Regional (and inter-regional) trading
in EVE involves buying items at a low cost in major trade hubs like
Jita, transporting them elsewhere, and selling them at a higher
price. (This contrasts with station trading, which involves buying
items at a low price (typically using buy orders) and selling at a
higher price (typically using sell orders) within the same station.)
I personally don't have the patience—or time—for station trading,
but I run a few specific, small regional markets and make decent isk,
by my lights, and find the activity rewarding. As I describe in an
earlier
post here, I started with a relatively small investment of around
500m isk and some T1 haulers and have made a growing business which
nets 3-4b a month at this point, with plenty of room to grow. That's
more than enough for my modest needs—and more than enough for most
players, I suspect. However, I also put relatively little time into
the business, and much of that time is semi-afk—compared with, say,
the time required in exploration.
There are many great traders and market
gurus in EVE (some of them have very helpful blogs which can be found
on my blog list, and most of them make many times what I do) and not
a few great trading/market tutorials. A number of trade/market
streams have even popped up on twitch. However, only some market
traders divulge much information about where and what they sell—doing
so results in more competition, especially for regional trading which
thrives on low competition.
In this post, I'm going to offer a
tutorial of sorts for players wanting to get involved in a regional
trade business. It will involve a specific and detailed example of
exactly where I would trade and what I would trade there—readers
can freely borrow my ideas, as I will only be partially setting up
this market with 100-150 key items.
I. Getting Started
What does a player need to get started
with regional and inter-regional trading? Really, just two
ingredients: Some kind of start-up investment in isk, and some kind
of knowledge of where and what to trade. How much isk you will make
depends on those factors plus the amount of time you devote to the
business (shipping items and updating orders particularly). My
assumption will be that we only ship items and update our orders a
few times a week—so no babysitting orders all day.
I.I. Investment and Profit: the 1–10–30
rule
There is no minimum amount of isk
needed—just enough to get something for sale on the market at a
slightly higher price than what you bought it for. I started my
markets with around 500m isk—however, I poured all of my income
from exploration into investment in the market, which amounted to
somewhere around 8-10b isk from other sources feeding into my market
investment over the first 4-5 months.
In order to make decent profit, I
suggest starting a regional market with at least 500m to 1b isk. But
don't stop there! For a regional market to be successful, expect to
support it with other isk making activities—station trading,
exploration, missioning, PI, FW, etc. I did all of those and more to support my market experiment while also funding PLEX and PVP. It is far easier to make that
initial few hundred million doing pure station trading somewhere like
Jita, as many recent market streams on Twitch have demonstrated. The modest rule I've
developed to direct my own trading I call the 1-10-30 rule: The
building-blocks of my business are individual orders which I can
expect to make roughly 10% profit at least every 30 days. Ideally,
you will have a lot more than 1 order, make a lot more than 10%, and
do so more often than 30 days—but that's our baseline case.
So, if we start with around 1b isk, our
default goal will be to make 100m in 30 days. Yes, it is very,
incredibly modest--comparable to high sec PI but at a few hundred times the start up cost! Yet I find it best to start with easily obtainable
goals, and, remember, we are not planning on putting much more than a
few updates worth of time into this market every week—if you
restrock and update orders more frequently than once or twice a week,
and you pick high margin, fast moving items, you can make much, much
more than a modest 10% every 30 days. What are our long-term goals? That's really
the key question. I'll assume the first long-term goal is to make
enough to afford a PLEX plus some spending money for activities like
PVP. So, let's say our goal is to make a stable 1b a month. By our
default rule, that means we are going to need to grow the market
into, roughly, 10b in sell orders.
Reality has kicked in, and you've
realized that if you invest 500m-1b and only meet the default 1-10-30
goals, it will be a long time before you reach 10b in sell orders
simply by investing (all) your profits! That's the catch with
regional trading: it is very long term and heavily dependent on how
much you invest into it, particularly if you do not want to micromanage your markets. If you are looking to make quick isk,
station trading somewhere like Jita is probably much better for you.
So, our “sweet spot,” then, is
going to be to reach 10b isk in sell orders. That means we need a
suitable location, and 10b worth of suitable items.
II. Locations for Trade
Finding the right spot to trade is the
first big hurdle. Here are two basic qualifications:
1) The system usually has at least 50
players, ideally using a single, specific station.
2) The players in that system engage in
activities there, or nearby, which would likely lead them to make
purchases.
The best way to find the right system
in which to set up shop simply comes from experience—think about
where you PVP, mission, mine, explore, live, etc., and think about
what other players do in that system, and sell the items you know
people there use. This applies to every type of system—from rookie
starter systems to low sec hotspots.
In my experience, hubs in the top 10-15
are competitive and often over-saturated with traders already (for
the more casual trader like myself). There are literally hundreds of
good options, but a recent change to EVE has opened up a few new
opportunities. The Sisters of Eve agents have become much more
profitable, drawing a huge amount of missioners. Osmon—one of the
locations for level 4 SOE agents—is a fairly established hub, and
very close to Jita. CCP added new level 4 agents in Apanake, Genesis,
making the system active with 50-250 players at any given time.
Similarly, Simela, Genesis, where level 1-3 SOE agents are located
often have 50-200 players active.
Check out the 2014 statistics (thus far) for top
systems for NPC skills:
The Bherdaspot-Simela pair is one of
the highest, while in previous months/years they were not even in the
top 10. On the chart of trade hubs linked above, Apanake has clearly risen up to
the ranks to around #20 quite quickly! Apanake is also fairly close to
Dodixie and Oursulaert—two of the bigger trade hubs. Where does
Simela rank? Roughly around the high 70's or low 80's over the past few weeks. While it has grown over the past few months, it
would still just about have to triple in its current isk in orders to
match Apanake. Of course, Simela is not without its disadvantages.
For one, it is a wonderful 22 jumps from Jita (and I'm assuming we
are going to make many of our purchases at Jita). Amarr is 23 jumps
away. Simela is 12 from Dodixie, but Dodixie is a strange market
where some items we are going to purchase are quite a bit higher than
Jita (or even some close regional markets).
If you've ever been to Genesis, you
also know this: it sucks. There is no main market, and many goods are
spread around in all sorts of random systems. Apanake (as well as the
other big hub, Tar, due to its location along a popular travel route)
cannot easily serve as the sole market, as it takes 14 (high sec)
jumps to go from Simela to Apanake—better to just fly to Dodixie!
Simela is also close to Gonditsa—a notorious low sec entrance
system which currently ranks 24th in systems on zkillboard. PVPers
don't typically want to fly 14+ high sec systems to refit their
ships, either. While, again, not completely accurate, here is the ranking of all trade hubs in Genesis:
If Simela makes for a decent trade
opportunity, why share it? Well, for one, it is an experiment for me, not a main venture. Primarily, though, I also
know this: Simela and even Apanake can easily contain many more
traders—in fact, Simela especially needs more traders to draw in
more customers. If a player is looking to buy a ship for missions,
say, and finds the ship at her local market, but does not find some
of the mods—rigs, the right tank mods, etc.--the player will
typically just fly to a major hub to purchase it all. Players get
used to buying at certain locations, opposed to going elsewhere—I
do, at least. When I'm PVPing, I will pay many times the cost of a needed item simply if it is in my current station or system. I lived in Simela for a few months when I first started EVE, and I was rarely able to buy items on the market there due to their
sparsity—I simply got used to the long trip to Dodixie. As a
result, it is likely that the extra traders in these systems would
actually help, not hurt, the trade profits of each individual
trader—as we will see later, there are certainly enough profitable,
moving items to hold enough traders, granted they sufficiently
diversify their goods. Furthermore, markets like Simela are not terribly attractive to established traders--compared to the movement of isk/items in markets in the top 10, isk moves at a glacial pace in Simela. What we lose in potential, quick profit, though, we make up for in the time required to keep it bringing in a slow and steady profit.
So, we are going to experiment with setting up out market
in Simela, at the SOE station. Of course,
there are many other
potentially great areas to set up a trading business, so feel free to
take my suggestions here and apply it elsewhere.Virtually any station where a few dozen people are regularly docked is a potential market.
Our next step in part II is to find
items to sell. Spoiler: there are far more potentially profitable
items to sell here than one trader could likely cover, so we will
have a plethora of options.
