Eve – A Venture into Trading

While selling some rat loot the other night I found that someone wanted to buy my Capacitor Coil for 0.01ISK. That is taking the piss I thought and went to the trouble of having a look at the buying side of the market. I noticed two things.

Firstly that there is a huge mark up between the buying and the selling and secondly, there is a wide variety of prices in the buying side. Certain commodities have an ‘agreed’ buying price and others vary wildly. John encouraged me to have a go and place a buy order with a view to making a mint.

With 3million seed capital I placed a buy order on capacitor rechargers – something that is useful on Gallente Armour tanks, I have at least 2 of them on my ships to keep the armour repairer going. My buy order is for 200 Capacitor Rechargers being bought at 6k (the highest buy order in the region). There were broker fees and other similar fun bits (taxes) but the end result was a 1.2m down payment to the brokers. The same item sells for about 18k in Essence. If my buy orders fills up then I need to sell the 200 units for more than 6k to make a profit. I figure that if I sell about 18k I’ll be doing well by tripling the investment.

Then came the crunch. After placing the order I noticed that though I had selected region wide buying, my trading skills did not allow the buy order to go further than the station I placed it in. As a result the buy order might not fill up. Glancing through the trading skills I notice that it might not hurt having a second character with another skill set.

There are simply too many areas that I want to play in!

With a trading character with some money the market is ripe for profit for a patient player. You wouldn’t ever have to fire a shot in anger to make a fortune. The market in Essence does not appear ‘mature’ by which I mean that the price difference between buy and sell orders is large enough to make big bucks. I do notice that the usual commodities have a much tighter margin (ammo) which would indicate more trading in these areas.

It will all come out in the wash as the week progresses.

Edit Well that was a disaster - I ended up with small amounts of goods spread all over the region - only a fraction of what I anticipated was actually bought - certainly not enough to set up a sell order.