Market Update time.
After a week or so of really focusing on the market, I’ve learned quite a bit, and made plenty of mistakes (which is kind of like the EVE mantra really). The good news is that I now believe my base of operations will do just fine for my little market mogul. Traffic seems high, it’s a minor mission hub, and it even has decent asteroid fields to attract miners.
Now my mistakes. If you produce 500 cargo expanders, don’t list all 500 in one order, even if you put them up for a good price. People buy them 1-4 at a time, and while you might get a few buyers a day, it will take next to forever to move all 500. What I should have done is split the 500 into groups of 50, and list each group at a different station, maximizing on those impulse buys that are too common in EVE. Why fly to the next station just to save 1000 ISK, right?
I also made some mistakes with my buy orders. Being the top buyer is often not enough, you also have to offer an aggressive price to encourage others to just take the offered price rather than list the item themselves. As long as you can make a decent profit, it’s worth getting more aggressive.
It total, I believe I’ve made somewhere around 100 million ISK in profit so far. A low amount compared to other traders, but decent enough for someone still learning and making mistakes. My current buy/sell limit is 53 right now, which is somewhat restrictive. In a week or so it should be much higher, and at that point I can really start to expand and think big.
Hardcore Casual 
Not bad. I always wish I had the time to play markets in EVE. If the game wasn’t so damn annoying to pick up and play again I would be all over it.
Just a tip, never have isk in your wallet. If it’s not in the market, it’s not making you money!
Unless you have Margin Trading trained. Then you should always have ISK in your wallet. But i don’t recommend training it until you know what you’re doing (i’ve been trading for months and still didn’t decide to train it yet, even though it is very useful… but can also prove to be a pain sometimes).
Hi Syncaine – I dabbled a bit in trading (no manufacturing just buying low and selling high with an 800k skill point alt). I managed to turn my seed capital of 20 million into over 60 million in a week. I know that is small beans but I am pretty pleased with a 200% return in a week and I know I could scale up those earnings with more seed capital. However I found that trading took a lot of time – specifically I found I had to fight the 0.01 ISK game for every buy and sell order. In my experience unmanaged orders don’t buy or sell.
I am now going to go back to missioning, For me trading is an interesting alternative way to play the game but given the time I have available I cannot do trading and missions at the same time.
Well for me I have two accounts, my combt pilot and my miner. The combat guy takes care of missions.
The miner/trader/producer is like my side projects guy, and the current side project is trading. Certainly enjoying it so far.
The biggest problems I’ve had with trying to make ISK on the market is that corporations and alliances I’ve been in don’t like competition in their chosen markets and that 0.0 alliances don’t like it when you put war materials up for sale where the enemy can buy it. It’s a real pain in the backside trying to sell things on alliance/corp forums and/or by using the contract system. Of course, when you’re selling to corp/alliance buddies, it’s also hard to justify much of a profit margin.
The word “Alt” shall guide you!