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Eve has buy orders and sell orders. In any large hub, there will be a spread between the two. Exploiting this spread to make money is the essence of margin trading. The key to successful margin trading is to turn isk over as quickly as possible. A 10% return may seems small, but if you're generating that 10% return on a given amount of money over and over, several times a month, it adds up fast.
All you really absolutely need to margin trade are order slots. Trade, Retail, Wholesale, Tycoon. The larger you go, the more orders you need.
The rest of these skills are optional. Their benefits are explained.
First, you need to establish your list of tradable items. A tradable item has two qualities.
How do you find these items? Go to the market and start looking! When you find your likely item, this is what you see.
This lets you rapidly confirm if the margin is worth trading for. Remember your taxes and fees! With default skills and standings, this is a 4.4% profit. Not exactly an ideal item for the budding trader.
Lets move on to the Price History tab.
More useful information here! The valuable columns here are Orders, Quantity, and Average. Orders tells you how many orders were involved in transactions. Quantity tells you how many items were involved in transactions. These stats give you a rough idea of how well an item sells.
Incidentally, this example item is the 30d PLEX; in other words, a timecard.
Once you find an item, add it to your quickbar. To do this, you right click on it in the market browser or search window and select “Add to Market Quickbar”. And with that…
This is a tool valuable for preserving your fucking sanity. I probably should have said this earlier, but margin trading can be a soul-rending activity. The quickbar is a valuable tool to speed things along, however. Add all of your items to it, and then bring up your wallet, and go to your orders tab. Viola; you have your wallet with all your orders as well as a list of only the items you care about trading, side by side.With this setup, you can fairly rapidly move through your list of goods and adjust your orders. I also recommend formatting your hanger as a list and alphabetizing it. This makes finding and selling your finished orders that much easier.
There is far more to margin trading than is written here. However, what seems to turn people off the most is contending with constantly being “.01'ed”, particularly when trading in Jita. “I don't have a bot and I don't care to sit here 23/7 changing my orders!” So don't. Tailor your trading style to how much effort you can put into it. Margin Trading lets you spend more money than you have; take advantage of it, spread out, keep placing orders until the amount required to cover escrow is two, three, even four times more than in your wallet. You won't bounce because most of your orders are rapidly .01ed down, but you're hitting enough items that some are bound to fill.
Alternatively, take the long road. Find items that have predictable cycles, such as more or less every T2 mod (why they cycle is beyond the scope of this article). Identify the cycle, place orders at the bottom. When they fill, list them near the top. It's a much slower, much lazier means of trading, but properly executed, it will make money.
There. Two examples of viable, relatively low-effort trading techniques. The whole point, however, is that “You have to babysit your orders constantly to make money!” is a myth, even in Jita.
A canny trader ought to find that he has no trouble doubling his initial investment very, very rapidly. Don't expect it to continue. The more money you have in the market, the lower your average percent return, because not everything has a 10%+ margin, and so you must accept lower and lower margins. However, having it making money - even if its only at a 7% margin - is better than having it sit idle. In short, money breeds money.
A useful spreadsheet for market trading can be found here. It was written by me (mynnna) and I continue to use it (albeit a beefed up version).
Guerrilla marketing is an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. This section is going to cover being a tremendous faggot vis a vis money, not just marketing.
Cultivate a habit of looking for market weaknesses to exploit. When you see them, capitalize on them. People often deride pilots that train non-PVP skills because when it comes time to sell the character, they will not be factored into its total skill-points for the purpose of determining value. This is stupid because you can make far more money in EVE by constantly prowling the market with your skills, and taking advantage of it. On an op in an enemy system? Browse the market for items that are likely increasing value –if we are going to take the system soon, Expanded Cargoholds and Warp Core Stabilizers are a good bet, for example, and if they aren't overpriced already, buy them and relist them for more absurd prices. Do this while shooting POS or camping gates. Depending on what's going on in the region, you can do any of the following:
don't
relist it if you think the enemy is having shortages that he won't be able to replace in the first place.Note that the Accounting and Broker Relations save you money when setting up market orders, while Marketing and Procurement allow you to set up sell and buy orders in stations that you aren't docked in –even if they are several jumps away, even if they are in an enemy station, though they must be in the same region is you. Contracting is useful when making deals from far-away regions, since you can always set up contracts in a station that you have shit in, no matter how far away it is.
If you need 100 Datacores of a specific type and are buying them in Jita, it's likely the competition will be updating their orders more than once every five minutes. Since you may only modify an order every five minutes, this means you are stuck waiting with that obsolete price for minutes at a time. To counter this, instead of putting a single buy order up for 100 datacores, put up two orders of 50 each. This way you can update more or less twice as quickly.
Let's say you've been happily selling widgets for months. Everybody buys widgets, but nobody ever remembers to make and sell them. Suddenly, somebody else notices widgets are a neglected market and begins competing with you. He may confidently drive down the price as he competes with you, reducing your market share and liquidity, until eventually people are actually paying a fair price for their widgets. And nobody wants that. So create several stacks of widgets with plausible numbers, 15-30 for modules, stacks in the eight thousands for ammo, et ceteras. And sell them all for .01 isk less than the others. Put each stack up somewhat later in time, or perhaps with different durations (don't just default to 30 days). It is unlikely that anybody perusing the market will notice that you own them all, and so they will believe that any entry into the market will face stiff competition, possibly dissuading them from entering it at all.
If you use your mouse scroll wheel after selecting 'Modify Order' you can adjust the price upwards or downwards by .01 isk per tick of the scroll wheel. I played EVE for three years before noticing that, so fuck you if this seems obvious.