My half-assed attempts at Station Trading

* As this only a short guide, I'm going to assume you understand the basics of trading already, e.g what buy orders are, what margins are, etc *

I'll say this right now, when it comes to trading there are much better players than me that you can learn from. Frankly, my turnovers per day are much lower than they could be. If I actually put in some effort into researching what sells well/what's in demand and all that jazz, I could probably make ten times my current profits with ease.

But that's not what this is about, because all of that requires time that you could be spending doing something fun, like PvP . Instead this is my handy guide to lazy trading. It might not make billions of ISK an hour, but so far I'm averaging about 20-30 mil a day with minimal effort on my part. In PvP terms, that means I can afford fit out a new Vengeance every 1.5 days! (Sadly I tend to lose them much faster than that).

Teh Lazy Guide to Station Trading


"Trading is the art of making money out of other people's laziness" - Some guy in Amarr

- First of all, I should point out the slight differences between the two main "types" of trading that I know of, "Station trading" and what I call "Hauler trading".

- "Station trading" is where you sit on your ass in a station (surprisingly) and spam buy and sell orders like there's no tomorrow. It means you have to look at margins alot, and fight 0.01 ISK wars, but it's pretty easy to get started in (and it's what this guide is focusing on)

- "Hauler trading" requires much more effort on your part. The general idea is that you exploit the price differences between regions to make a profit. E.g, Cap booster 800s are selling in Amarr for one mil, but the Jita buy price is at 2.3 mil (not that this would ever happen). So you buy all the boosters in Amarr, fly them over to Jita and sell them for profit.

I don't have enough experience to tell you which is better, though you could feasibly do both quite effectively. Obviously though, "Hauler trading" is going to need something to haul with, and therefore some industrial skills. However the main draw for me towards Station trading (as an income source) is that you don't need any particular skills to do it with some effectiveness. Obviously if your aim is to make this your EVE career, then there are many skills to increase the number of orders you can have, decrease the taxes you pay and suchlike.

But for the occasional trader, what are your first steps?

Well first of all, you're going to need something to buy and sell. Unfortunately you'll have to use your brain a little here. Think of items that are in high demand. The obvious choices will be ones that are used in PvP, and therefore blown up alot. Things like tanking modules, weapon upgrades, GUNZ etc... (Mostly T2 modules, because the T1 stuff is barely worth trading unless you've only got a few mil to spare). These are all good investments, but often require quite a bit of a start-up fund to trade effectively. (I gave my alt 100mil to begin with a month or so ago, and his total value is now over 700 million :P) If you're a little strapped for cash, trading Meta 3 and 4 items can often make some decent profit, but the best profit is usually in the T2 products.

But wait! Don't just slap down a load of buy orders on those modules and walk off expecting to find heaps of ISK when you get back to your computer. You've still got work to do yet.

Now you've got yourself a little list of items that are likely to be in high demand (maybe fifteen or twenty is a good start), open up your market and look at the buy and sell orders in your region. You want to find margins that are decently sized, but not too large (for reasons that will become clear in a minute). Most of the modules I trade make me about 200 - 800k per module, with a couple worth 1 mil per module. Generally any margins higher than this are likely to crash or are heavily contested.

Once you've cut out all the items with razor thin margins, you need to head back to Market Details (sorry) and click the "Price History" tab. Yes, graphs are pretty but that's not what we're interested in. Instead, go to the bottom left corner and click "Show Table". Ignore all the columns except "Quantity". This shows you the number of units bought and sold per day, for as far back as you set the table (I usually stick with a month). Anything around 50+ per day isn't bad, 150+ is pretty good, and 250+ is excellent. Anything less than 30 per day (even if it has really good margins) isn't really worth trading because it'll take so long for it to be bought and sold on. Incase you don't realise why this is bad, that's cutting into your potential profit per day. (Even though we're being lazy, that's still not a good thing)

Obviously you'll want to try and set yourself up in a Trade Hub (e.g Jita, Amarr, Rens, Dodixie) if at all possible, purely because of the higher volumes of items traded, although you will have to compete with other traders trying to do the same thing you are. If you've got less time to spend messing with orders, it can be useful to set yourself a few jumps out from a hub, and supply that area instead. However, I only update my orders a couple of times a day, and I'm making decent profit out of it. It's all down to preference and how much effort (if any) you're willing to spend on this.

So, you've got your items, a start-up fund and a general grasp of what to do. Now all you have to do is get down in the trenches and fight the 0.01 ISK wars with all the other traders trying to make their fortunes. It may seem like speadsheets in space, but passive ISK is not to be sniffed at :P

Good luck!