Tibullus
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Posted - 2006.09.22 10:55:00 -
[1]
Edited by: Tibullus on 22/09/2006 11:04:08
Manipulating the EVE market is something that really interests me. Reselling implants across regions is how I made my first 100 million.
Reselling can be a tricky business, and it takes a while for me to get used to the market conditions. But there are a number of things that I look out for and tactics that I employ. Unfortunately, I'm not an economist so I don't know their technical names.
Market flooding - I was buying some tech 2 items from Jita and selling them in a completely starved region for a 10mil markup. It was daylight robbery, and I loved it. A few weeks later the market was flooded with a huge order of the item, at an honest price. This killed my venture. Flooding a market is never good for business and creates a market geared in favour towards the buyer.
'Fabricating a market' - For example when I was selling +1 memory implants (about a year or so ago on a different char) I would find a region that had very little and flood it. However, I would ridiculously overprice the implants, and place individual market orders at different prices in order to create a high average market price and make it seem like the market had healthy competition. I think the highest profit I made off a +1 memory implant was something like 5mil, which was quite a lot to me back then.
'Starving the market' - If I had found a particularly lucrative tech 2 item to resell but not quite enough to fabricate a market, I would resell them one at a time at the highest possible price.
'Long-term investments' - I recently bought an Eos for about 100mil. At the moment there are plenty on the market, but what I'm hoping for is that they will become the NPCing mobile of choice, more and more people will use them and they will become as sought after as HACs. There are a few problems with this, and it is risky, and fleet command ships are very unlikely to be get blown up since they SS in fleet battles whilst still giving gang bonuses. At the very best in a few months time I will be able to sell it for a high profit, at the very worst my PvP main can NPC and mission in it, so it isn't high-risk at all.
'Screwing up' - At the very worst, you can usually resell an item at the price you bought it at, which makes it one of the safest trading professions out there. Items in EVE rarely depreciate in value and I think I have made very few losses in my trading career.
In general when people undercut my prices there isn't a lot I can do aside from either 1)waiting it out, 2) finding a new market and a new item 3) if they have undercut by a lot, buying it up and re-marking up the price.
At the moment I've created this relatively new character (Tibullus) to start getting into manufacturing. However, I'm mostly focusing on things that cannot be created by NPC loot tables, in order to lower my competition. My goal, as a poster mentioned earlier, is not to make the largest amount of profit but instead to have a steady income of ISK that I can siphon off to my PvP characters.
Just my personal take on the markets. What annoys me is that while I used to spend a lot of time trading they never sorted out the remote buy orders. That would have totally changed my approach, but ah well. Have they sorted that out yet, because it would be very useful.
Regarding loot from my PvP characters, I sell that as cheaply as possible, just because I prefer liquid assets.
EDIT 1: added long-term investments. |