First Weekend

I had intended to write an update Sunday night, but real life intervened, and then EVE was down last night when I tried to log on.

I want to evaluate my first weekend with regional trading. I had a bit more time to update orders and do research, with weekend traffic providing some notable volume I was able to increase my wealth by a pretty good margin.

I started last week with approximately 330million ISK across 2 characters, one trader selling in Rens and another selling in Amarr. My current positions with these characters are as follows:

Slightly more than doubling my "wealth" in less than a week, I'm pretty happy with that. As you can tell, once again I have spare ISK that I need to do more research for, currently 155,019,163 ISK sitting in wallets not helping me. 

Research is currently (and I foresee will often be) my most time consuming activity, but finding and keeping a current list of slow moving, low competition, but high margin items is vital.

Currently I have been doing all my hauling myself, as my Rens trader can fly a blockade runner. This saves me money, but is time consuming, and it is only a matter of time before I get ganked. Therefore, I will spend some time this week analysing different hauling options to free up my time for research.

Notice that once again I have not included my "station trading" character in Jita. I did find time to update his orders a few times over the weekend, but the profits I make on that character (with current assets of around 2.5bil) are pretty on par with my 2 regional traders. This is obviously not great, so I am considering "cashing out" with him and moving him to start selling in Dodixie instead. It'll take a lot of research to get him up to speed however due to the amount of ISK involved.

Day 2

The first "real" day, as far as I'm concerned.

A minor work emergency prevented me from logging on yesterday, but tonight I had a decent amount of time to get myself sorted.

I logged on to find only one of my items had sold, irritating, but 8mil profit is better than nothing (based on an initial set of 40ish million in items bought). I updated my orders and found another 11 items to buy on my Rens traders, then went to Jita and brought them across.

I took a look at my Amarr character, on starting off he had 209 million ISK, and after doing to some digging I decided on 12 starting items to trade, for a maximum buy of 20mil for a single item (slightly more than my Rens trader). By the time I had shipped things around and updated my orders, a couple of items had sold in Rens, so I have some cash to re-invest tomorrow.

I have not updated my Jita station trader, as I haven't really had chance, so i'm not taking him into account in this entry.

As things stand my current positions are:

Rens on the left, Amarr on the right.

I take into account a 20% provision in my sell orders to allow for lowering my sell orders in response to other people. I try to not disrupt markets I enter by only buying 1 of each item, and entering my prices 1ISK below the current lowest, but I will always have some orders that are outbid and that I will have to reduce.

I need to find more items to invest in, as any ISK in wallets is currently not doing anything to help me earn money. I should have more time over the weekend to do more research.

Day 0

After creating the blog and outlining my assets last night I didn't really have chance to do much more than a cursory browse of items on eve-central; tonight was my real start to my trading.

I decided to focus first on my character in Rens. Browsing eve-central it quickly became apparent that it does not have price information on blueprints, so I improvised with my character in Rens browsing the market, whilst I had a tab of eve-marketdata open viewing the Jita prices.

The items I am looking for are low volume, high margin, with an upper limit of a 10mil buy price. In an hour or so's browsing I identified 12 items, and headed off to Jita to buy them, hauling myself and posting them for sale in Rens.

I only used 42 million to buy these items, and posted them for sale for a total of 108 million, leaving me with 76 million in my wallet. I will have to browse for other items that fit the bill tomorrow, as my time is limited to about an hour/hour and a half most weeknights.

It begins...

It all begins here.

In this blog I will be documenting my experiences with trading in EVE Online. I will mostly be attempting to emulate the methods outlined by croda in his excellent blog:

marketsforisk

In his blog he outlines his experience and methods of trading, primarily regional trading, that it, buying in one region and selling in another. I will be taking a very similar approach, buying in Jita and shipping out to Rens and Amarr to sell, whilst doing some station trading in Jita. The difference is that whilst he starting from a fresh account with only the small amount of ISK from the beginning missions, I will be starting with some experience and assets in the game.

A full outline of my starting characters:

- My old "main" character, with  accounting/broker relations V, 65 orders to use and good standings with Caldari Navy/Brutor Tribe. will be primarily selling out of Rens.

- An Amarr character created with the 20 free dual training days gifted by CCP last Christmas, has middling trade skills and no standings of note, will be primarily selling in Amarr.

- A character in Jita, who has recently been dabbling in station trading, Has almost perfect trading skills and good Caldari faction standing, will continue to station trade/buy items from Jita for other characters to ship.

My starting assets are as follows:

Most of this is on my station trader, so I will be starting small on my regional trading. I want to learn the ropes with a small amount of money, rather than throw too much at it and make simple mistakes.

With that, it's time to look at EVE-Central for items to trade...