Ois Tips to being a successful Trader in the EVE universe

Quick Intro and a realistic slap to the back of the head

Before we get started on this guide for trading I wanted to let you know that although I told you I plex-out regularly it isnt without substantial effort. You should also know that sometimes I do not make enough and end up paying out of pocket. Usually that happens when I want to buy shinys for an l4 ship or when I end up spending nearly a billion on a POS set-up. =) Also, In case you were wondering, yes I am actually employed! I work as a product acquisition specialist for my father (glorified title for shootin the shit with product reps on phone and in email). Here are few things that have happened to me that have set me back a few times that I hope you remember while starting your trading career: losing expensive cargo, forgetting/adding a zero, buying incorrect modules/ships for the area (check the area is it PVP or PVE oriented), and finally, putting orders up without checking the Universal market. Never assume that because youre in a high profit margin area that every item will sell WAY above Jita prices because, sometimes people have sell orders up for less than what they should because they dont research the market and you may not catch it because youre in a rush. If that does happen EVE Mentat is supposed to tell you, EVE Mentat is a program which Ill briefly touch on later. Anyway we can talk about that more in game, now on to the good stuff!

1. Whats the first rule of fight clubNEVER TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB! Thats pretty selfexplanatory; if you find a good place to profit keep it a secret. I guarantee others will try and steal your profits. If someone you dont know asks how you are making iskies point them in the wrong direction immediately, competition is fierce. Also, as you have played EVE for a long time you can understand why I also say keep it on the down-low with any corporation members. I dont mind trading secrets and tips with you, but only on a secure channel. I like to plex-out lol. 2. Time is money, and with the amount of volume you need to be trading at to plex-out (around 1-3 billion at a time in sell orders); it will soon occur to you to use Red Frog/Black Frog Freight instead of moving it yourself. Believe me when I tell you jumping 25 gates four times in a row is not fun. I had Red frog do 5 shipments for me yesterday and it was the best decision I ever made. (You should have high enough profit margins to be able to do this every time, if you dont pack your alts bags and time to go hunting for a better location)

3. Organization will make it much easier to keep your profit stream stable. In order to stay organized I recommend using a program called EVE Mentat. This program was created solely for the Trading Mechanic in EVE. I could get into depth on that program alone but go ahead and google it and check it out. Also, Excel Spreadsheets; they can be both time wasters and savers. I use Spreadsheets to keep note of what items sell the fastest in system Im selling at so I can quickly tab over and see what new buy orders to put up. 4. Want to stay sane? Build up your Quickbar Folders. Look-up a guide for building Quickbar folders in the market tab or try this one (btw this site is great these guys do all the analytics for you): http://k162space.com/2012/06/04/trading-103-quickbar-and-uilayout/ . Quickbar Folders allow you to quickly look up the items you need and place buy orders at a faster rate without typing the name of the module over and over again (Huge Time saver) 5. Quick Rundown on Skills Needed: Trade, Broker Relations, Retail, Accounting, Margin Trading, Wholesale, Tycoon a) Order Number Increase: Trade, Retail, Wholesale, Tycoon b) Decrease in taxes and fees: Accounting & Broker Relations

c) Margin Trading: Making buy orders on the Margin (allows you to keep more liquidity for other things): if for some reason you dont have enough money to cover your buy order it will just fail no fees involved Also a scamming trick at Jita. d) The other trade skills are ok but unnecessary for what you want to do at Leastmaybe. For example if youre on your main and are half way across the region it may be a huge time saver to train up remote buy/sell order manipulation. Although, thats why I also recommend you leave a Trade alt where you want to sell your stuff at. e) Contracts and how I am currently using them This is something I just started getting into and its selling ships with rigs installed. I made an auction bought a Dominix and put on x2 large capacitor control circuit and x1 large sentry damage augmenter. Currently it is at 105mil and I bought the Dominix at 68. So I may squeeze by with a tiny bit of profit. The thing is though, the idea is sound. My idea is this: If you are in a pvp area people want full ship load outs NOW not in 10 minutes as they may have just been killed. So maybe we can look into making pre made ship loadouts at some point. Of course that would also include advertising and other logistical issues but thats future me talking again lol.

6. If you can only put up 5 buy/sell orders walk away read a few guides while you train up for a week, you are going to want at least 50, this allows you to diversify your assets so that something is always selling. Kind of like the stock market. 7. When buying modules to sell at a potential trade hub, there are a few options. A) Go to Jita and play .01 isk wars until you get all of your orders filled (This is the quickest way, just annoys me sometimes) B) Go to a minor hub like dodixie, if you want to wait and only have to occasionally change your buy orders to the lowest until you get your orders filled. C) Find a Mission System and place competitive buy orders and hope they get filled, this does work but it can take a month or two to get everything you want because players usually ship the T2 items they want to sell to a trade hub, but any high meta items you need can be potentially filled quickly. 8. How much to buy at a time: This a problem for me btw, I like to place huge buy orders that almost never get completely filled, its a money waste and something you should avoid. To help point you in the right direction: Usually you only need about 20-25 of an item, unless it is a script or a high volume item like a micro auxiliary core or a prop mod etc. (ask me in-game for more high volume items) Start small, and only buy items that you personally think are going to sell. I recommend you look at this guide for more information on Graphs provided In-game: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/How_to_identify_items_to_trade and this guide for High Volume PVP items: http://k162space.com/2012/11/02/high-volume-pvp-items/ , in my opinion it is ok, but it helps you learn what sells well. Here is a snapshot of my current sales for the day:

Looks good right? I have another 7-8 sales that didnt fit in the snippet tool. Youre looking at sales with around 20-30% margin. Some items were unfortunately sold at/near jita prices due to competition but because I used buy orders I still made a profit. On average this toon makes about 100-125 Mil Gross but he can only have 49 orders up at time which is a real problem when you got 2.5 bil waiting to be put up on the market. I also just moved out there yesterday so I still do not have a handle for what people want out there. I know now I need more Shield extenders and BCS2s etc. The red buys were because some dumbass was undercutting way too low. DC IIs sell for 1.2mil and he was selling them for 890. Oh well more iskies for me. So never be afraid to take out the low ballers every now and then, sometimes you lose money but you actually stabilize the market for the time being. For example the next guy who placed DC IIs up for sale probably would have sold them for .01 under that guys cost. 9. How to find a good location: I use three web tools, Element43(http://www.element43.com/market/trading/station/ranking/) , Dotlan, and of course Eve-central. My first

tip is to not blindly trust what E43 or E-C have up for sell/buy orders. Why? Some people manipulate logs that are sent in to Eve-Central (That may have been fixed but you never know) & Market data is usually collected a few hours earlier sometimes up to 24. Other than that is pretty easy, look at Element43, pick a location with a low-medium amount of orders up, tab over to dotlan, see if it has a direct/near connection to Low-sec/Null Sec (This is important because different items are needed in Null and Low and it also means its a hotbed for PVP activity), click it check the number of jumps into system in the last 1hr/24hr and if it has a high number of jumps then I would send your alt over there to check it out. I usually just put my toon on AP and read a book or something. If you want to go into more depth you can check the surrounding low-sec systems for ship kills etc. Once you get their compare it with the Jita market, if the buy/sell orders are matching up with eve-central data then you should be okay to use it. I prefer having my secondary at Jita, but thats not always possible.

Anyway I figure this is a good start for reading, if you can even get through it with my terrible grammar and editing skills haha. Ill include some links below that will also help you in your conquest. http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Advanced_Trading_Guide http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Creating_an_Alt_Hauler http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Lessons_Learned_By_A_Budding_Trader http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Trade_Hubs http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Trading and http://www.youtube.com/user/Abbadon2110?feature=watch This is Abbadons Youtube channel and contains some free tutorial videos on market trading. Oi Hannah