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.