I buy and sell faction/deadspace/officer mods, ships, skill-books and implants with traders covering all 5 main trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Hek and Rens) plus secondary hubs in most other empire regions. I have 24 active traders, 3 on Jita (one each for mods, implants and skillbooks), 2 in another region, another 19 each covering a different region and a couple spare traders that are not actively trading.
June was a slow month for me, I didn't do very much but I still made a profit of 43 billion after expenses.
Current net worth is 641 billion with roughly half in cash and market escrow. Most of the rest is in sell orders and recently acquired assets I haven't gotten around to posting for sale yet. Very little is in assets I don't intend to sell soon, with maybe 5 billion worth of ships and fittings I keep for my own use.
The last several months I've significantly increased volume on ~20 high volume items and been playing longer term trends while spending less and less time at it every month. That's been working so well I'm considering concentrating on 20 to 40 items in even greater bulk, spending very little time at all on the rest and probably eventually dropping out of much of the rest completely.
The roughly 20 high volume items I'm working now are performing extremely well. There are at a least another 20 items that should perform similarly though with all the no-lifers and bots currently working those items it'll take a fair bit of work to inhibit their manipulations enough that prices begin to normalize and profit margins finally settle down to reasonable, reliable, steady levels.
Have you ever played the manufacturing materials market? It might be interesting how much more this might balloon with the upcoming industrial patch.
ReplyDeleteNo, never. I stay out of the bulk materials markets and stick to high value low bulk items I can move in smaller ships.
Deletemight be worth a look, one time i even bought and sold PI in a npc nullsec didnt move it around at all just bought and sold right where it was. I was experimenting thinking meh this wont work. To my surprise people bought the crap out of the PI in nullsec.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say, "high volume" what sort of range are you talking about? I also trade in faction/deadspace/officer mods and often the items are trading only around 10 or 15 per day in Jita. I assume this is "low volume" - but everything is relative...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the excellent blog!
Yes, terms like "high volume" and "low volume" certainly are relative terms. For faction mods I put the threshold at 200 a day moving on Jita.
DeletePrice matters too, 200 a day at 10 mil each isn't the same as 200 a day at 100 mil each. "Low volume, I consider most factions mod moving much less than about 50 per day as low volume.
High volume items tend to be very heavily camped and prices highly manipulated. It can take a while to break into a market and get a good handle on the true prices they move well at in volume.
But once you do get a handle on a market you can make a lot of ISK moving items in bulk at margins lower than the no-lifers and bots (or at least most of them) like.
Sisters launchers (both types)
CN cruise launchers
CN BCS
etc...
Then again there are times when certain high priced "low volume" items can be very profitable too. CN Adaptive Invulnerability Fields for example. You have to be more careful in those markets too, if you don't know the market and it's prices cycles and buy too many at the wrong time you can get burnt badly.
Thanks for the info. My Jita station trader gets my attention twice a day (before and after work) for about 8 minutes each time updating around 25 buy orders and associated sells. I have about 60 items that I look over on a not-too-regular basis and put up a buy order for half a dozen of an item when the profit is greater than 8%. I don't really have a feel for the market other than "try to buy stuff when it's profitable and hopefully sell it before it's not..." So I'm not an expert trader.
ReplyDeleteI probably should pay more attention. But 15 minutes a day pays the bills for my two accounts and that's the goal in my case. Doing some research on some items to see how they fluxuate could be fun - and in the end not change my routine but could result in bigger profits.
Thanks again!
That really isn't all that different from what I do. The main differences being one of scale (I work more items on more characters in more places) and I transport items between places.
DeleteI have about 20 items I check and update far more frequently than the rest, another 50 or so items I check as frequently as I can (though not nearly as often as I'd like to) and a few hundred more almost passive items that get checked very infrequently (sometimes they even expire before I get around to them).
"Expert" trading is overrated, what really matters is having a decent trading strategy, sticking to it and putting in enough time to make work, which you're obviously doing. Expertise, knowing your markets and price fluctuations better, comes with experience.