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.