Friday 25 April 2014

Business As Usual - Only Better

Burn Jita is on but if not for some slight difficulty logging into a character in Jita and the constant lag tidi I wouldn't have noticed. For me it's mostly business as usual, flying billions in and out of Jita on autopilot.

Here's an example of one load I autopiloted into Jita today.


The only difference between today and my usual business is things are selling faster and for higher prices than normal.

Conclusion: Burn Jita isn't achieving it's stated objectives. To the contrary it's great for business. I wish they'd do it all year long!

8 comments:

  1. Careful buddy, you're showing ship class and name.

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    1. That's why I changed the ship's name before taking the screenie and changed it back after. ;)

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    2. Ah you're ahead of me as usual!

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  2. I found burn jita to be more of a hindrance to trading due to the massive tidi even inside the station. Waiting 10 seconds to change a price, no thanks.

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  3. Hello Merchant Monarchy,

    I had a question about trading. I recently returned to the game after several attempts/trial accounts going all the way back to 2007 and have now found success in trading. I started following the marketsforisk blog and have used those methods to good success for the first 10 billion. I am now starting to place buy orders for regions instead of the hub to hub buying from sell orders. Because even though I don't do the "0.1" isk game it still feels like it when I update 1-2 times a day and get undercut. With the regional/10 jump buy orders I have already found good success on a few test items.

    My question is how do I price my goods after purchase? I want to try and drive away some of the bots/no-lifers through pricing. Say for example I bought some implants using 10 jump orders for 40m and the sell/buy spread at the nearest hub is 54/44. Do I place a sell order for 53 or 52m? Or do I make a deep cut and put it at 20% above what I paid for say 48m? Just curious to find out what a good spread should be to drive away bots.

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    1. I know exactly what you mean. The no-lifers and bots are always around. The bigger the profits to be had on a particular item, the more of them will be camping it and the more frequently they'll cut.

      What you price it at depends on what you want to achieve. Do you want to sell 1 or 2 or do you have a big stack of them that's been piling up? Or maybe you just want to shake things up a bit ? And of course daily volume and buy price on the main hub in the area matter too.

      With the numbers you mentioned cuts of 1-2 million might not affect the bots at all until the profit margin is squeezed down around 5%. On the other hand they'll often let a bigger cut (say 3-5 million) sell (so they can go back to gouging even more... Unless it's high volume, then it'll probably get cut pretty quickly.

      In general I find pricing more than 20% over the current buy price at the main hub for the region often means it's going to take a long time to sell if there are any campers around. If the existing margins are more than twice that (40% +) I'll often just half cut the existing margin. 40% I'll cut to 20%, 300% I'll cut to 150%.

      You said you want to drive some of the no-lifers and bots off. Unless it's a very low volume item you'll almost certainly have to go under 20% margin to drive enough off to notice. If it's a high volume item you'll probably have to go much lower than that, maybe even under 5%, especially if you want to drive most of them off permanently.

      It is important to make price calculations based on a percentage of buy order prices on the region's main hub not the price you paid. There are exceptions but for the most part, no-lifers and especially the bots are strict station traders, they camp the region's biggest hub buying and selling with station orders only.

      Congratulations on your early success, 10 billion is an important milestone for a new trader. It's an impressive early achievement, especially if it didn't take more than a few months and you did it on just one account.

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    2. Also, in the beginning it's usually better to move items quickly so you get the ISK back to reinvest. You'll make more (3 times more) selling 1 per day at 10% profit than selling 1 per month at 100%.

      Later, when you have a lot of ISK you can sit on things longer and play longer term trends. Buy in bulk when prices are low, stockpile until prices go up again and then sell.

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  4. Thank you very much for the advice. I did use a second account in order to have a trader in Jita and it took me about three months of fairly consistent trading with the occasional week of inactivity. Plus I only PLEX'd the accounts for the first time this past month but yes thank you for the congrats. Great blog!

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