Notes on Trading, Part 2

[Etienne Darmond]

Posting this as its own topic and erasing original 'comment' on part 1:

(This way whatever wisdom it contains gets more exposure to the uni.)

Link to part 1: https://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtop ... 97#p951797

ED’s Notes on Trading and Related Activities, Part 2.

Hello again. Due to RL circumstances I’m back to a bit of a hiatus from the game so to sooth my EVE compulsions and obsessions we continue with sharing some of what I’ve learned about trading and related activities where I left off in part 1.

1. Some loot items are very profitable and have a high turnover. Some loot items are best recycled. Even if you don’t have the scrap metal processing skill you will get 50% of the materials and charged a facility fee depending on your standings with the corps that owns the station.

2. For some loot items, especially those that tend to have a low ‘buy’ price it is way more profitable to recycle it yourself and sell the minerals than it is to try and hawk the loot on the ‘sell’ market, or sell it to a buy order, or to sell it to the UNI’s buyback program. If you do sell such loot on the public market, you’ll be selling to a pirate such as myself who uses the minerals either for resale or as stock for manufacturing projects. If you sell such loot to the UNI buyback program, you can feel nice that the profits are re invested in our corporation. (And our corp is well worth the investment.) A High scrap metal reprocessing skill takes a while to train but it can lead to some great opportunities for discount minerals from low-market-ISK-value / high-mineral-yield loot.

3. With Max scrap metal skills ED has 55% return on reprocessed modules so I reprocess in multiples of 20 to make sure I get maximum juice out of my squeezed oranges.

4. A clue to such juicy reprocessable loot item as mentioned in 1 above is a series of buy orders almost ridiculously lower than the sell orders. For example if an item is selling for 7,000 ISK but you can buy it for 950 ISK that may be an indication that the minerals are worth just under 7k and you can get them for the bargain price of 951 ISK plus fees, and brokerage. 6 x purchase net profit is pretty sweet!

5. In figuring out the profitability of reprocessing loot items remember to watch your margins re fees, taxes, and brokerage. Calculator scrap paper spread sheets mental math and fingers and toes are all part of the game.

6. You’ll get an idea of mineral return and value by placing something in a station’s recycling dialog box. As long as you don’t follow through by pressing the final button, you get an estimate. Just cancel the transaction if you don’t want to actually reprocess the loot you are examining. The estimate does not necessarily reflect current market, it uses some mysterious CPP algorithm. So fingers toes calculators spread sheets and 3rd party apps are all in order to refine your estimate.

7. There are also third-party tools that help with recycle value such as Adam4Eve.

8. Depending on your various characters skills and standings it can be profitable to buy loot for recycle at trade hubs and haul it yourself to a recycling station. I do this regularly with my alts in Amarr and Jita placing buy orders and my main hauling to Dodixie for processing and on to Stacmon at Uni’s Forge for stockpiling as manufacturing feedstock. That’s because my main has an awesome standing with the Federation Navy so I pay no fees to recycle there. He carries rigs for the alts to sell at those high-volume hubs and comes back with salvage and other things as industrial feedstock. Just be very careful about choke point systems like Uedema and Vacema. Learn from hauling 101 and use tools like check before you jump and Uedema scout.

9. It can’t hurt to have an alpha alt permanently stationed in choke points, so you have real time eyes on gates before you make a decision to haul. AND remember if you can’t afford to lose the cargo AND the ship, don’t fly it. Somedays you will lose, that’s part of the game. Also its often better to haul two or three loads in a small more agile ship than it is to pile it all into a triple cargo extended Iteron V and….well…..Safety. and other high sec predators particularly like to eat those like popcorn (often with a single destroyer)……and such a pile might not even make it safely out of Jita 4,4.(use insta-undocks and instadocks….Jita is a terrible pirate hole…..er I mean a wonderful opportunity to learn evasive tactics as a juicy prey item….)

10. I find a viator (blockade runner) works very well for this kind of triangle trade among the hubs. If you don’t have the skills or can’t afford a blockade runner the cloaking trick on a properly fitted badger is almost as good….

11. best is to watch what is happening at Uedema and avoid times when non-war related kills are happening at gates or there are pilots from known high sec ‘pirate’ corps like Safety. In or near system. You can estimate if a kill is war related or not by looking at the alliances involved in zkillboard. Of course, hauling on a Uni character when Uni itself has been war decked or is cooling down from war dec is not recommended.)

12. Sometimes, not often, I can sell rigs I’ve made for a quick and reasonable profit to a Jita buy order. Be careful though. It happens only occasionally in certain categories of rigs and most buy orders are below the cost of manufacture and materials. I figure when it happens at Jita its because an alliance is stocking up.

13. If you accidentally place a sell order at lower than the highest buy price, you’ve lost your stuff to the buyers. BE CAREFUL to review your entries before you press the final button.

14. If you goof an order, and no one has bought or sold to it as yet you have a 5 minute wait before you can adjust it.

15. If you goof a sell order but it doesn’t get immediately scooped by the highest buy order you can instantly minimize your losses by buying it yourself. Consider the loss of the tax and the brokers fee tuition in the school of commerce and a friendly PVE / PVP reminder to CHECK your orders before you finalize them.

16. If you goof on a buy order and end up benefitting sellers with a serious amount of 'bonus' isk at great cost to your own wallet it MAY be worth looking up who benefitted in your wallet and writing a polite evemail that admits your mistake and ask for them to send some isk so you can recover some of your loss. Most pilots will ignore you. Some will insult you. Some will give you a harsh sounding “…well that’s the price of learning in EVE lecture…” But despite the dog-eat-dog predatory nature of this game and the way it encourages some people to live out sociopathic fantasies, there is an astonishing level of tough but fair good sportsmanship, comerarderie and affection for people who will own their mistakes and keep learning. Some pilots WILL help you recover faster from your error by topping up their price paid to something near market value. Sometimes you will even make cyber buddies or begin to meet potential virtual business partners in this way. Just don’t beg, or whine, or spam and own your error. Consider it a pvp loss and tuition in the dog-eat-dog world of marketing. (Incidentally even in pvp ship losses there are some pilots who are perfectly happy to enter into dialog with their victims about the victim learning pvp…some are rude, some will ignore you, but again there is comeraderie and tough but fair good sportsmanship out there, your buddies WILL kill you if they get a chance but you can all go to the pub afterwards and have a good laugh…and learn….with many of them most days.)

What does such a buy order goof look like? Well imagine something is selling for 70 isk and you want to buy 1,000 items. But you type in 7000 isk by mistake. The system will grab the first 1000, lowest value sell orders at 7000 isk or less BUT it will pay 7000 for each item no matter how much the seller was asking in the order. So, shazam, you meant to spend 70,000 isk to get something at market value but you end up paying 7,000,000 isk. Ouch. It's like a pvp ship loss. Now imagine you goof both the isk amount and the number of items to 10,000 items at 7,000 isk. 70,000,000 isk. That's like loosing a battle cruiser.....ouch.

17. Don’t just accept the default values the computer enters for your buy and sell orders. If you do, you will end up placing sell orders at pittance higher than the highest buy order and a pirate like me is just going to come along and scoop it up to save brokerage on placing a buy order. You will be out tax AND brokerage and would have made more money just selling it to the highest buy order (because then you would not have paid brokerage), effectively wasting your market slot and loosing you money at the same time.

18. I’ve found that station trading named material components (Sleeper, Takhmahl, Talocan, Yan Jung etc.) does quite well in Jita with its massive number of customers and its turn over. However, they don’t sell very quickly in other hubs nor is it that easy to source them at low prices in other hubs. Jita is all about the churn. (and the possibility of getting killed while docking or undocking with out insta bookmarks….or getting eaten in Uedama on your way back or forth to market.)