Sisters of Eve - A specific and lucrative trading example

Everyone says traders don't talk about what they're currently selling, what their best / most profitable items are, and the like. Myself I've never really been against going into details about exactly what I do but then again I don't want to give away all my secrets (or my most profitable items) either.

Today I'm going to talk about a couple of my long term best selling, fastest moving, most profitable items. There are 3 items I generally check on and post/update orders for most days (even on many days when I do nothing else). These are two of those items.

Sisters of Eve faction sells 2 particular LP items that have been among my 3 best items for a long time.

Sisters Core Probe Launcher
Sisters Expanded Probe Launcher

Expanded are more popular and move in roughly twice the volume of Core.

I've been making 2-3 billion in profits off just these 2 items every month for about a year now (I've been playing for a little more than 1.5 years). That's just counting the ones purchased from Jita. I'm really not at all certain just how many I buy per month in other regions or how much I make on them (other than to say the average profit per launcher is higher than on launchers purchased from Jita) so I didn't count them.

On Jita both generally go for 35-37 million in buy orders and 37-40 million in sell orders. There are times when prices go a little higher or a little lower for a while but prices are generally pretty stable and those are the ranges they're usually in.

Osmon, the main mission hub for Sisters of Eve mission runners, is 6 jumps from Jita and in the same region (The Forge). Both launchers can usually be bought for 1-2 million less on Osmon than on Jita.

Watch out for the scammer who likes to post margin scam buy orders on Jita for 50 of each Sisters launcher at around 40 million each with a minimum of 50 (obvious margin scam). I've seen other buyers overcut his order but since they're almost always Jita station orders it really doesn't affect me.

I like to use 10 jump buy orders on Jita priced just a little over the highest buy order on or in range of Osmon. I buy 5-10 a day Core and 10-20 a day Expanded from Jita orders alone. Over 90% of those orders get filled on Osmon.

I did try buying and selling 20-40 a day of each for a month or so but that didn't work out any better. All that happened was the competition got fiercer. It took more time and effort to buy them and margins were smaller so the overall profit was about the same (probably even a bit worse) in the end. I actually increased profits by buying fewer but moving more of them for sale off Jita.

I can pretty much count on making an average of at least 3 million profit per launcher if I just resell them on Jita. If I resell them elsewhere profit per item is close to double that.

Often prices on the other main hubs are fairly close to Jita prices (within a couple million) but sometimes they'll spike higher for a while. Prices on the other main hubs don't usually stay high for long though. They usually move pretty well in the 40 - 42 million range and sometimes closer to 45 mil for a while. Occasionally they'll go for 45-50 mil for a day or so and very rarely for a few days. Anything over 50 mil on the main hubs will pretty much be insta-cut by camping no-lifers and bots.

On smaller hubs (not the 5 main hubs) sell prices are rarely under 40 million and often closer to or over 50 million. As long as there isn't too much competition I can send stacks of 10 off to many of the smaller hubs and expect to sell them within a week or two (sometimes much faster than that) for 45-55 million each. When small hub prices get down around 40 million each someone usually buys them all out within a few days. In fact if they go much lower than 40 mil there's a very good chance that someone will be me! When small hub prices are at 50+ mil other traders start shipping big stacks in and competition can get fierce so it's often better to sell for less than that.

Traders with lower budgets could work Sisters Core Scanner Probe and Sisters Combat Scanner Probes instead. That market behaves in pretty much the same way though probe prices are much lower and sales volumes higher.