With all this good advice of my last post, I decided to try to regional trade into null security space, which I had never done before.

Since, I am a member of Pandemic Horde, I picked Horde’s home system O-VWPB to set up my shop. O-V is quite a busy system with local never dropping under 100 people, so in theory there should be plenty of demand to sell stuff.

What Items to Trade?

First thing I needed to do was to find 20-30 items with a decent trade volume and profit margin to trade with. The most obvious choice for this are items that all hordlings need in order to fly Horde’s doctrine ships. Doctrine ships are recommended ship fittings, which are frequently used for strategic alliance fleets or home defence fleets. These ships get used and destroyed a lot, so there is a never stopping demand for doctrine ships.

I checked these modules for a trade volume of about 20-100 items a day and a decent profit margin of at least 20% compared to Jita prices. If a module fit these criteria, I added it to my market quickbar . After going through the most common doctrines, I came up with the following list of items that I thought were worth trading:

Most of these items are within the 0.5 – 1 mil ISK price range, with a few exceptions that had either a very good profit margin or very little competition on the market  I also added some items that are frequently used for ratting and mining, because there is always a demand for that stuff too. Finally, I picked a few skillbooks for doctrine ships that had a very good profit margin although low volume.

I decided to seed my business with 500 mil ISK to get started, which leaves around 20 mil ISK in average per item to invest. As mentioned in the last post, its always a good idea to trade in many different items to mitigate the risk of sudden price changes.

Shopping and Hauling

Pandemic Horde has its own courier services, which conveniently ship goods from Jita 4/4 to O-VWPB.  There are some different ones, but I used Karkinos in the past, which are inexpensive and run jump freighters a couple of times a day, so I decided to work with them again. 

I permanently placed one character in the Jita trade hub. This character is used to buy items and check prices.

My trade character is located in O-V to check local prices and post sell orders. The trader character is on its own separate account, so I can compare prices between the systems in two Eve clients at the same time.

This is the initial stock I bought in Jita to stock my items in O-V :

These items were then contracted from the buyer to the trader char. The trader is a member of Pandemic Horde and created a courier contract to O-V:

As you can see, the cost of the shipping is quite reasonable . A couple of hours later, I checked the contract on my trader again and noticed that it was already delivered to O-V.

So I posted all items on the local market and payed the 2,5% broker fees to create the sell orders. After posting, my orders and wallet looked like this:

The first 500 million ISK were successfully invested!

Day to Day Business

Once you have the items to trade sorted out and the market stocked, you only need to update your orders and restock items that you ran out of.

I usually updated my orders five times a day, mostly in the evenings. Since there is quite some competition for my items on the local market, most sell orders get undercut within an hour or two. Ideally, you update your orders as often as possible to always be the cheapest seller, but since I am a lazy guy, I usually only update every hour while doing different things in and out of game. Updating 25 sell orders never takes more than 3 minutes, most of the time less. Every morning, I checked for items that ran out, bought new goods in Jita with my buyer and created the courier contract to O-V. In the evenings the contracts were usually done and I posted the new items on the market.  Buying and posting items takes maybe another 10 minutes a day. As soon as your available ISK gets bigger, you can buy larger quantities of your items and hence you need to restock less frequently. By this you can further reduce the amount of time needed to run your business. In total I spent about 25 minutes a day on my trading operation.

What’s the Profit?

After the first 24 hours, my shop looked like this:

I almost got my seed money back and still had 400 mill in sell orders left. After restocking and trading for another 8 days my total net worth ( sell orders and liquid ISK) was three times of my initial investment, without changing the number of items I traded with:  

So I made about 1 billion ISK within 8 days of trading. The total time invested for 8 days was 8 * 25 = 200 minutes. This results in an income of 300 million ISK / hour, which easily beats most other sources of income in Eve. However, this calculation does not include the time to identify the items you want to trade in. But since you only need to do that once, this amount of time gets less important the longer you trade in the same items. I personally trade with the same items in high-sec for years.

Unfortunately, this income does not scale simply with time invested, but with the number of items you trade in. If you want to spent more time making ISK trading, you also need to find more items that are worth investing in. In my example, I would need another 25 good items on the O-V market to spend an additional 25 minutes a day trading. You will notice quickly that the number of items that are worth investing is not unlimited, but I guess even in a relatively small market as O-V you can find 100 different profitable items to trade in.

Checking your Profit

Lastly, I want to show you a nice out-of-game tool to quickly check how profitable your items are. Eve Mogul is a free online trade tool that tracks your item stock and calculates the profit by the difference between buy and sell price. With Eve Mogul you can easily see which items are your most profitable and how much isk you earned. This is an screenshot of my business on Eve Mogul:

By monitoring your items, you can decide when to stop trading with an item without memorizing your buy prices. I usually just sell the rest of my stock at a loss and don’t restock anymore if an items gets below the 20% profit margin.

Conclusion

I hope this guide showed you how easy you can make a decent buck by trading. The Eve markets are very deep and complex and it can be truly addictive to find new trade opportunities and explore new markets and locations. In my opinion trading is the most profitable activity  in Eve, which also comes with very little risks attached if you trade in different items and let other people do the hauling for you.

If you have any suggestions for this guide to improve it or find anything confusing, just send me in in-game mail to my trader char  “Piter Presley” and I will get back to you.

By far the most profitable activity in EVE is trading. The amount of ISK that changes hands on the market is so big, that even a very small slice of the trade volume can make you space rich.

In this first part of my trading series, I want to give you a brief introduction to regional trading.

The basic idea of regional trading is to buy goods in one region, transport them to another region, and sell there for a higher price. Since the market browser only shows items sold in your current region, players won’t usually know in which region they can find the lowest price for a ship or module and will just buy the cheapest items they can find in the market window. After you setup show in a region you occasionally lower your prices to be the cheapest seller. If you run out of stock for an item, you ship in fresh goods from a different region.

I will try to explain this only by using in game tools. There are a lot of out of game tools that can aid you finding good items to trade or to update prices. Even homemade spreadsheet using the Eve API are not uncommon to be used by traders. However, these tools are not strictly necessary  to start a trading business and mostly make your life easier or the process of trading faster.

How to Compare Prices?

How do you know where to find cheap goods and where to sell them? This is when multiple characters come in handy. By placing your chars in different regions, you can check the local regions prices and compare them to prices in other regions you have characters in.

It is easy to see that a big number of characters is very nice to cover multiple regions to trade in. There are even some traders who cover all high-sec regions that way. If you don’t have multiple account available, you can still use jump clones to cover different regions with one character. The drawback of jump clones is, that you can only jump once a day. I would suggest to use at least two characters for your trading business to always cover two regions at the same time. If possible these should be on two separate accounts to compare prices in two regions in two client windows.  

It is also a good idea to only use these characters for trading and leave them in their respective stations. By this, your main character can do different activities elsewhere without interrupting your trading activities.

Where to Trade?

The easiest way to trade is definitely between high-sec regions. Most players in Eve live in high-sec and mostly use the five major high-sec trade hubs for their daily shopping, which are in order of significance: Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Hek, Rens.  Usually the cheapest prices in New Eden can be found in Jita 4-4 station, Eve’s most important trade hub.

There is also a number of smaller high-sec systems that have minor trade hubs that might be worth trading in, which are mostly close to low-sec. These is quite convenient for low-sec and null-sec residents who don’t want fly all the way out to the major hubs and prices there are usually higher than at the major hubs.

The market volume in the major hubs is quite big compared to the ISK a normal player can invest, so you don’t have to worry too much about not selling your goods if you pick the items you trade wisely.

There are also big trade hubs in null-sec, mainly in the staging systems of big alliances like The Imperium, Test Alliance or Pandemic Horde. To cover these hubs you will need a character in the respective alliance and some form of logistics network to transport your goods to the hubs.

What Items to Trade?

This is actually the most crucial part of any trade operation. How do I identify items that are worth trading? This is a question that is not easy to answer and highly depends on the amount of isk you have available to invest, how long you want invest it and how much time you want to spend updating and comparing prices for your trading operation.

I will next go through three different scenarios and compare the items, time and ISK needed. These were the three stages my personal trading business went through, but there are of course other combinations that work great.

Scenario 1: 500 million ISK, high turnover, lots of time

This is a scenario that fits most people that are relatively new to Eve and want to get into trading. I think the smallest amount of ISK  you need to start trading is 500 million ISK for this scenario. You can start with less, but in that case there are other sources of income that are more profitable than trading.

One key factor for success is to not only trade with one item but in a large number to minimise the risk of losing your ISK by price fluctuations. If you only trade in one item and the price of that item moves below your buy price, you might make a big loss. The probability of this to happen to 100 different items is next to zero, so you will never lose all your invested capital.  With 500 million isk you can invest 20 million in 25 different items, which is a good number to start with.

The items that work best for this scenario are in the 0.5 to  5 million ISK range which are commonly used for PVP or PVE activities, like mining equipment, small and medium sized weapons,  ewar modules, shield and armour tank modules, T1 small ships and exploration equipment. These modules have usually a high trade volume per day, which you can check in the market history window. I try to stick to items that have a volume of 25-100 items sold per day depending on the competition for that item. If the competition is small, a lower volume is ok.

The items should also have a profit margin ( sell price – buy price) of at least 10% of the price  after taxes, which you need to check with your two trading chars between the two regions you want to trade in.

Since there is such a low entry barrier to trade these items, competition on the market is usually big und prices can change a lot over a couple of days . This is why you need to update your sell orders as often as possible to be the cheapest seller. By this, you hopefully will sell all your items before the price hits your buy price. If that happens you can either continue to sell at a loss or stop updating your price and wait for the price to go up again. This depends on the amount of liquid ISK your have. If you have to stop trading because all your ISK is stuck in unprofitable items, it might be better to sell at a small loss and then start to trade with other items, than to not trade at all.

Scenario 2: 2-10 billion ISK, medium turnover, not that much time

This is the scenario for more experienced traders. You should start to trade with more expensive items in the 5-30 million ISK range. This adds bigger T1 ships, small T2 ships, mining barges, faction frigates, BPOs and cheap faction modules to you trading portfolio. These items have less competition and hence you don’t need to update your order that frequently. However the turnover is also much lower and it takes more time to sell your goods. The profit margin should be higher than in scenario one, since you will need longer to sell your stock and want to protect your investment against price changes.  I would suggest a margin of at least 15%-20% for these items.

It is btw a good idea to still keep trading with the scenario one items that worked out great and only replace the worse items with new more expensive ones.

In this scenario, you should further increase the number of items you trade to 50-100. Since you update your orders a lot less, your total time spent will also decrease significantly.

Scenario 3: 10-50 billion ISK, slow turnover, very little time

This is the scenario for experienced traders with pockets full of ISK. You will start to trade with the most expensive items that are in the game. This adds all faction items, dead space items, T2 ships, expensive pirate implants and expensive BPOs to your list.

These items have very little competition and prices move very, very slowly. The trade volume can only be a couple of modules a month, sometimes even less. Mostly it is only worth to trade these in the major trade hubs, because of the very small trade volume elsewhere.

It is usually more than enough to update orders once a week, even once a month is fine for some items. Sometimes there is so little competition on these markets, that you are the only seller in the region and you don’t need to update pricesat all.

The profit margin on these items should at least be 20%, but since competition is so little, it usually will be a lot more.

You should also further extend the number of items you trade to counter the low turnover. The more orders you have, the more ISK you can make. I usually have around 200-300 sell orders open in different regions.  However, if you got to this stage there is no upper limit in orders ISK, items and regions to trade in.

How to Move Your Items?

Finally, I want to cover how to move your good to your newly opened shop in a different region. First thing is: Never transport your items yourself in high-sec!

Hauling stuff around is a huge time sink. Time that you better spend trading and making the real bucks. The best way to move your stuff is creating courier contracts and let other people do the hauling for you. There are two public hauling services, PushX and Red Frog, who can quickly move your goods within high-sec. They both charge around 1-2 million ISK per jump in high-sec depending on the volume and price of your items. Check their website for exact pricing and instructions how to create a contract.

You can also create public courier contracts, that every player can accept. I mostly haul by public contracts and pay around 1 million ISK per jump and billion ISK of value. Contracts are usually picked up and finished within a day. There is also a public chat channel called “Hauler’s channel” where people accept public contract that are posted in chat. Read the instructions in the MOTD for pricing suggestions.

If you want to trade into low-sec or null-sec, you will need either your own jump freighter or use the rather pricey PushX or Black Frog services. Ideally, your alliance has a jump freighter service available for their members that you can use.

One last word about the amount of collateral you should use for your contracts. Always put a collateral of at least 10% more than your purchase price on a contract. By this, you even make a small profit if the hauling player steals your stuff or gets killed by gankers in high-sec.

Evepraisal is a neat website that calculates the value of your items from your assets window for your collateral. Just add 10% to that value and you are fine.

These are the basics of regional trading. In the next post, I will give you a real world examples of a freshly started trading operation in null-sec and some numbers about how much profit you can expect.