I wrote a post advising everyone to stay away from station trading. Lot have changed since then, so I choose to remove that post as I consider it now misleading. However the main point of that post is true: new players and non-professional traders must avoid station trading like the bubonic plague. To station trade you need billions of capital, I'd say after 2B cash you can give it a shot, but you'll I have to set up buy orders for 1-3 items, which fill fast and need recreating. You need high market skills which are mostly Charisma based, an attribute that can't be used for combat skills or even combat support skills. Finally you need dedication, you can't station trade casually like you can mine, haul or run missions when you feel like. In station trading, you are on it 100% or you are out.
What is station trading? Sitting in one of the trade hubs (mostly in Jita, Rens, Amarr, Dodixie), set up buy orders for item X, then resell item X instantly on the same station. Station trading makes its profit out of sellers and buyers being inpatient, lazy or just plain dumb. (I know you make 99999999999999999T in a minute so you can afford to pay premium, no need to comment)
What items you can't station trade?
So what items can you station trade? Items that are dropped by pirates or random missions. The one who gets it get only one, so not bothering to research can actually be smart, but usually he is just dumb like a rock. He sells for the highest available buy order and don't look back.
Preparation step #1: For every sale you have to pay 1% tax. For 1B that's 10M. You can decrease it to 0.9-0.5% by learning accounting skill. Without rank 4 don't even think about it. Get 5 as soon as you can. When I say "as soon as you can" I mean when you learned the other necessary skills to 3-4. If you prefer to drive a good pew-pew ship first, you shall stop reading now and forget station trading forever. There is no shame not being dedicated to this branch of economy and you can make good money hauling, mining, salvaging. But if you even think about preferring a pew-pew ship, you will either fail in station trading or will hate it and have to force yourself every day to continue.
Preparation step #2: Broker fees. You have to pay 1% to the brokers for setting up an order, either buy or sale. That includes orders that will expire or you cancel. Since you buy and sell, you pay this fee twice. The approximated formula is BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding), which isn't entirely accurate but a good guideline. As you can see, the skill Broker Relations can only bring you to 0.75%, so while having it rank 5 is nice, it's far from being optimal use of your time. Some may even call me a newbie for telling, but I think maybe rank 5 can wait after your pew-pew ship and rank 4 can wait for the other trading skills. What matters here is the standing. I wrote how you can farm standing very fast via distribution missions and datacenter missions. These are "farmable" so you can do it actively instead of waiting for skill points. Please note that broker fees ignore the connections skill. A simple graph to show the effect:
Preparation step #3: margin trading. When you set up a buy order, the price is taken from you. The skill decreases this price to 75%, 56%, 42%, 32%, 24%. You pay the rest when the item is sold. This skill allows you to set up buy orders for 3-4x more than you have cash, as they won't find seller all together.
Preparation step #4: trading slots. You only have 5 trading slots and for station trading you need two slots for every item. 3 is more convenient (2 sell, 1 buy). You can get more slots by learning Trading 4, then Retail 5, then Wholesale 3. That give you 104 extra slots, that's a good start. Later you'll need Wholesale 5 and Tychoon 3 for 128 more slots.
How to actually do the trading? You set up a buy order and a sell order and probably get under and overcut by 0.01 ISK in 10 minutes. Then you start closing the prices by big steps and continue to do so until the competition gives up or the two prices get into 1% range of each other (2x 0.25 broker + 0.5 tax). Then you wait until your competition finally gets the picture and goes away. It won't happen overnight. For me it was more than a week till the 0.01 punks packed their bags and left. Until then I spent time and my capital was rotting there. First they will cancel their buy orders, but they still have to sell their old stock. If you notice your buy order being the highest by a large margin, decrease your buy order, and instantly follow it with your sale to make them even more miserable and because lower prices increase demand so their stocks go empty faster.
Worst case scenario:
Usually you encounter random sellers who got the item in a mission but not so dumb/lazy/"making 99999999T every hour and still run missions" to sell to a buy order. You can just wait them out, or buy them out (careful with that, do only if their price is closer to your buy order than your sell).
One day someone like you comes along and start doing the same. Who will win? The one with higher capital, as he can afford keeping his money in unsold items and buy order escrow waiting for the other to give up.
Finally the great question: how profitable it is? On Friday morning I included "2.5B (0.4B gifts)" to the post. Today, Monday morning I include my current report: 3.74B (0.4B gifts). I used a stopwatch to exactly calculate the time spent trading (as opposed to getting standing for my Amarr trading alt, or running L2 securities with my girlfirend to hook her up on the game): 5 hours, 48 minutes in the last 3 days. 214M ISK/hour. OK, it was weekend, when the kiddies are unleashed, 3 workdays would give less, but still, 2 PLEXes in a weekend.
Again, before you'd jump into printing money, I'd like to stress the upfront costs: after 7 weeks of playing, my best combat ship is an Osprey, I grinded standing with Caldari Navy and state doing distribution missions and paying others do do security storylines. I got 2B starter money by hauling pyerite and mexcallon on a T1 industrial and skillbooks in a T1 frigate to the most pirate-infested system of the universe and spent a week clearing up the 0.01 punks. So, think carefully if it is for you or not. The other business ways (hauling, mining, manufacturing, planet industry) are producing more than enough ISK for your normal gameplay and save you from ever having to shoot little red NPC crosses.
The moron today is our friend, the 0.01 punk. If you don't get why he is a moron, maybe station trading is not for you. (Solution below in small letters)
It is a buy order, he should have typed 28000026.01
What is station trading? Sitting in one of the trade hubs (mostly in Jita, Rens, Amarr, Dodixie), set up buy orders for item X, then resell item X instantly on the same station. Station trading makes its profit out of sellers and buyers being inpatient, lazy or just plain dumb. (I know you make 99999999999999999T in a minute so you can afford to pay premium, no need to comment)
What items you can't station trade?
- Items that are produced by players like ships and modules. The producers are hard-working, patient (material research can take months) and smart (as they could understand the complicated crafting system). As raw materials are available in practically unlimited number, they can produce large amounts and cut the middle man: you.
- Items that are NPC sold like most skillbooks: any hauler can buy them 2-3 jumps away and dump them on you any time
- Items that can be farmed like veldspar: The rule of morons is "i farmd it so itz free lol", so they happily undercut any price you set.
So what items can you station trade? Items that are dropped by pirates or random missions. The one who gets it get only one, so not bothering to research can actually be smart, but usually he is just dumb like a rock. He sells for the highest available buy order and don't look back.
Preparation step #1: For every sale you have to pay 1% tax. For 1B that's 10M. You can decrease it to 0.9-0.5% by learning accounting skill. Without rank 4 don't even think about it. Get 5 as soon as you can. When I say "as soon as you can" I mean when you learned the other necessary skills to 3-4. If you prefer to drive a good pew-pew ship first, you shall stop reading now and forget station trading forever. There is no shame not being dedicated to this branch of economy and you can make good money hauling, mining, salvaging. But if you even think about preferring a pew-pew ship, you will either fail in station trading or will hate it and have to force yourself every day to continue.
Preparation step #2: Broker fees. You have to pay 1% to the brokers for setting up an order, either buy or sale. That includes orders that will expire or you cancel. Since you buy and sell, you pay this fee twice. The approximated formula is BrokerFee% = (1 – 0.05*BrokerRelationsLevel)/ exp(0.1 *FactionStanding + 0.04*CorporationStanding), which isn't entirely accurate but a good guideline. As you can see, the skill Broker Relations can only bring you to 0.75%, so while having it rank 5 is nice, it's far from being optimal use of your time. Some may even call me a newbie for telling, but I think maybe rank 5 can wait after your pew-pew ship and rank 4 can wait for the other trading skills. What matters here is the standing. I wrote how you can farm standing very fast via distribution missions and datacenter missions. These are "farmable" so you can do it actively instead of waiting for skill points. Please note that broker fees ignore the connections skill. A simple graph to show the effect:
Preparation step #3: margin trading. When you set up a buy order, the price is taken from you. The skill decreases this price to 75%, 56%, 42%, 32%, 24%. You pay the rest when the item is sold. This skill allows you to set up buy orders for 3-4x more than you have cash, as they won't find seller all together.
Preparation step #4: trading slots. You only have 5 trading slots and for station trading you need two slots for every item. 3 is more convenient (2 sell, 1 buy). You can get more slots by learning Trading 4, then Retail 5, then Wholesale 3. That give you 104 extra slots, that's a good start. Later you'll need Wholesale 5 and Tychoon 3 for 128 more slots.
How to actually do the trading? You set up a buy order and a sell order and probably get under and overcut by 0.01 ISK in 10 minutes. Then you start closing the prices by big steps and continue to do so until the competition gives up or the two prices get into 1% range of each other (2x 0.25 broker + 0.5 tax). Then you wait until your competition finally gets the picture and goes away. It won't happen overnight. For me it was more than a week till the 0.01 punks packed their bags and left. Until then I spent time and my capital was rotting there. First they will cancel their buy orders, but they still have to sell their old stock. If you notice your buy order being the highest by a large margin, decrease your buy order, and instantly follow it with your sale to make them even more miserable and because lower prices increase demand so their stocks go empty faster.
Worst case scenario:
- Before your arrival the sell price is 10M, followed by 10M.01, 10M.02, 10M.03 and lot of other orders around it, while the highest buy price is 8M and 6 other orders right below it.
- You enter with a 9.9M sell and 8.1M buy order. In an hour you'll find 10 sell orders between 9899999.89 and 9899999.99 and 5 buy orders between 8100000.01 and 8100000.06.
- You modify your prices to 9.5M sell, 8.5M buy. You thank God that in EVE the names are anonymous so they won't spam you with moron letters.
- Next day you find 10 sell orders between 9499999.89 and 9499999.99 and 3 sell orders between 8500000.01 and 8500000.03.
- You modify your prices to 9.1M sell, 8.9 buy. They buy one of your items just to learn your name and send you moron letters. You send them to me so I can publish them here
- Next day you find 9 sell orders between 9099999.93 and 9099999.99 but only one lone buy order above you. You smile and wait.
- Next day the buy order disappeared and you are the highest. The second highest is some old order at 8000001.18. You decrease your buy order to 8.4M and your sell order to 8.6M. You imagine them cursing and calling you noob. Oh wait you don't have to imagine, they send you tells educating you about "how can we all make money with larger margin".
- Next day there are 8 sell orders between 85899999.93 and 8599999.98 (the 8599999.99 sold out). There is no new buy order, the second highest is still that 8000001.18. You decrease your buy order to 8M (yes, below that old order, it won't disappear otherwise), and your sell to 8.2M.
- On the seventh day the Lord rested, so shall you. Imagine them praying for the Goons to finally come to Jita and do something with you as they obviously can't.
- Some time on the next week the name of your item shows up on your transaction list. You either bought one or sold one. You check the item and see that the sell orders above you sold out, you have the highest buy order and the second highest is at 7M with 54 day expiration (was a 3 months order that was forgotten 36 days ago). You set your buy order to 7.01M, the sell stays at 8.2 and you start making profit
- A week later you see no other sell orders, besides some old and overpriced crap and no buy orders above you. Congratulations, item X is all yours, you can elevate the sell price and print ISK
Usually you encounter random sellers who got the item in a mission but not so dumb/lazy/"making 99999999T every hour and still run missions" to sell to a buy order. You can just wait them out, or buy them out (careful with that, do only if their price is closer to your buy order than your sell).
One day someone like you comes along and start doing the same. Who will win? The one with higher capital, as he can afford keeping his money in unsold items and buy order escrow waiting for the other to give up.
Finally the great question: how profitable it is? On Friday morning I included "2.5B (0.4B gifts)" to the post. Today, Monday morning I include my current report: 3.74B (0.4B gifts). I used a stopwatch to exactly calculate the time spent trading (as opposed to getting standing for my Amarr trading alt, or running L2 securities with my girlfirend to hook her up on the game): 5 hours, 48 minutes in the last 3 days. 214M ISK/hour. OK, it was weekend, when the kiddies are unleashed, 3 workdays would give less, but still, 2 PLEXes in a weekend.
Again, before you'd jump into printing money, I'd like to stress the upfront costs: after 7 weeks of playing, my best combat ship is an Osprey, I grinded standing with Caldari Navy and state doing distribution missions and paying others do do security storylines. I got 2B starter money by hauling pyerite and mexcallon on a T1 industrial and skillbooks in a T1 frigate to the most pirate-infested system of the universe and spent a week clearing up the 0.01 punks. So, think carefully if it is for you or not. The other business ways (hauling, mining, manufacturing, planet industry) are producing more than enough ISK for your normal gameplay and save you from ever having to shoot little red NPC crosses.
The moron today is our friend, the 0.01 punk. If you don't get why he is a moron, maybe station trading is not for you. (Solution below in small letters)
It is a buy order, he should have typed 28000026.01
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.
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