User:Hirmuolio Pine/sandbox
Trading is the act of buying and selling items within Eve.
Contents
Introduction
There are many recordings of Uni trading classes available on the forums. A few examples are listed below:
- Trading 101 - Lompster (Basics of trading, some emphasis on station and wartime trading)
- Eldiora (The basics of trading. Emphasis on interregional trade and getting started.)
- Dr Deus (Introduction to trading. Emphasis on station trading, trading in Jita, Maximizing profit.)
- Sun Win (Buy and Sell orders. Creating a Trade Alt. Buying Low, selling high. Trade via hauling. Details of the Market system, Market analysis. Recommended Skills.)
Advantages of trading
- Easy to get started: You can start trading right away on a character with no skills, and the amount of skill training needed compared to other professions is fairly low. The only skill you really need to start with is Trade, without which you'll probably feel a little limited in the number of orders you can have open.
- Easy to do during war: With a small investment in skills (Marketing, Procurement and Daytrading to level 2) you can easily station trade in one system while docked up in another, or use an alt to trade in other ways.
- Time-flexible: A lot of trading happens while docked up, and it's easy to go AFK with no real danger most of the time. While this isn't true during hauling, good hauls tend to be fairly short and you can always dock up halfway through.
Trade Interfaces
The Trade Window
Possibly the simplest and least-used form of trading, the trade window requires you to be docked up with someone in the same station. It's mostly used to deliver items personally to a friend. The trade window is less useful in general since mass trading is not possible and scamming is common.
Contracts
A contract is a public, formal agreement for work or goods, available through the contracts button on the NeoCom. Like the trade window, mass trading is hard and scamming is common. However, contracts have a couple of advantages. They can contain goods not normally available on the market, and finding an audience for your trading is much easier than through the trade window.
Alternatively, courier contracts can also add extra profit to hauling routes.
The Market
This is where most trading in Eve takes place. The market is essentially an automated list of item exchange contracts: buy orders and sell orders. Since orders can be partially filled and searched easily, it tends to be a lot more convenient than trading through contracts, although the basic principle is the same. Another advantage of the market is that it's easy to see the price and quantity that items are actually selling for, using the market details tab. Markets are limited to the specific region they are in.
Tips and Tricks
As with other aspects of Eve, the first rule of trading is to never invest what you can't afford to lose.
0.01 ISK-ing
Once you get into trading, you will notice that a lot of people tend to over/undercut you by just 0.01 ISK per unit. Quite a few new players seem to have a problem with this - often getting annoyed to the point where they radically change their orders, slashing huge chunks off their profits. However, a more useful way to look at the 0.01-isking is that it is simply the game mechanism by which a logged on and active trading player has the advantage over logged off or AFK traders. Over or undercutting your competitors by just 0.01 ISK is precisely how this is achieved. So when someone else over/undercuts you by just 0.01 ISK, they are just getting their turn at the front of the queue. If you are there, updating your orders, you can simply update your orders and it is back to your turn to be at the front of the queue... On the other hand if you are not there, or not logged on, don't get so bent out of shape when someone that is active happens to be reaping the rewards.
And when you start doing some 0.01-isking of your own, try using your mouse-wheel to bump your price. You might like it, specially since it can be quite quick once you get used to it.
Of course, sometimes the market for a particular item is simply unrealistic, or maybe you need your trades to go through quickly for some reason - a radical price change might be called for, but a good trader will have identifiable reasons for making such a change, rather than it just being an emotional "I'll show you!" response to being 0.01-isked.
- There is a real danger during the modification of your market orders that you may accidentally enter the wrong amount or potentially forget a decimal point resulting in a significant loss of ISK. To mitigate this risk, observe the net change in your order before confirming it. You can also change the order amount using the up/down key to quickly add/subtract a few 0.01 ISK at a time.
Finding items that are good to trade
There is an incredibly simple 3-step plan for finding good trading items:
- Click on a market category, and start looking at the orders and market details for each item
- Switch to another category, and keep looking at each item.
- Look at items some more.
With that said, it's important to know what you're looking for, and hopefully the burger method and the tips on this page should be enough. Generally, for station trading, you want to find items that:
- have a high and fairly constant demand. You can check item demand by looking at the volume sold chart in the market details. While some items might have huge margins, if the volume sold is small or infrequent then there is much more risk associated with that item.
- actually sell for the buy and sell orders listed. You can check this by looking at the market details and seeing whether the range of prices includes the current best buy and sell orders. Hopefully the median price should be somewhere between the two.
Good items to trade are (depending on region and current market) meta-4 items (e.g. arbalest launchers): they can't be produced and some of them have better or the same attributes as their T2 counterparts.
Remember to diversify between different items so that if your market breaks down you don't lose all your money.
Alternatively an EVE University member has created a dynamic TradeBook that provides real-time market data on any EVE item, so long as the API calls to EVE market-central are working (and they usually are - as of June 14th, 2016, CCP deployed a massive update that greatly increased the speed at which market data is updated). You can find the TradeBook in the EVE University Forum under the Research, Production, and Trade tab. Click here to access the document.
Trading Math
Reason: Needs update due to the tex, fees, and skill changes in summer 2019.
Like almost all of Eve there is math. Fortunately most of the math in trading is basic math and/or the game does the math for you. If you want to find out how much you will be paying or selling an item please use the following equation.
X=The amount of units you want to buy or sell
U=The price of one unit of what your trying to buy or sell
P1=The overall cost of all the units you want to sell
P2=The overall cost of the units you want to buy
B=The broker percentage in decimal form
E=The amount that you will get after a sell
A=The amount you will have to pay to buy something
X * U = P1
P1 - (P1 * B) = E
X * U = P2
P2 + (P2 * B) = A
So if you were buying PLEX for 100 isk each and you want 100 PLEX the amount you would have to pay after a 10% broker fee is 11,000 in isk. The equation for this is below.
100 * 100 = 10000
10000 + (10000 * .1) = 11000
And if you want to sell the same PLEX for the same price and amount and same brokers fee you will get 9000 isk and the equation will look like this:
100 * 100 = 10000
10000 - (10000 * .1) = 9000
Trend lines
Trend lines are used in the real world to help self brokers and stock brokers find out future events in the stock market, or more commonly known as a technical analysis. To use a trend line all you need to do is find a way to draw a line from peak to peak and trough to trough in the line graph on price history on an item. You will want to draw a line that hits at least 2 to 3 peaks and another that hits 2 to 3 troughs. This will tell you that the price should fall between the 2 lines and if the prices hits one of the lines or go a little past it then its time to buy or sell the item in Eve. The trick to this in both Eve and the real world is to do this and know what you're doing as fast and right as possible.
You should be able to look at a graph in 5 minutes and say if it's a good buy or sell for you if you're buying and selling short term. The only trick to using something is it must be straight. If worst comes to worst you can press print screen, paste the image into paint and make the trend line there but if you do this you will lose some valuable time.
Because there is so much information already out there here is a link that gets in detail on what you should do to make and read a trend line.
Lastly here is another video that shows you how the trend line works on line graphs.
Scams to avoid
- Trade routes or courier contracts might be set up by pirates - a camp could be waiting on one of the jumps on the route to collect your ship, their goods and the collateral.
- Courier contracts might be set up to deliver to a player-owned station where you do not have docking rights.
A good way to avoid courier contract scams is to only accept contracts for routes you were planning on hauling anyway, and to not accept contracts to player owned stations.
Trading Cost Modifiers
- Broker Relations [Req: Trade 2] reduce base broker fee by 0.3% per level
- Accounting [Req: Trade 4]: reduces sales tax by 11% per level
- [[Skills:Margin Trading]] [Req: Accounting 4]: reduces escrow requirement for buy orders by an additional 25% per level
Whenever you set up a buy or sell order, you will have to pay the broker fee: 5% of the total order (3.5% at Broker Relations level five), modified by standings. Whenever each unit gets sold, the seller will pay 5% of the sell price as a sales tax (2.25% at max skills). The fees show up in the wallet journal as "Brokers Fee" and "Transaction Tax".
Thus, a station trader with zero standings will pay between 5% (at max skills) and 10% of the order price as fees/taxes. This is important to take into account when calculating your profit, but of course the standings below can change that further.
Standings
Faction and corporation standings relevant to the station the orders are placed in will have an effect on the broker fee. Faction standings contribute 1/3 more than corp standings. Note that the unmodified standing is used for the calculation. The exact formula is:
- BrokerFee (in %) = 5 - (0.3*BrokerRelationsLevel) - (0.03*FactionStanding) - (0.02*CorpStanding)
With no skills or standing the broker fee is 5%. With 10 faction and corp standing, the broker fee is reduced to 4.5%. With broker relations V and perfect standing the fee is further reduced to 3%.
| A long, long time ago... |
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2019-08-01: Market sales taxes and broker fees have changed:
Tax associated skills have been changed:
See also https://www.eveonline.com/article/pvewgz/updates-to-sales-taxes-and-brokers-fees |
