time.... and I did not die  ). While this sounds like I had mountains of ISK I needed only a billion or so (well, a billion was a mountain of ISK to me at that time), because other people started buying Nocxium, too. Despite all the risks I didn't know then (especially people that are stockpiling huge ammounts of minerals in the trade hubs) the price jumped upwards and i made my profit. All in all I made 90M after taxes and fees - actually a disappointment because I had put a lot of effort into it. 
Immediately I reinvested into Megacyte because according to the price history it was at an all-time low. I didn't know the drivers for mineral prices at that time  and frankly it was a disaster. I bought at 1700 and something and expected to see it climb to 2100 or higher within the next 3 to 6 months. Instead it dropped below 1500 and stayed there. But after simply being lucky with Nocxium I finally learned a valuable lesson here: "Don't trade what you don't understand."
Enough said. Now go out and find your own deals, make your own mistakes and learn from them, get experience and grow a fortune.  |