Mailbag - Market Mistake

Re: Re: Market mistake
From: Name Removed
Sent: 2014.01.21 09:27
To: My Tradealt,

Thank you very much. Indeed noteworthy and rare to find players with your attitude. It's experiences like this that makes me want to keep on playing this game.

Yours faithfully
Name Removed

--------------------------------
Re: Market mistake
From: My Tradealt
Sent: 2014.01.21 08:34
To: Name Removed,

Fair enough.

I hate the way the market does that braindead crap and since you asked so nicely I sent you another 74.85 mil.

--------------------------------
Market mistake
From: Name Removed
Sent: 2014.01.19 13:14
To: My Tradealt,

Greetings

Congratulations on your purchase of the Highwall Mining MX-1005 implant for 150K isk. I was a bit too quick about putting it on the market, and what should have been a 150M sell order became a 150K sell order, automatically filling your buy order of 75M.

I would be extremely happy with any compensation for my mistake, hoping that you would pay at least the remaining 74,850,000 isk of your buy order. I'm crossing my fingers, and hoping for the best.

Fly safe.

Yours faithfully
Name Removed

Choosing a Trading Station

One of my readers recently left the following comment:

Hey man logged in just to say thanks your blog has helped me immensely with my own trading ventures. 

One thing I was still curious about and hopefully you can do a blog on, is HOW you choose what regions to trade in, apart from the big trading hubs I've never been able to figure out what would be a good region to place buy orders in and whatnot. 

Thanks once again 

Jerex Deka

This is a great question. One of the problems I have writing articles for the blog is there's so much I could write about with so many complex permutations, qualifiers, circumstantial / situational subtleties, and related subjects to get sidetracked on that it's often difficult to cover a topic well without straying into too many other things and practically writing a book in the end.

The trick is finding topics that are focused on something specific without being too simple and Jerex' question is a good one for that. Today's topic is about how to find good places to trade from.

Though Jerex asked specifically about how to find good regions, pretty much any high sec region is good to trade in. I'm in 19 high sec regions now and they're all good. IMO picking a station to trade from is more important than choosing a region to trade in.

Once you have a good station picked out you need to figure out what to buy and how much to pay for it as well as what to sell and how much to ask for it, at that location.

Like they say in real estate it's all about 3 things. Location, Location and Location.

The 5 main trade hubs (Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek) are obvious choices. However, the main trade hubs are infested with bots and no-lifers which can make it difficult for anyone else to do business on them. Depending on your business model and how much time and effort you want to spend working at it, you might be better off avoiding the main hubs and sticking to smaller hubs.

There are many things that can help you identify good locations to trade from, including in game information, websites and offline utilities/tools.

For websites and offline tools I really like:

EVE Marketdata for their Station Rank Lists
Ombey's 2D EVE Maps (or Dotlan if you prefer)

Some of things I look for are:

Map Statistics "docked and active"
Level 3 and 4 mission agents (the more the better)
Sisters of Eve
Facilities, especially Clone, Repair and Manufacturing
Starter systems
Number of asteroid belts
Proximity to ice fields
Travel choke points
Regional gates
High to low/null gates

Generally speaking the more of the above a particular station has the better it is for trading. Unless it's infested by bots (Oursulaert for example), then you're often better off on another station. In that case I particularly like stations only a jump or two away and straddling the main traffic route(s) to either the rest of the region or to other (preferably more populous) regions.

Knowing as much as you can about the above factors should tell you a fair bit about the players in the area, giving you an idea of what they're likely to sell cheaply and what they might pay dearly for.

I've used a few different methods to find stations to trade on in the past but right now I pretty much just use information from EveMarketData and Ombey's maps leavened with my own personal experience in the area.

I check EveMarketData ranked lists of trade hubs within a region to find out the size of the market on all the different stations. I look at Ombey's maps to get an idea of likely traffic routes, chokepoints, proximity to ice / asteroids / facilities and the like. Finally I consider my own experience in the area, things like "I pass through this system a lot on the way to other places" or "There always seems to be a lot of players in this system".

Then I choose a system after considering all of the above. I don't always choose the largest market, in fact a few of my best (favorite) locations are far from being the largest hub in the region.

Map "docked and active" used to be my primary method of finding new stations to trade at. But that isn't nearly as useful now as it was before Dust was released. The problem is now Dust players show in the "docked and active" list too. Pre-Dust, you could count on it any system that normally had 30-50 players docked and active was a good sized secondary hub and any system with more than 50 was a big secondary hub. But now players on the docked and active list could just as easily be a bunch of dust bunnies and a ghost town as far as Eve players are concerned.

Stations with mission agents, especially level 3 and 4 agents, make good trading stations too. Generally speaking, the more agents and the higher level those agents are the better.

Sisters of Eve agents are particularly good. They have the best missions for repairing faction standings and they have some very desirable items in the faction LP store too. Any sisters station is good for trading and if they have level 3 or better yet level 4 sisters agents (Osmon for example) they're very good. Having a sisters station nearby (within 5 jumps or so) is pretty good for business on other trading stations too.

Facilities attract players to particular stations too. I find clone, repair and manufacturing facilities are more important than labs. Most of the better trading systems have at least 2 of those 3 facilities though there are exceptions. Some of the best have only 1 or even none. Manufacturing often means competition from manufacturers, depending on what you sell and just how much competition there is, that competition could be a good thing or a bad thing.

Starter systems are pretty much guaranteed to have good numbers of players around and not all of them are newbies either. The regions around them are generally fairly well populated too. One big advantage of starter systems is the no-lifers and bots don't seem to be very active on most of them (or at least not in my markets).

Travel choke points both between regions and within a single region. If you notice you seem to be passing through a particular system more often than most it's a travel choke point. As long as there's a station in the system, travel choke points often make great trading locations even if they don't have any of the other indicators of a good trading station. Just watch out for gankers they like travel choke points too! Be particularly wary of gankers in 0.5 security choke points, especially if it's a choke point on the route to low/null. Ombey's or Dotlan maps are great for finding travel choke points. Dotlan is more up to date but I prefer Ombey's because I find it easier to read and it shows trade hubs too (I double check trade hub status on EveMarketData).

Mailbag - Regional Pickup Question

The Question

Re: Re: Trade
From: Tubrav Sadarts
Sent: 2013.10.18 02:19
To: Moxnix Induli,

I had another quick question too; how do you deal with all the pickups? I have a large amount of 10-system buy orders in a few regions, and when I go to pick up all the accumulated items every few days, it's on the order of 70 jumps per region. Do you do this constantly?

My Reply

I only do pickups when there's stuff worth enough to make picking it up worth my time. Just how much it takes to be "worth my time" keeps getting higher as I get richer too.

Trying to pick everything up all the time would be so time consuming it'd drive me nuts!

In the very beginning 1 million was more than enough to travel across the entire region and 100k was enough to travel several jumps.

A few months later I wouldn't even undock unless I was looking at picking up at least close to 100 mil in total and I wouldn't bother picking up from any station unless it either had at least a few million worth of stuff to pickup or I was already in the system anyhow.

Now I don't usually bother undocking until a character has at least 500 million or so to pickup without having to make much more than 5 or 10 jumps. I won't do very many more jumps unless there's a billion or two that needs picking up.

I'll often use public courier contracts to help cut down on the travel time too. Anything worth much over 500 mil is usually worth couriering.

I rarely bother picking up from stations that don't have very much of value on them unless I'm already in the system either picking up from another station in system or passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Sometimes I'll spend half a day afk autopiloting to clean up a bunch of little stuff on one character. But that's mostly afk flight time with maybe 10 minutes or so in total where I'm actually at the keyboard.

Flying blockade runners helps a lot too. They're much faster than any other cargo ships, quite safe on autopilot (in high sec anyhow) and carry quite a lot more cargo than any combat ship with speed anywhere near the same ballpark.

Mailbag - Q&A Part 1

Mail Received

Trade
From: Tubrav Sadarts
Sent: 2013.09.21 00:45
To: Moxnix Induli,

Hiya,
I realise this is a completely random mail, but I found your blog discussing your trading and was wondering if you could offer some advice. I'm a Jita station trader and I'm getting absolutely sick of checking 150+ market orders twice a day to see them all needing modification. I also have about 8bill in market orders in Jita at any one time but my hangar rarely has more than 2/300mill of stuff when I come to check it half a day after updating my orders.

Then I read your blog and see something like http://merchantmonarchy.blogspot.ca/2013/05/one-day.html, where you get probably more skillbooks in value than I do over my whole order list in one day... in Jita, no less, so I wonder how.

Also, I tried my hand at some regional buy orders (in Lonetrek and Domain), but at least for Lonetrek most of them keep getting over-bid within a short time, which isn't helpful...and they hardly get filled either; is this what you find, or do you get many more orders filled somehow? I was also wondering if it's possible to do what you do but without an army of alts, since I don't have the RL or in-game cash to maintain 5/6 other accounts...

Sorry for the rambling-ness, I just have a lot of questions...
Cheers,
Tubrav

My Response

The real trick is to not get greedy. Pay better than the no-lifers and bots like paying and sell for less than they like selling for. Don't try to make a killing on every sale (you'll just get undercut in seconds), instead go for reasonable profits at fair prices.

Cut just once or twice a day using large cuts around 10% of the difference between buy and sell orders and do that for BOTH buy and sell orders. The idea being to reduce margins until your items start selling in a reasonable amount of time. It's important to raise the buy price too so the bots can't just keep buying more below your sell price and continue undercutting your sell orders by 0.01 ISK forever.

When the margin on something gets around 2% then just let your orders sit there without updating. Let the bots and no-lifers continue cutting at those low margins and tying up all their ISK on low profit transactions. They can't keep buying it all forever at those kind of margins. Sooner or later they will run out of ISK and then you're in again.

If you have plenty of ISK identifiying a few high volume items that you can buy and resell daily at 2-5% profit without too much trouble can help a lot too.

Regional buy orders are a different kettle of fish, often you're better off just going with lower range orders, I use 1, 2, 5 and 10 jump buy orders a lot. The higher the value and/or profit of an item the longer range I'm liable to use. Again pay a little more than the other guys, that way you get all the close ones and they have to travel 10+ jumps for the cheaper ones they get... Or you can work it the opposite if you're just getting started and don't mind some long trips.

Notes and additional clarifications

- I did some minor editing to my response before posting on the blog. In particular I changed a couple words and added three sentences to make things more clear.

- Tubrav sent me another mail since then asking for further clarification on several points. I'll cover that another day in Part II.

- I should also mention while my "one day" post was about a single day's worth of business on a single character, it was one of the better days. Not every day is that good (some days are terrible in fact) but it doesn't take many days like that to make for a good month.

- Raising buy prices by large amounts works particularly well when you're buying in lower volume than the competition. You can buy 1 or 2 at a slightly too high price and resell them at a profit a lot more easily than that douchebag trying to dominate the market by updating his buy order for 200 every 5 minutes can. If he keeps on cutting anyhow, chances are good he's going to get flooded with overpriced stock he can't move quickly without taking a loss.

Mailbag - Order Posting?

This post covers several points I've wanted to clear up for some time about my order posting/updating process. A few days ago I received an in game email with questions along the same lines. After answering that email I realized with a little polishing and expansion on a few points posting it here would be a great way to finally get that blog post done.

The email

love the blog

From: Zosius

Sent: 2013.06.11 10:19

To: Moxnix Induli,  

Hello Moxnix,

I love your blog. have been reading it awhile. I have few questions that i was hoping you can help me with.

When it comes to trading how do you do your order updates? I own 3 accounts in major hubs and update buys and sells 1by1 moving through quickbar simultaneously in all ccounts. This is to see the price balance and reallocate stock or trade more cautios if price is out of balance between the hubs.

This method takes time but is quite profitable. I noticed that I can manage to 1-1.5bil a day if I spent 2-3 hours updating orders one time a day including houling (30min). However after sometime i burned out and got demotivated. I felt in position where finding new ventures was costing more isk/effort  than just updating my items list.

I constantly read that you update very casionally. How much time do you spend updating orders a day and how frequently you do it to sustain such large growth. If you update sells and buys sepearetely, don't you get annoyed once you are done with sells, you move back and update buy orders only to see your sell order is far behind already.

thanks for any advice and regards,

Zosius

Re: love the blog

From: Moxnix Induli

Sent: 2013.06.14 08:24

To: Zosius,  

My Response

Thanks, it's always nice to hear from my blog's readers.

My order updating process is fairly simple but difficult to explain properly. I mostly just use common sense, a simple priority system (do the most profitable things first) and make most decisions quickly by using simple rules of thumb. But there are a lot of rules, special cases and exceptions to the rules which makes it seem far more complex than it is and makes it very difficult to explain in detail.

I also like to mix things up frequently to keep the competition on their toes. When I say I do something a certain way it doesn't mean I never do it differently it just means that's what I usually do most of the time. Hence why I use words like "usually", "mostly" and "generally" so much.

At the most basic I start by checkiing my inventory for newly purchased items. I post most of the new stuff and while posting I'll also update existing orders (both buy and sell orders) for the same items.

Sometimes that's all I do though I'll generally do it on 3-5 of the most important characters. The ones that tend to move items in the highest volume and make the most ISK.

Once that's done, I'll usually (but not always) check all my sell orders on those characters and update those too. When I do that I'll usually update buy orders for those items (the ones I have sell orders for) too.

I also tend to concentrate on the most profitable, highest priced and highest volume items. There are many days about all I do is spend 5 or 10 minutes on each of the 3-5 most important characters checking nothing but sell orders and the top 20-50 items on each character.

If I have more time I'll do a few more characters and maybe update all buy orders on a couple too. I do try to update all buy orders on at least 2 characters once or twice a week but sometimes I skip that and take it easy for a week or so too.

My cuts tend to be big, generally around 10% of the difference between buy and sell orders and I don't normally camp, but there are exceptions to everything. Sometimes I'll cut by 1 ISK either to confuse the competition or because the profit margin is so low I'm only cutting to keep the no-lifers and bots on their toes. Large cuts discourage camping no-lifers and bots, when margins are low they'll often not cut you and let your items sell. It might take a while but after a few days of big cuts once or twice a day they'll usually slow down or stop camping and your stuff will sell. Raising buy prices at the same rate ensures that when the price gap closes it'll be at a decent profit over the price you bought at. Conversely if you don't raise buy prices by large increments too the campers will just continue 0.01 ISKing you out of business.

I hate camping but very rarely when my sales on a particular station have for a long time been greatly reduced by obsessive, perpetual campers constantly 0.01 ISKing me. I'll camp for a short while (a half hour or so), updating several key items every 5-10 minutes to see how the no-lifers and bots react. I'll adjust prices with large cuts and quickly reduce profit margins until I either find the sweet spot where the no-lifers and bots slow down enough that my items start selling again or margins are so low it's not worth my bothering with anymore.

Slightly more often I'll do what I call semi-camping, leaving a character logged in all day while I'm mostly afk (not even in the same room as the computer) but able to drop by and spend a couple minutes checking key items periodically throughout the day. The character might be online 12-16 hours but I'm only actually at the keyboard a few minutes at a time for maybe a half hour in total. This is extremely useful both for finding out just how hard a particular market is being camped and for screwing with the no-lifers and bots that are camping it. It's also a great way to sell off some overstock and balance assets, sell orders, escrow and cash in hand on a character that has too much in assets / sell orders and not enough liquid cash without becoming an obsessive camper and starting a perpetual cut war myself.

I don't worry too much about the price balance between hubs. Generally I have a pretty good idea of the usual prices and when I'm unsure the estimate I get from mouse hovering over an inventory item is usually close enough. I do usually notice when something is priced very high or very low and buy, sell or ship items to take advantage of it. Also there are certain items I tend to buy on 1 station (mainly Jita) and ship off to 1 or more other stations to sell.

Burnout... That's why I sometimes go for a week or so where I don't do much other than let orders sit and post new purchases. It takes maybe half an hour to do that on 4 or 5 characters. Sometimes I even go a few days without doing anything, I just let everything sit for a few days.

I usually spend 1-2 hours a day but there are days I spend far less time and there are days I spend 3 or 4 hours instead. On average it's about an hour a day when I'm taking it easy and 2 hours a day when I'm being more serious about it.

It does take patience and at times it can be difficult to be patient enough. When I find myself getting annoyed or angry is when I realize I'm starting to take it too seriously. I'll log off then and not do very much at all for a few days. The really interesting thing is markets often rebound nicely after leaving them be for a while like that.

Anyhow I hope this helps. I'll probably base a blog post on it later. I'd include your mail in the post but not your name unless you tell me posting your name ok with you.

Notes

1. My response has been edited to correct minor mistakes (typos/grammar fixed, ambiguous wording changed).
2. My response has also been expanded upon in several places to make things more clear and bring up a few additional points I wanted to make.
3. Zosius' mail to me is un-edited. It's a straight copy/paste of the in-game mail he sent me.