Scruffy DeJanitor
Nequadric Mining Association
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Posted - 2014.09.29 05:45:00 -
[1] - Quote
I started station trading myself about five days ago starting with a 500m investment. At first things were slow and profit was there but not as substantial as I would have liked. I was putting in buy orders on about 10-15 different items (this used up all but 30m of my initial investment) and would babysit them over the course of the day while I did other things on my other account. In my first couple days I only made about 30m total in profit which to me wasn't worth my time so I eventually broke down and purchased another PLEX to put towards my investment. This changed things DRAMATICALLY. This allowed me to spread my money over ~50-60 items now and with that level of spread my orders were filling immensely faster (not each individual order mind you, but my hangar was filling with items overall much faster). Now I was pushing 100-150m in profits per day which was satisfactory for my needs.
Now, with the information you provided along with some assumptions I had to make to fill the gaps where questions arose, I would say the steps you need to take to improve your profits would be to first spread your investment across more items overall (high and low volume items). I would also suggest staying away from minerals and ammunition because these items are traded in much too high volume to give you any solid profit. Essentially what I like to do is I use a program called Elinor that will give me instant profit margins on items, so I click through hundreds of items looking for margins above 10% (usually between 10-30% as anything higher usually has far too low a volume to make a timely profit as well). I then check the market history graph for that item and I usually look for a minimum trade volume average of about 50 units and a maximum within the thousands (typically around 20,000 units max). Elinor then provides sample data to show my expected profits based on the number of items I purchase so lets say the average volume moved is 100-200 units per day and Elinor says that I can profit about 5.89m from flipping 25 units. To me this profit is worth the time it will take to flip, and should be rather easy to flip considering I am only attempting to buy less than half that days volume for that item. Rinse and repeat until your left with about 50-100m or all your orders are used. Then play the waiting game, updating your orders as often as you can and the profit will begin to come in. Lastly and although it's obvious I would say start with a higher investment, 300m isn't going to bring in the profits you are probably looking/hoping for.
tl;dr
Spread your investment over as many items as you can, stay away from super high and super low volume items, look for something in between (ship modules tab holds a lot of great items), start with a larger investment, give it about 24 hours or enough time for your orders to get going, imagine your on a bike and each time you pedal = one day of trading, obviously the first pedal is going to take a little more effort then the next, but eventually you'll be pedaling along at a good pace without much effort and your profits will come flowing in. |