Reselling fixed priced items

There are many items which have more or less fixed prices. The NPC sold items are completely fixed. The random mission loot that you collect from morons who don't know the way to the nearest hub via region-wide orders is almost fixed. Items that are common in one region but not another can be treated similarly.

The market of these items is mostly ignored because traders mistakenly try to station trade them. You can't. Station trading is arbitrage between inpatient random sellers and random buyers. Trading with these items is haul-trading. The fact that you might never leave your station doesn't change that.

How is it different? Your competition is not the guy who sets up a higher buy order and a lower sell. The 0.01 punk while can show up is not much of a problem here. The competition is invisible. The competition is the buyer telling "screw you, I go and pick it up myself". Look at this skillbook: If you are a station trader, you set up a buy order for 9.6M, and resell the bought items for 12.8M. Except you barely get any items and they don't sell at all. You wrongfully blame the 0.01 punk who undercut you to 12799999.99, cut the price and still don't sell. Even when the punk leaves, you barely buy and sell. You declare the item useless, sell it to a buy order and leave it... to me who gets rich on stuff like this and curse the lack of trade slots to make much more.

The reason of this fail is in the market history: The minimum-maximum values tell that transactions below 10M (your buy orders) happen 1-2 times per month along with sells over 11M. Why? Because the buyers go to the NPC station and buy it for fixed 10M. However the average price is 10.5M so there is money to be made here. People are ready to pay this 0.5M for the time not spent flying a few jumps.

So what will you do? Pick the items up for 10M and sell them for 10.5M. You can haul them yourself or you can buy them away and set up courier contract. However the item won't come to your station on its own like pirate tags. No one bumps into such book by accident. The only people selling these - besides traders - are the ones who bought it by mistake and want to get rid of it. They aren't that many, 1-2 a month.

The reason why they are left alone is the "ridiculous" profit rate. I'm selling most of these for 105% buy price. The tax and broker take 1%, leaving me pitiful 4% profit. Feel free to laugh and jump to the comment section to tell how awesome you are for selling for much higher profit. Or consider that the item has a constant daily demand so what I list in the morning is sold by the evening, allowing me to reinvest my money on the next day. 1.04^30 = 3.24 (224% profit/month). Still laughing?

Such business is completely safe. You can't lose on it, worst case scenario is being forced to liquidate for near buy price. People are always buying these things and the buy price is fixed.

What to do if the damn 0.01 punk shows up? You can do two things: one is nothing, waiting until he get bored and leaves. Most do, as they utilize their time to get on top of sells and that pays off much better with high margin items. If he stays, he is probably doing what you are, just at a bit lower price. Ask the question: "am I happy with 3% profit (143%/month)?" If yes, start selling for 10.4M. If not, liquidate the item and remove it from your quickbar, he won.

The interesting thing about daily profit on such items is that they barely affected by time spent or capital invested. The high turnover allows you to buy just one item, sell it, buy the next. That's exactly how I started with Logistics books when I thought 30M is a fortune. Or you can buy 100 pieces and sell them in a week without pressing a key. The outcome is the same, what changed is only the capital rotting and the the time spent. The more money you invest, the less time you have to spend, greatly increasing your profit/playhour, decreasing your profit/capital but leaving your profit/day intact. That can only be changed by changing the price. The smaller the margin, the more people buy from you instead of flying themselves.

Morons who buy a wrong book are rare. Morons who buy a wrong book and can't set up a sell order are ever more rare: Note: this book is random drop, so should be station traded.

Business report:
Sunday morning 5.21B (0.1B gifts as I gave another 200M to girlfriend, 3 PLEX behind for second account).
Monday morning 6.07B (0.1B gifts, 3 PLEX behind for second account).
Tuesday morning 6.40B (0.1B gifts, 3 PLEX behind for second account).
On Friday morning I had 4.63 (-0.3), so in the holidays when the kids were unleashed, I made another 2B.

Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel and your UI suggestions are welcomed.

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EVE UI suggestions

This post is dedicated for the discussion of the EVE UI suggestions permanent page.

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Goons: enhancing our game, destroying the game

The Goon motto is "Goonswarm is not here to destroy the game, but your game." The burn Jita event is one of their latest action in that. At first I did not even understand how could their idea to blockade Jita make any effect. I mean you can mine ice where the ice is, but you can trade on any stations, and while Jita is convenient, it has nothing that makes it essential. I assumed that people will simply trade somewhere else nearby and the Goons will not shoot down anything but lost newbies who can't read the news, so the event will not fail but drown in boredom as Goons will spend all day in a Tornado, doing nothing, their all day killmails will contain a dozen lowbie ships.

I still think that their event holds no danger to the trade or smart players and their killmails will only contain lost newbies, morons, slackers. However I'm now convinced that it won't be in dozens, but in thousands. Actually they can shoot down so many ships that they run out of Tornados in a day or two.

This is good news for us. Remember that the traders biggest competition is the "i farmd for free lol" moron, who does not purchase services, but do it himself much-much less effectively or undercuts with items he farmed with terrible amount/hour. The Goons now make us the favor of exterminating them. When they finally run out of ships, declare themselves victorious and go home, we will be stronger than ever as our trivial competition is down. Gallepirratlulz will no longer pollute my Logistics book profit by the single books he bought 10 systems away and transported here in his laser fitted Dominix, since he lost that thing to a Goon Tornado. More profit for me.

Everything that make the game harsh, dangerous, widen the gap between those who can and those who can't. We can asses the risks and avoid it, so we'll even make profit on the event. Those who "play for fun" will fall. Long live the Goons!

Except the "play for fun" won't linger defeated, ripped from all his wealth. He'll quit the game. I repeat what I wrote, the griefers are the sole obstacle between EVE online and blockbuster success. Profitable pirates don't really matter here as the morons and slackers don't have anything that worth pirating. If CCP let the Goons massacre the idiot who transports a single Logistic book in his Dominix, thinking that 1M profit is good money for 2x10 jumps, the bad players will leave in masses.

Remember, 80% of the players never leave high sec and something tells me that they aren't station traders or haulers. Rather mission runners and cruiser-miners who want to farm for some "awsom ship". Another 10-15% are consensual PvP-ers. They do the same except they go for some reachable ship and every week or two they team up, have a roam to kill random people and feel like PvP gods. Then they lose their ship, reiterate that "we had fun lol" and go farm more. None of these are up for non-consensual PvP and that's exactly what the Goons are bringing in. The result will be exactly the same when Blizzard made the "scourge invasion" event in WoW. People stopped logging in and raged on the forums as they were too dumb even to relocate to Silvermoon or whatever-named-goat city which were unaffected. And in WoW they lost nothing but the ability to do something now. No property was lost. I know that EVE players keep telling themselves that they are better than WoW players, but my 300M/day income strongly disagrees.

Here the interest of me and the Goons is directly conflicting with the interests of CCP. We don't want morons and slackers (pubies they call them) in the game. CCP wants. The difference between The Mittani and me is that I'm capable of recognizing this and properly responding, he can't. That guy still thinks that he can defeat CCP in its own game. CCP is not another alliance ingame, they are gods here. They could delete every ship of the Goonswarm with a few clicks. Messing with gods don't pay. I learned it the hard way (in short: I figured out how to kick bad players from an open WoW battle, therefore greatly increasing our win chance. Blizzard removed the option instantly to prevent bad players from being kicked). The Mittani don't just want to mess with gods, he wants to wage war on them. Seems his removal of CSM, forcing to write apologies and banning for 30 days did not teach him who's the boss here.

CCP will somehow protect its bad players from being massacred. Has to. However they are indeed in a bad situation as outside the game they are not at all gods. They are a publisher company who has to serve paying customers: us. The selling point of EVE is the competitive environment. The announcement of "EVE turned to space WoW" would cause them lot of lost subscribers and not just Goons. I quit playing WoW as an MMO, I'll just consume new content when available and unsubscribe until another bunch of content is published. CCP can't even hope on that as they don't have storyline content. They can lose their selling point by making PvP actions impossible.

What can they do to protect their bad players from Goon massacre without losing their selling point? In the short notice of April 28 no major overhaul is possible, but they still have options:

• Increase the security status of Jita to 1.0. There are already such systems, many directly next to it, why not Jita? This way the Concord can respond even faster, increasing the costs of ganking. They could also tune up Concord to throw in more ships, making sure that even a destroyer can't fire two volleys.
• Increase the strength of the faction polices. They fire on everyone below -5 security status just for being in empire space. They already capable of calling reinforcements. Tune up these reinforcements. If the faction police can't clear the system in 5 minutes, it calls battleships. If they can't kill everyone with -5 sec status in 10 mins, time for the Caldari Navy to drop some Leviathans.
• Plant some more sentry guns
• Warn players of this event in a popup window on the loading screen and in official news. Maybe the Concord could send a mass-evemail too.

On the long term, some more permanent solution is needed that protect both interests of CCP: to provide a stress-free environment to bad players and retain the highly competitive nature of EVE. My solution is simple: high sec is almost completely safe and completely poor. The first part is tricky as we want to protect newbies and bad players, not idiots who autopilot a frigate with 20B inside. My suggestion: security status can only be increased by paying to the Concord (they should have "fundraiser for the good cause" agents in lowsec), about 500M to offset the effect of a kill. You can't just rat yourself up, so suicide gankers will only jump on fat targets and ignore the losers and newbies.

The second part would mean removing L4 missions, incursions, wormholes, archeology and hacking sites, battlecruiser and above rats from highsec and ban the usage of miner modules besides Miner I (environmental protection). This way anyone who choose to be a "high-sec carebear" would be able to play safely forever but would be so poor that no serious player would choose this way. Since the bad players are uninformed, they wouldn't even know that the 3M/hour they get for running L3 securities or mining veldspar with an Osprey is a joke and would be proud of their achievement of getting an empty Navy Raven hull after a month.

An interesting comment was addressed to me on Syncaine's blog: "In WoW you have been battling the M&S endlessly, you’ve lead ganking campaigns against the Ensidia fanboys on Magtheridon, you’ve campaigned against bots, you’ve ran a herb interdiction, you’ve ran complicated and evil (for wow standards) metagaming schemes in BGs and Tol Barad, and you even wanted to deny BH to the horde for a week after 4.2 launched. You’ve ran mail and chatlog ‘porn’ sections on your blog. And you dreamed of the day when MMOs would be liberated from all M&S. ... Honestly I was expecting you to be in Goonswarm or some other criminal outfit, robbing morons blind, organising mass campains, and coming up with evil metagaming schemes for domination of all space."

This question is  good enough to get a blog post level answer:
I want two things: first I want the smart and hard working to stop being compassionate towards the M&S. I want them to stop boosting them, attributing their failure to "being new" or "being casual" or "being unlucky". As there is no other way to defend against Jita gank than hiding, the losses of the M&S will only bring sympathy to them.
Secondly I don't think that the M&S is beyond help. They are lazy and dumb because they can afford to be such. They are carried by welfare provided by the game developers (the state) and friendly helpful people (charity). In absence of these they would be broke. I want them to be poor and without status symbols. I want them to be, feel and be observed by peers as losers as only these things can force them to cut the bullshit and start doing something useful. I want them to reform and be better, no less than the worst leftists, I just strictly believe that the only tool that can make it happen is the whip. Goons don't want to change them, they just want them to suffer, die and disappear.

Moron of the day is here.

Business report: 4.63B (0.3B gifts as gave another 100M to girlfriend, 3 PLEX behind for second account). A week ago I was at 2.5 (-0.4), so in a week I made 2.2B. Let me put this number into perspective. In a month I can buy 9 PLEX-es (-1 for second account). Or a more understandable way: if I'd choose to pilot titans, I could buy the materials for the hull and full set of faction fittings before I'd have the skills to use them.

Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.

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Second account trader alt

There are 4 market hubs: Jita, Amarr, Dodixie and Rens. If you already have the knowledge to station trade on one, why not do the same on all 4 to multiply the profit? It's easy: you start a second account and create 3 alts on them.

Philosophical disclaimer: I uphold that paying money inside a game (opposed to for the game) is generally buying boost, implies sucking in the game and also idiotic: if you enjoy playing why do you pay for fast forward, if you don't enjoy playing why do you play? Buying a second account is no different, you could experience the game fully in your first account, you are paying for increasing your income bypassing in-game restrictions like travel times between hubs and trading slots. However you can "un-boost" yourself by paying the second account with PLEX you buy for ISK. This way your second account is upheld by in-game means, aka "playing better". The obvious consequence is that your second account must make more than a PLEX worth. Since my second account was activated via the "power of 2" program, allowing 6 months play for 3 months price, I'm now 3 PLEX behind the equilibrium point and this will be displayed on my business report (despite I used only 2 weeks of the 6 months yet and the alts there are not yet able to earn serious money).

The characters on your second trader account need the same skills as the main station trader. To get them as soon as possible, I suggest the following path:

1. Cybernetics 1 and get +3 implants to Cha, Mem, Will, +1 or +2 to the rest
2. Skills needed to do the career missions in all 3 faction bases: this is advised as the fastest way to get faction standing. The skills are Destroyers 2, Faction Frigate 3, Targeting 1, Astronometrics 1, Industry 1, Hull upgrades 1, Afterburners 1, faction specific weapon 2. If you value playing time over skill learning time, train Caldari Frigate 3 and Small hybrid turrets 2 regardless of your faction. Small railguns with iron charge oneshots starter mission frigs from maximum targeting range, saving you lot of chasing. Get a cargo magnet to pick up the mission-loot they drop in that distance.
3. If you are going to get your standing via distribution missions and pay mercenary/bring your main for encounter storyline, get Faction Industrial 3 and Anchoring 1. If you'll get your standings via doing security L3/4 via your main boosting, skip
4. Remap for Cha 8, Will 6.
5. Get Social 4, Negotiations 2 (or 3). Getting Distribution/Security relations is questionable as the book cost 20M so you need to earn 150M from mission LP rewards just to break even and I doubt you can do it before reaching 6/6 standing (which is good for a trader alt)
6. Learn Connection 3, to access higher level agents faster, then learn your starter trading skills which are Trade 4, Retail 3, Accounting 4, Margin Trading 3, Broker relations 3, Contracting 2, Diplomacy 2. While the learning is in progress, do the next steps, these skills won't help them.
7. Get a destroyer, fit it with 6 weapons, leave 2 slots for miner, civilian salvager, civilian logi modul that you'll get for missions
8. Do all the career agent missions. When doing the scanning missions, take 3 documents from each container
9. Fly to the next career agent hub and do the missions. You can instantly complete the scanning missions using the documents from the first hub
10. Elevate your standing using distribution missions and datacenter missions or your main boosting securities. Your alt can safely join the fight in a capsule as the NPC pirates don't podkill.
11. If you want to haul between hubs, watch out for dislikes! You must stay above -5 with diplomacy or the faction police shoots you. It's especially nasty with Caldari-Gallente as they hate each other with 0.5 modification. Remember, you don't have to get to zero, just to -4.9, and Diplomacy is a simple (x1) skill, with Diplomacy 4, you can go down to -7.7 unmodified skill and stay safe.
12. When your skills are learned and your standing is above 5/5, start trading and keep learning skills or start your next alt if you have capital

Business report: 4.48B (0.4B gifts, 3 PLEX behind for second account) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.  Personal note: I finally got to 8 standing with Caldari Navy, so can have jump clones. No more missions for my main. Ever.

PS: if you know about EVE business blogs (trading, hauling, mining, manufacturing, planet industry), please send me the link. It's not like I don't want to link them, I just can't find them.

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The secret of World of Tanks

Update: due to the undying interest in the topic, I did a more serious research in the topic, read that instead!

World of Tanks is an extremely successful game with 20 million users and 30% paying rate. That's 6M paying customer, in the same league as WoW, despite much smaller developer budget.

To make it more awesome, World of Tanks is a PvP game, while the other blockbusters like WoW, Farmwille are purely PvE, where no one is frustrated by defeat. Everyone can tell a dozen PvP MMOs that failed or linger with a few 10K subscribers. And unlike the other mentionable successful PVP MMO, EVE online, there is no "high sec" in World of Tanks. The only gameplay is going to the field and battle enemy tanks, head on.

PvP games are killed by the "PvP spiral": the bad players are pwned and stop playing, making the second worst group the worst, who are now pwned and it goes on until no one left but the hard core. World of Tanks is probably the only game out there that is not affected by it.

Of course the developers can tinker with the matchmaking system to give both teams equally strong players (as opposed to tanks), so the bad ones are carried by good ones. However it's just annoying but not a fix: in this scheme the bad ones would still be massacred, despite half of them would get a "you won" screen (that he probably don't even see as he exited battle on death). This was the first piece of puzzle that I could use to set up my tinfoil hat theory: I saved the results of 60 battles and found that:

• 58% of the players had 0 kills
• Only 23.5% had 1 kill
• 10% had 2 kills
• 8% had 3 or more kills.

This is exactly what we would guess. A handful of good players are pwning the bad ones. Now I went to the offical site and checked the toplists. As there is no kill/battle toplist, I checked the top winrate and the top XP/battle players, randomly clicking on top 1000 (but not top 100) players and did not find a single one with more than 2 kills/battle. Actually their average is around 1.3. We are talking about the best here, the world top 1000 and their kill rate don't reach the double of the big average (0.74). Whoa. Can you imagine that WoW gladiators or EVE killmail top 1000 players have only 2:1 kill:death against average players?

The next clue is the winrate itself. 60% winrate gets you to world top 1000, and despite serious efforts I failed to find a single player below 40% winrate, even when I looked up players who griefed the team in battles I was. Yes, even active griefers manage to win 2/5 of the battles. I know, random battle, but still. Put a gladiator in a WoW BG and see how he both dominates the chart and also provides lot of wins. In WoT, even the best players are just "slightly above average", while even the AFKers and griefers are just "slightly below average".

The above alone explains the success of World of Tanks. It's a PvP game where no one fails. Everyone has wins and everyone has kills (if the best ones have just little more than average kills, the worst ones also have little less than average kills). A PvP game where no one pwns and no one is pwned, a game where everyone is competitive, where no one is left behind. A miracle. It's too good to be true. And probably it's not.

I started to get data about the misses and ineffective hits of me and my girlfriend while using the best cannon of the game, BL-10. It wasn't easy to get the data as the game has no combat log and the developers explicitly told that they never put in any. I had to make marks on a paper during battles, so probably made mistakes. This data is not at all accurate, but the result is so big that the signal-noise ratio is probably good enough:
On battles that we won 13% of the hits were ineffective.
On battles that we lost, 29% of the hits were ineffective.


I'd like to stress that below comes my opinion about the facts and not facts themselves. There are other explanation of the facts which can be true, therefore I can't claim my opinion be "the truth". The straightforward explanation is: "if you suck or unlucky, you lose", however it assumes that the battle depends on me. I saw too many AFK-leeches win battles to believe that. I can suck and shoot nothing but E100 turret front armor and still win due to teammates and can be "top gun" and lose (did that too many times). Also, why does my penetration rate varies so much between battles? I magically forgot where to aim in 5 minutes?

Now my tinfoil hat explanation: the matchmaker decides who needs a win to not fall too far from the average and who needs a defeat to not elevate too far from it and assemble the teams accordingly. The "winner" team gets a bonus to its penetration chance, the "loser" team gets a penalty. While you can make a miracle and with awesome play you can win even these battles, or lose a "won" battle to griefers or 6+ AFK-ers, but the bonus/penalty on average works, making sure that everyone is just slightly away from average. After the victory is decided, the players do the rest. As I already found, on the winner side the kills are much more distributed, half of the winner team scores at least one kill. So while in every battle the good ones "pwn", the "good ones" change from battle to battle.

Further proof is my gold ammo test: with item shop ammo I had 2.4 kills/battle and 69% wins (world top 100). My kills are simply not enough to explain the insane amount of wins, as I killed only 16% of the enemy. The solution is that gold ammo allowed me kills when I did not suppose to kill anything, turning a lost match into a won.

Even more proof: the statistics page lists which tanks has the highest win ratio:
T82: 59.09%
Marder II: 58.07%
SU-26: 57.32%
Lorraine 40 t: 57.03%
MS-1: 56.98%
Except the Lorraine, all of the tanks in the list are lowbie tanks. Why? Because lowbie tanks have very little armor compared to gun. If I shoot a Marder II with another Marder II, I simply cannot get a nonpenetrating hit without it being obvious bug or cheat. Even if my real penetration strength is just half of the formal value, I still can damage everything on the field (except KV front armor). So these tanks are able to bypass tinkering with penetration chances. With such tanks it's possible to get insane win rates.

One more time: the data can be insufficient and the results can be interpreted differently. However, even if they are completely innocent in rigging the matches, the case is a good example for maximum transparency: in the presence of combat logs, even the slightest shed of suspicion could not exist.


EVE business report: 4.13B (0.4B gifts). Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.

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Inverse ransom

I'm a strict supporter of profitable pirating. The smart shall exploit the dumb and the lazy. Also, I believe that the rise of profitable pirates can decrease the amount of griefers more than anything else. Players tend to go for rewards, and if there is a clear way to get ISK while doing PvP, most will do so and only the most obnoxious persons (opposed to characters) would keep going for "tears".

In EVE it's hard to be a profitable pirate. The act of piracy is a strongly negative sum action. The destroyed ship loses its hull, and you can salvage back about 30% or something via salvaging, if you happen to have a salvager ship around. The modules and the cargo has about 50% chance to drop. If we assume that the fittings and cargo costs as much as the ship (which is a good rule of thumb) the pirate gains 40% of the value the target loses.

Of course there is a system to increase the pie: ransoms. The pirate demands ransom and let the target go. If the target worth 100M and he demands 70M, he gets 30M more than by destroying the ship and the target loses 30M less than he would if his ship would be destroyed. Win-win.

Except there is absolutely no reason for the pirate to honor his promise. The optimal action is to take the ransom and destroy the ship. Due to this, the optimal action of the target is not paying ransom, therefore we got a nice game theory trap where everyone does what is optimal for him, providing the worst global outcome (largest loss to target, smallest gain to pirate).

Behold my idea, the inverse ransom, which solves this situation and makes pirating much more profitable: the pirate tackles the ship and initiate communication, both via direct chat and on local with something like "Yarr, this is pirate X, talk to me landlubber or feel my wrath!". Roleplaying text is always recommended since it distances people from the game. The more likely the target views the situation ingame rather than "that person tries to defeat my person", the more likely he'll cooperate.

The pirate then makes his offer: "Yarr, the mighty pirate captain has caught another mouse! You have two options little mouse, fight/self destruct and lose your ship AND your pod OR make some ISK to recover your losses. Interested or want to die?" The target will most probably tells that he is interested.

Then the pirate presents his offer: "I pay you up front 66% of the value of your hull! Yes, I, the mighty pirate pay you little mouse! In return you leave your ship and run away with your capsule. If you destroy your ship instead of leaving it, I'll kill your pod and put your name on the list of bad mice and from now on me and my mates will kill and podkill you when we can. What will you say?"

If the target has more than one brain cells, he says yes, and the pirate pays him. There is a chance that he won't leave his ship, but it's small as the pirate already shown him reason and goodwill (as far as a pirate can go) and also he doesn't want to lose his implants. Probably he'll just drop ship and runs away with his capsule.

Assuming that the target worth 50M in hull and 50M in fits+cargo, the pirate pays 33.3M and gains 100M, which is 23.3M profit over the kill loot, while the target lost "only" 66.6M instead of 100.

Insurance can mess it up, as the target may be better off taking the insurance payout than the pirates money. In most cases however the difference between the payout and the pirate money isn't enough to cover the losses of the implants, and probably most targets won't even think of insurance when tackled by a pirate. Also, if someone is dumb enough to be captured in lowsec, he is dumb enough to not being insured.

Another interesting case can be when the target is a hauler where the value of the hull is nothing compared to the value of the hold. That value cannot be insured and totally lost to the player, while 50% is lost to the pirate. So this case the pirate can offer 25% of the cargo. Also the chance of either party scamming the other can be decreased by trading in turns, for example with a dumb T1 pilot who went to lowsec with 1B cargo:

1. The pirate gives him 50M and demands him to jettison 200M worth cargo
2. The pirate gives him 100M and demands jettisoning 400M worth cargo
3. The pirate gives him 100M and demands jettisoning the rest of the cargo
4. The pirate gives him 66% hull cost and demands leaving the ship

I think this idea can give a rise to "honorable" pirate corps that are known to not podkill anyone leaving his ship, decreasing griefing significantly while increasing the amount of players involved in PvP. That's really a win-win.


Business report: 3.92B (0.4B gifts) Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations and soon group activities on the "goblinworks" channel.

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Station trading

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?

• 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.

There is one exception from the above rules: if the running price is below the material/NPC price. For example the Astronometric Pinpointing book goes for 380-390K, despite NPCs sell it for 405K, as newbies get them for the starting quests and sell it as it give no "pew pew lol" skills. My pet business, the Logistics book is not an exception from the above rules, I am making profit as hauler and not station trader.

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: Please note that while it's almost linear, the standing vs time spent farming is very much not. Raising standing from 7 to 8 is about 4 times longer than from 0 to 1. Find your own spot, I go with 8/8 (this way I get jump clones too). My current broker fee is 0.28% with Broker relations 4, Caldari state 7.7, Caldari Navy 7.2.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Next day you find 10 sell orders between 9499999.89 and 9499999.99 and 3 sell orders between 8500000.01 and 8500000.03.
5. 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
6. 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.
7. 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".
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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
11. 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

From time to time a 0.01 ISK punk comes along and tries his luck. Don't ignore your orders for days, don't encourage him. The faster you show him the door, the faster he goes out on it. If you let him have profit for days, he won't give up so fast.

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

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