In this last post of my regional trading series, I want to give you some practical insights into my personal regional trading operation which I am running for quite some time now. This operation requires a lot of ISK and some relatively well trained trade characters to set up. However, timewise it needs very little effort to keep things rolling and still generates a nice amount of profit every month.
The Character Setup
As mentioned in the previous post, it is highly recommended to use at least two separate accounts for your trading business. By this, you can compare prices between regions in two separate Eve client windows, which makes life so much easier. I use three characters on two accounts to cover the five major high-sec trade hubs in New Eden.
The Buyer: My first character is permanently docked in Jita IV – Moon 4 -Caldari Navy Assembly Plant to check prices and to buy new stock for the regions I trade in. This character really only needs the Contracting skill trained to create public courier contracts.
The first Trader: The first trade character uses two jump clones to cover the trade hubs in Amarr and Rens. This character needs some training to set up shop in these two hubs. I recommend to have at least 150 available trade orders to cover both hubs, which requires the Wholesale skill to level 5. Furthermore you need the Accounting and Broker Relations skill trained as high as possible to reduce taxes and fees for selling items. The other trade related skills are not required, since you will just put up sell orders in the current station and won’t create or modify any orders remotely.
The second Trader: Trader number two uses two jump clones to cover the remaining major hubs in Hek and Dodixie. Skillwise, this character needs the same skills as the trader number one.
The Items
The list of items I trade in only consists of high value faction items and implants. These items can further be divided into two separate groups: PVE and PVP mods. Both groups have a good demand in high-sec because of different reasons.
PVE modules: High-sec PVE is mainly done by mission runners, who prefer to use faction launchers and Ballistic Control Systems of all types. Faction launchers only need T1 ammunition and can be used to inflict any type of damage, which is perfect to keep the ammunition costs low, while inflicting the maximum damage to the mission specific NPCs. Another popular weapon system for PVE are drones, which need all types of faction Drone Damage Amplifiers to increase damage. Furthermore, Target Painters and Omnidirectional Tracking Enhancers are a popular way to further increase damage application of launchers or drones.
PVP modules: The elite PVP players of New Eden love to use faction electronic warfare modules like Stasis Webifiers, Warp Scramblers, Warp Disruptors and Energy Neutralizers. For low sec PVP, pirate implant sets like Snake, Slave, Crystal and Asklepian sets are a quite popular choice, but are also sometimes used by PVE players to increase their tank.
This is a screenshot of the items in my market quickbar for my Jita buyer:
This list of items could be further increased by a selection of deadspace items, propulsion modules, skill hardwiring implants, training implants or skill books but my current list generates enough income that I don’t see any reason to further increase it. I also trade the same items in all four regions I trade in. This could also be optimised by different lists for every region that covers the items that sell better or worse, but I am just to lazy for that.
The Process
As mentioned before, I try to spend as little time as possible to manage my trading operation.
Normally, I restock my items for 2-3 times a month for each region. For this, I go through all my items in the market quickbar and compare the local price on one of the trade character against the Jita sell price. If the profit is greater than 20%, I update the order to be the cheapest seller. If not I just lower the price by a million or two and wait for the price to go up again.
If I don’t have an active sell order for an item and the profit is greater than 20%, I buy new stock in Jita. I try to spend at least 200 million ISK on each item that needs to be restocked. Once I went through the entire list, I create a public courier contract to ship my newly purchased goods to the respective trade hub. For the reward I usually put half a million ISK per jump and billion of collateral on the contract. If the collateral would be more than two billion ISK, I divide the items into smaller stacks and ship them in separate contracts with less than two billion ISK collateral. The collateral should always be 10-20% greater than the Jita sell value of the goods in case the guy who is going to ship the items gets ganked or simply fails the contract. On the next day, the contracts are usually delivered and I post new sell order at the trade hub.
When I update sell orders or post new orders, I never keep track of my original purchase price. Since the market for faction items and implants is not too big, prices normally change quite slowly and I rarely ever make a loss on an item although I only check the current Jita price. After trading with the same items for a while, you also simply memorize the Jita price range an items usually sells for.
Finally, I never keep the profit I make from trading in the wallets of my trade characters. Eve’s market interface can cost you a fortune, if you do a typo when posting orders. One wrong sell price with a couple of extra digits, can cost you billions in taxes and fees. So it is a good idea to send all profits to a “banking character”, who never buys or sells on the market. By this, the sellers don’t have enough cash in their wallets to make a big costly mistake. If you need the ISK, just send the proper amount from the banker to your buyer or other characters when they run low on funds. I usually keep a maximum of two billion ISK on each character.
The Profit
Now to the interesting part: the profit. Since I am a lazy guy, I use Eve Mogul to automatically calculate my profit. Eve Mogul uses a FIFO algorithm (first-in-first-out) to calculate the profit of each of your transactions by the difference of your sell and buy price for an item. You only need to provide the ESI authorization for all your characters that are involved in your trading operation and you will in return get a nice summary of the profit you made.
According to Eve Mogul, I made around 90 billion ISK in profit during the last 12 month almost evenly distributed on all four hubs .
To update orders and restock a single regional hub, I usually need about 30 minutes, which comes to 2 hours to update all four hubs. If I do this three times a month for a period of 12 month, it results in 72 hours in total per year for running the trade hubs. This comes to 1,25 billion ISK / hour. However, this payout comes only with great investment. To fully stock the four regional hubs with the items from my list takes around 50-60 billion ISK in active sell orders. So it is more a matter of getting enough cash to invest in the market than the actual time running your business.
The following screenshot taken from Eve Mogul shows the most profitable items out of my list for the last year over all hubs:
The profit per month also changes a lot with the season. During winter, fall or after a major release login numbers are high and I can easily make 10+ billion ISK in profit per month, while during spring and summer the profit decreases, because people don’t play Eve so much, since they have better things to do than internet spaceship piloting.
The revenue of my trading business is around 20-40 billions ISK per month,which is almost perfectly distributed over the four hubs. This is a screenshot of the transactions from my Hek / Dodixie trader for 6-ish days:
I hope this insights into my regional trading operation will inspire you to start your own trading business (or simply take over my markets 🙂 ). In my opinion trading is the easiest form of income in Eve and also almost risk free. Instead of shooting NPCs in your VNI for hours, better start a new carrier as a trader. In the beginning it can be hard to get things going and make enough investment capital to get thing seriously started, but once you know the drill and have some experience with the markets the ISK will start rolling into your pocket.
As always, if you have any suggestions for this guide or different opinions about the topic, leave a comment or send me an in-game mail.