Raviy Oyla's guide to regional trading

There are many trading guides out there, and pretty much each one will tell you the same: train some trading skills, get some starting capital, start trading, buy low, sell high. This guide won't be any much different, but i will focus on what I did to make my first 10bil isk, and exactly how can it be done with a brand new character, step by step.

I will assume that you already have a main character that has a few million isk that you can invest into your brand new trading character. If you are completely new to EVE Online, it would be the best not start trading straight away, and do something else to learn the ropes. Trading the way I do means you won't ever leave your trading station after the first week.

Step 1: Create your first trading character!

This is the easiest step. It doesn't matter what race you choose, or what your profile picture looks like, or what name you choose for yourself. Have fun creating it :)

Step 2: Decide in which areas you want to trade

This step is important since you will spend your first week outside a station getting standings with the local faction in the area where you will trade. You need to choose between Amarr/Caldari and Gallente/Minmatar. This is due to the fact that Amarr and Caldari (and respectivelly Minmatar and Gallente) are allies, and they affect each other's faction standings. Getting high standings with one side will substantially lower your standings with the other side.

Step 3: Give your trading character a few million isk. Do your first tutorial, get your first free ship, and then move on to your first rookie career system.

Step 4: Start raising your standings with the factions you chose.

The easiest way to raise the faction standings is to do the rookie career systems. There are 3 of those systems for each faction, and doing 6 systems for two allies faction will (should) get your faction standings up to 3.2 without skills for each faction. Additional boost for one faction of choice is the Sisters of EVE epic arc which starts in Arnon system.

Rookie career systems are:

1. Gallente

• Couster
• Clellinon
• Trossere

2. Minmatar

• Hadaugago
• Malluker
• Embod

3. Caldari

• Uitra
• Jouvulen
• Akiainavas

4. Amarr

• Deepari
• Pasha
• Conoban

In each of these systems there is only one station, and in that one station you will find 5 agents that will offer you missions. There are two military agents (military and advanced military), business agent, trading agent, and exploration agent. Agents you should focus on are the first four. The way I do these systems is the following:
1. Do first two missions for the exploration agent. Exploration agent doesn't give you any real standings, but the second mission will give you a ship that is useful later on. Both missions are very simple. In the first mission you will warp to a cosmic signature and take something from a can, and in the second mission you will follow directions and jump through a few gates.
2. Do the military and advanced military. I usually take both missions at the same time. One thing you should look out for are the advanced military missions where you are given a ship to blow up in. Don't make the mistake of blowing up your good ship :)
3. Do the business and industry missions.

If you do all 6 systems, you will end up not only with decent standings, but with approximately 40mil isk that is pretty decent to start your trading career.

Make sure not to decline a single mission you are given since if you do, you can't get to the 10th mission in the chain that gives you a nice standings boost.

And here I get to the whole point of why you should grind these missions. Before you can start effectively trading, you want to get your broker fees as low as possible in your trading hub. Let me clarify a bit. For each transaction you make on the market, you will pay Broker's fee, and Sales tax:

 

Without any trading skills and standings, your Broker's fee and Salex tax will be 1.5% each. With skills and some standings, you will have something similar to the screenshot above, and since you are a trader, you do want to save every ISK you can. Sales tax is lowered with a skill, and the lowest it can get is 0.75% (skill in question is Accounting). Broker's fee is lowered in three steps:

1. Train Broker Relations skill to V (something you will do in any case)
2. Raise your standings with the local faction
3. Raise your standings with the corp that controls your trading hub station

In theory it's possible to get Broker's fee down to nothing if you have 10.0 standings with the local faction and very high standing with the local corp that holds the station. I never got that low, so I cant vouch for that info :)

While doing all career agent missions you shouldn't focus on training any trading skills. Instead you should train the skills you will need to do your missions. That means factional frigate (advisable to III), Factional weapons (small hybrid, small energy, small projectile ...)

Step 5: First important skill, first remap, and start on your trading skills.

Before you start training trading skills, there is one specific skill that should be trained to IV at least: Cybernetics. You will definitely want to use implants to speed up your training, and the only prerequisite to use them in Cybernetics. Training it to IV will set you back for about two days, and to V will set you back about 10 days. This is up to you how long you want to invest it in, but I would suggest biting the bullet and getting it to V. After a while you will be able to afford +5 implants, and those do help (+4 help a lot as well).

Once you are done with Cybernetics, get yourself Charisma and Memory implants. Get the highest ones you can afford and have the skill for, and remap your stats for Trade skill training:

1. Intelligence: 17
2. Perception: 17
3. Charisma: 27
4. Willpower: 17
5. Memory: 21

Most trading skills are Charisma/Memory based, and this mapping will give you fastest training time for the whole plan. The skills you should train are the following:

1. Trade V (get it to V asap. It's a prerequisite for all/most other trading skills)
2. Retail III (later on in the plan you will train it up higher)
3. Accounting V
4. Broker Relations V
5. Retail V
6. Wholesale V
7. Tycoon V

This would pretty much sum up everything you need to do for regional trading with your trading alt. You should create one more alt (on an account separate from your trader so they can be online at the same time), park it in Jita, and use it to purchase all the cheap items you will resell for profit in your trading hub. You can move the items yourself (you should do it yourself if you are low in isk) or you can pay other people to do it for you (use courier contracts).

There is much more to trading than what I wrote in this guide. As you might have noticed, I don't refer to certain trading skills, or the contracting skill since they are not needed for my trading method. If you want to do station trading as well, you should train Margin Trading to V, and you can also look into skills that will allow you to make remote purchase orders, and modify your orders remotely.

The hardest part of trading is figuring out what to trade. I can recommend skill books for the beginning, and as soon as you have 500mil isk or more, start trading T3 subsystems. That's how I started off :)

If this makes sense to anyone, don't hesitate to leave a comment (even if all you say is: Raviy Oyla, you suck!)

It's that time of the month

My least favorite date came - date when I have to spend 5 PLEX to keep my accounts going.

What was good about it this time is that after 5 plex were spent, I was left with more than 7bil cash in total, meaning that I broke my first milestone - 10bil personal wealth.

Current state of affairs is as follows:

1. Freeflow ISK: 162,609,241.07
2. Sell orders: 5,700,187,542
3. Items in transit: ~3bil isk
4. Available PLEX: 0

Mini milestone set for 30 days: break over 15bil plex personal wealth. I think it's doable this time.

And now for something completely different

Once in a while I do something else in EVE beside trading, and one of my passtimes is running lvl4 missions, and of course salvaging all my wrecks. This time around I decided to use one of those new nifty Mobile Tractor units to see how will it work and whether it's worth using it to cut down on time needed for salvage.

 

 

 

Well, it was a total waste of time. It tractors one wreck at a time, and by the time it gets down 8 wrecks for me to salvage, i probably could have cleared the whole area using my trusty Noctis with 5 tractor beams and 3 salvagers.

 

I guess i'm going back to the previous setup I had.



Being a full time parent sure takes time away from games

And that is not such a bad thing. I definitely enjoy spending time with my kid instead of wasting it on my internet spaceships, but in the past three weeks I did find a little time to play and think more on the whole get rich fast strategy.

My main focus was analyzing the market to find profitable items that don't require too much of my attention. I'm almost completely out of T3 subsystem market, and I moved the focus onto other items that will bring me pretty much the same profit, with way fewer daily updates.

Current state of affairs is as follows:

1. Sell orders: 6,550,720,185
2. Buy orders: 276,222,656 (in escrow)
3. Freeflow ISK: 1,296,696,143.21
4. Items in transit: ~900mil
5. Available plex: 3

All in all not too shabby for average 15minutes of eve per day :)

A very intense trading session

Last few days I was very busy with RL events (wife giving birth to an amazing baby boy), and a relatively large amount of ISK (5 bil) piled up in my wallet, and I wanted to see what would be the fastest way to make some profit.

I started browsing the market to find items that move in large volumes, and have relatively decent profit margins, and to my great surprise, the best candidate was PLEX.

The trading session was completely different from what I do usually.

I set up a purchase order, knowing that i will be undercut almost instantly, and set it for the whole region. EVE was reduced to a window from full screen, i started an episode of ST:Voyager, and started updating the purchase order every few minutes.

The purchase order was for 15 PLEX (margin trading V ftw), set for the region with 1 day duration. To my great amazement, a few minutes after setting the order PLEX started piling up in my home station. Every single PLEX that came in was re-listed on the market - standard station trading.

Buy orders were updated on average every 5 minutes, and the sell orders were updated on average every 10 minutes. During one hour of intensive trading, I managed to move over 25 PLEX, which netted me somewhere around 750mil isk profit (approx 30mil isk profit per PLEX).

In the end I saved 5 plex to fuel my accounts next month, and one of them came for free :)

Perhaps in the future I will set myself time for weekly PLEX trading sessions. It seems to work quite well :)

One thing that was amazing is that out of 25 PLEX purchased on a region wide order, only two weren't in my home base, and both were in very decent accessible high sec systems where I can easily send alts to pick it up.

Trading update - November 5

The new trading plan is working even better than expected.

Current state of affairs:

Items for sale: 6,467,076,952 ISK
Freeflow cash: 713,272,141.18 ISK
Items in transfer: 0
Available PLEX: 0

Comparing to last week audit the, my gross worth is up by 1.9 bil ISK, and taking into account that some of the items there are for sale are very slow moving items, net worth is probably up by 1.4bil isk, which is not bad at all for one week's worth of trading with total capital that is under 10bil isk. If it continues this way, in a few weeks I will definitely be able to buy Plex for all six accounts, and still remain profitable.

In the meanwile a new trading character is getting trading skills up to a point where he can start bringing profit in a new trading hub, and i'm looking forward starting market research for the new hub.

Starting a new account and a new character brought me again to EVE's favorite cespool of stupidity called the Rookie help channel. It was just amazing to see how lazy people are, and now they can't be bothered to read the text that is on their screen, but what top's it all are 10 day old characters who think they figured it all out, and they start giving out pretty terrible advice, and arguing that they know what they are talking about. So if who ever reads this is a true newbie, remember one thing: Google is your best friend. There are tons of good EVE blogs out there that will give you very decent advice. Second thing to remember is: tutorials are there to teach you game mechanics. Don't skip them because they cover 99% of what people ask in the rookie help channel. Not following the tutorial, and asking questions that the tutorial answers just makes you look stupid.

Thinking does pay off

Only a few days after moving to a different trading hub I can already feel the results and rake the profits. Competition on my favorite trade items is less fierce than in Rens, and it reflected straight away on the bottom line.

Current state of affairs is as follows:

1. Items for sale: ~3.8bil (this will probably shring down to ~3.2bil since I did overprice some items)
2. Freeflow cash: ~1.3bil
3. Items in transfer: 0
4. Available PLEX: 0

If everything goes right, in about a month I will have enough ISK to start a long term plan that was on low fire for a while: Blueprint research.

One of my characters will soon have high enough standings to anchor a POS in .7 sec minmatar space, and and soon as that happens I will start looking into setting up a large POS with a bunch of labs and advanced labs to start researching BPO's. Ideally in about 9 months I will have a few highly researched BPO's that will start providing profits from from BPC's that will be created in the same POS.

Only time will tell whether this long term plan is viable to begin with.

In addition, i'm approaching the point where I will be able to spare 6 PLEX each month for each of my currently active accounts.

I guess I was doing it wrong

This morning I officially decided to move out of Rens and look for greener pastures. Market for items I was trading became too competitive, and my trading volume was down to less than 100mil profit per day. I don't know whether there are bot traders there, or no-lifers, but I can't be online and update my sell orders every 10 minutes or so to remain competitive.

Current state of affairs:

Total sell orders: 0 isk
Total free-flow ISK: 2,414,000,000.0 (-ish)
Items for sale: ~700,000,000 isk
Available PLEX: 0

I already moved the character to another trading hub where I have relatively decent standings (0.42% broker fee) and hopefully today I will start investigating the new hub and trading opportunities.

Trading update - 10/18/2013

Trading is definitely a profitable business in EVE Online, but of course, I knew that already.

The state of my trading is as following:

1. Sell orders: 1,225,092,710 isk
2. Freeflow cash: 1,010,162,504.92
3. Available PLEX: 1
4. Spent PLEX: 1

Time to reinvest into my favorite trade items, and perhaps look for new markets.

Last round of trade was in items that seem to have a very large competition, and due to my infrequent price updating, it was a lot slower than I expected - basically my greed got the best of me. I saw highly profitable items that trade in acceptable volumes, and the price difference between Jita and Rens was over 100%. The mistake I made was jumping onto that wagon with more than 2-3 items.
Time to start looking into other low volume high profit items that don't have over 20 traders competing for the sell.

I also decided to add PLEX to the audit information. One PLEX was used for a new account that will become my Dodixie trading alt. The alt is currently training Cybernetics 5, and as soon as it's trained up he will get a +5 charisma implant and start training his trading skills.

This new alt brings me to the musings part of this blog post. Since it's a new alt, i'm stuck with the rookie help channel for a month (I know I can close it, but ...) and just looking at the rookie help channel gives a great insight into various types of people that you encounter almost on every MMO.

You have your genuine newbies who just want to get pointed in the right direction, and then you get the other type of newbies who want to be spoon-fed, and almost want to have someone else play the game for them. And then of course you have the newbie helpers who most of the time seem to be perfect assholes who come to the rookie help channel for an ego boost since they can't get it somewhere else (with a very few exceptions).

If any newbie ever comes to read this blog, here is a piece of advice: google is your friend. I learned much of what I know about EVE (not that I claim I know that much) from other EVE bloggers. Stop asking stupid questions in game, and start working for yourselves.

Two weeks worth of a business trip = More ISK than I started with ?!?

I was away for rougly two weeks on a busines trip, and of course I forgot the password for this blog, plus never logged on to gmail from my laptop on this account, and ...

Oh well.

After two weeks of barely touching the game, here is how my financials look like:

Sell orders: 315,317,674.00 ISK
Freeflow cash: 1,334,277,847.20 ISK

This is way better than I could hope for. Most of the sell orders I had went through. I updated them twice a day, and twice during these two weeks I got new stuff to sell and had it hauled over to Rens.

Now it's time to get cracking again, re-invest all of that, and see how it goes on

Tuesday financial report

It definitely pays off to do a little market research, and see what items can be re-sold for a decent profit. Since the last financial update I earned roughly 200mil isk just by doing proper market research. I moved a few items from Jita to rens, and currently my wallet looks as following:

1. Sell orders: 693,903,221
2. Freeflow isk: 105,721,661.27

Looks like my rudimentary trading plan works.

So far I made no links ok the quickbar, or opened Excel even once to keep track of anything I buy or sell (not saying that this is the way to do it, but just reminding myself that with proper book keeping I could have probably made more than 200mil that I made)

For now I don't want to share what I trade in case someone actually reads this, but I will give a full and detailed financial report on October 15th including every single item I traded, and price update strategies.

First month recap

After a rather long hiatus, I came back to EVE Online about a month ago. I was away for the best part of two and a half years, and before the big hiatus my main occupation was nul sec carebearing, ratting, and ocasional pvp with my stealth bomber pilot alt.

Different things happened, the corp I was part of fell apart, I moved back to high sec, and decided to strike out on my own. I trained up a few corporation management skills, created a corp of my own, and started doing PI on a massive scale with 15 characters; and that was the biggest mistake I ever made in my EVE Online career. The whole process was too tedious for my taste, I had to invest at least 3 hours each day to haul the items around, and after about a month I just gave up on it, and on the game itself.

To cut the long story short, I was away for a while, and now i'm back, determined not to make the same mistakes I made in the past.

So, from my 'vast' experience here is the list of things not to do:

• Don't go to nul sec when you have only 12mil skill points (you will in fact be someone's cannon fodder)
• Don't do PI on a massive scale. (it's too boring for a paltry one PLEX a month)
• Don't be a sheep (stop reading other people's blogs and blindly following their tactics)
• Don't fall for scams (in all honesty I only fell for one scam, margin trading one, for less than 100mil isk so no real harm done)
• Don't spend too much time on the game. Real life is interesting as well
• Don't fall into trap of doing one single thing all the time. It gets boring real easy

And of course if there is a don't list, there has to be a do list as well:

• Make realistic goals for each month, week and even a day
• Be an honest trader. 
• Be nice to people. If a hauler brings your stuff from Jita to Rens (25-odd jumps) for a rather low fee, be nice and say thanks. You will both feel nicer for it.
• Make fun of scammers in local chat while revealing their scams (helping a newbie is always nice)

And now for the actual recap of the first month:

 It all started very slow. I forgot the passwords I used for all of my accounts, and one of the accounts was tied to an e-mail address that was no longer available. I opened a support ticket with ECS using what limited information I had about my accounts and characters, and within a few days they got back to me, and gave me back all the info I needed to reactive all accounts. 

I also had 5 free days on each account from the last promo, and this gave me a chance to log on to each account, and start consolidating all the assets I had, and start thinking about what I want to do this time around.

I sold off most of the junk that was sitting in my hangar (on all of my characters) and started making an inventory of assets that might be useful in the future, and this is what came out:

1. Raviy Oyla 

• Bestower
• bunch of PI goo that needs to be sold off
• leftovers from old trading sessions
• Roughly 100 mil isk in cash

2. old PvP alt:

• fitted stealth bomber
• roughly 4mil isk in cash

3. Mission runner alt:

• Dominix with a lousy fit
• salvaging Catalyst
• bunch of salvage and modules to be sold off
• roughly 75mil isk in cash, and around 100k LP with a Gallente corp

4. Null sec carebear alt: 

• bunch of assets in the old station in Fountain, pretty much inaccessible
• PVE fit Drake (rather useless after Drake's got nerfed)
• bunch of junk to be sold off, worth roughly 100mil isk
• roughly 200mil isk in cash

5. Industry alt

• High sec mining fitted Hulk
• High sec mining fitted Mackinaw
• Mammoth 
• bunch of junk to be sold off, worth roughly 200mil isk
• roughly 45mil isk in cash

After everything was sorted out i was left with the following

1. Raviy Oyla

• Bestower
• roughly 150mil isk in cash

2. Other chars

• stealth bomber
• Dominix
• Drake
• Hulk
• Mackinaw
• Mammoth
• roughly 800 mil isk in cash

First month activities:

Relocated everyone and everything from Gallente space (Dodixie area) to Minmatar space

Raviy Oyla settled in Hek, did some station trading, 150mil cash doubled up to rougly 300mil. Trading station changed from Hek to Rens

I started boosting my Minmatar standings, so I did all the rookie missions, and career agents for Gallente and Minmatar, and finished the Sisters of Eve epic arc. Minmatar standings after connections V: 5.04 (that was boring and repetitive, but I did need the standings boost. Standings with Minmatar before the grind were at around -0.2.

Exploring market opportunities in Rens. The hub seems to be well stocked, and the current standings with Brutor tribe give me broker fee of around .44% (which is not bad considering the minimal investment)

Other char activities: 

Purchased Noctis for the Nul carebear alt, mission running in duet with the mission runner

Purchased a tanked Retriever for the industry alt (not that I ever went mining, but considering the latest changes to high sec mining, I won't be undocking the Hulk any time soon. 

All of the chars seem to have learned rather random and useless skills, so I started sorting that out, and upgraded all chars to a full set of +3 implants (yeah, i'm a cheap bastard).

I will finish off this post with an interesting anecdote from the last weekend. Being a sheep that I am, I followed the advice of another trading blogger to trade skill books. Buy them cheap from NPC vendors, and re-sell them for profit in a trading hub. I took a trip to a local college, stocked up on about 150mil worth of skill books, took them back to Rens, and posted them all on the market. Since I don't like playing the .01 isk game, I started undercutting aggressively, by 1000 isk at a time. About an hour into the game (I was triple boxing with my mission runner and salvager) I get this nice e-mail from a fellow trader saying that I suck (as if I didn't know that) and that i'm running the skill book trade for everyone with my aggressive undercutting. Being the nice trader I am, the reply was along the lines of: I won't play your .01 isk game, and if you don't like my trading method, you are more than welcome to trade in alternate commodities, or go to a different trading hub (Jita, the capital of .01 undercutting for instance). As a reply I got a nice and shiny bounty on my head: 10mil isk (Yaay me!)

The whole cheap skill book trading was rounded up with rougly 50mil isk in net profit, and I re-listed all the remaining skill books for the same price i bought them for. Interestingly enough, all were bought out by the same (let's not call it bot trader) person who complained in the first place :)

Yet another EVE online trading blog

Let me begin with a question: Is there a need for yet another EVE Online trading blog?

There probably isn't, but this can be a very nice platform to track my own progress, and keep myself in check with all the trading activities.

The way I see it, main reason for trading in EVE is to make myself independent from paying real $$ for the game, and to finance other activities I might enjoy.

A little bit about my EVE online background. When it comes to the game, I'm not new to it, but I'm still one of the biggest newbies around. I've been around EVE since 2006, with large gaps in play time. My oldest char has somewhere around 12mil Skill Points (which probably makes it the oldest newbie char in the game) and my youngest char has around 13mil Skill Points (char created in 2010).

I came back to EVE Online recently (about a month ago), liquidated all the old assets I had, and decided to start a trading career with one of my old chars that has almost all of the trading skills maxed out. The char is of course Raviy Oyla (the friendly trash talker from Rens) and this blog will be used to chronicle my progress toward my first milestone: 100 billion net worth for that one char.

Status as of today:

1. Freeflow ISK: 415,595,293.67 ISK
2. Sell orders total: 209,927,530 ISK
3. ISK on other active characters: approximately 800 million (this cash will never be transferred to Raviy Oyla)

One month goal:

1. Freeflow ISK: 200,000,000.00
2. Sell orders total: 1,200,000,000

Skills goal: Train Tycoon V

That much for today :)