EVE Lost and Found: An Applied Introduction to Regional Trading: Part II

Way back when, I started an introduction to regional trading, one that gave specifics on what and where to sell. Here, finally, I talk about what to sell—with specific examples, but also a focus on how to find a market niche.
In part I we introduced the basic ingredients of setting up a regional/inter-regional trade market, and picked a suitable location. Here's what we have at this point:

Sell Location: Simela, Genesis
Buy Location: Usually Jita, but Dodixie is an option as well (we might also buy up orders in systems nearby Simela and pool them into the market there).
Profit Goal: Make a stable 1b a month with infrequent order updating.
Investment Goal: 10b, on the modest assumption we will make 10% of that a month.
Product Goal: Find at least 10b in suitable items to sell.

What to Sell?

Let's start by making a list—a big one. Were going to list, first, the main activities players engage in in Simela and surrounding areas. Then, starting with the most popular activities (so far as we can tell) we are going to list all the main items people use in those activities and, more importantly, all the items people lose in those activities. At that point, we will look at the actual market details in Simela and see which items make for potential trade opportunities.

We already know what the most common activity is in Simela: missions. Level 3 missions are available for the SOE faction, but there are also level 4 agents available in system as well. Hang around the stations for a while in Simela, or the gate leaving system, and you will notice few use the two non-SOE stations. You will also notice that the majority of ships leaving the SOE station are level 3 mission ships—battlecruisers, primarily. However, try hanging around Bherdaspot at the Simela gate or at the sun using dscan for a while, and you will notice a decent amount of level 2 mission ships out (like cruisers), as well as level 4 mission ships like battleships.

We are going to start our market, then, by building around the mission runner population. But what else do players do in this area? PVP probably comes in second. If you spend some time looking at the killboards for systems around Simela-Gonditsa, you will notice that very few loses are from PVPers fighting PVPers. Search through the kills in Gonditsa on any given day and you will find only a few PVP ships dying for every few dozen non-PVP ships. This tells us that PVP-specific goods might not be the best market in this area, but is perhaps still worth stocking later on.

Mining is also a common activity no matter where you go in high sec, but scanning the belts around Simela every so often suggests the miner population is relatively low. Exploration is also quite common, particularly leading into the low sec area. While it might not seem like it, Simela is also next to a travel route. The pipe from Gonditsa leads into Van (Aridia) which leads to Solitude, so it is likely that some players as far away as Solitude use Simela as a nearby hub for buying and selling.

So, first we focus on items relevant to missions. Then we move to PVP-specific items, then mining and then exploration items.

Where I usually start when brainstorming what items to sell is by thinking about what people lose. If they lose it, they will likely seek to replace it. The starting place is probably obvious: Ammo and drones. Ammo gets used up, drones get destroyed or left behind. However, I've tried trading in ammo and drones elsewhere, and the competition in intense. But something strange happens when we look up common types of ammo on the Simela market. There is not much competition, even in the most frequently used ammo types. As a general rule, it isn't usually worth trading in T1 ammo and drones given the massive amount that needs to sell in order to make a profit. That leaves us with T2 ammo and faction ammo.

Take missiles as a test case. Experimenting selling all these kinds, as one might expect, heavy missiles are the fastest movers while rockets and light missiles are the slowest, with the rest in between. Scourge missiles of all types tend to move more quickly than those of other types, and javelin/precision variants are the slower of the T2 types. There are trade offs at every point, however. T2 and faction light missiles have almost no presence on the market. They won't move fast, but 1) the orders will rarely require updating in 0.1 bid wars, and 2) the profit margins will be determined largely by you. As market order slots becomes an issue—we have around 300 total on a character fully skilled—these two features might be less attractive, but market order capacity ceases to be an issue when you use more than one character for trading. So, I experimented in the following items:

Heavy Missiles