Trade Secrets

There's an entertaining discussion about Market Blogs (or the lack of them) in the Eve Blogosphere that's been going on across several blogs lately.

It all started over at Jester's Trek with Jester's comment

"To my knowledge, there isn't a blog out there written by a market guy".

Ardent Defender followed up with a long rambling response on his blog. He brings up some good points and includes a large number of interesting quotes.

Then Stabs came up with his own humorous take on the subject. Well worth reading for a good laugh.


Well, I'm a market guy and this is my blog.

I'm paraphrasing here but one thing in particular Ardent Defender pointed out was how traders don't like to talk about the details of what they do and especially not about specifics of what they're doing right now.

There's a lot of truth to that, most of us traders tend to be rather close mouthed when it comes to specific details of what we do. There are a number of reasons for that but the primary one is competition. If you tell people exactly what you're doing, you create your own competition and your profits go down. Hence we tend to talk in general and tend to avoid mentioning specifics like what items we trade in or what stations we buy and sell on.

I make it a point in my own posts to give out some specifics because specific examples are good for helping others learn how to trade. I can say do this and that will happen all I want and you might be skeptical but saying I did this and this is what happened lends more credibility to my words. They also help prove my methods aren't just crazy theories but actually work in practice.

But I don't give everything away either. Trading is very competitive, especially when profit margins are high. From my experience (not just in Eve, but also as a very rich and fairly well known market blogger in WoW), I know that as soon as any reasonably well read blog posts specifics about working a particular market segment for big profits, competition increases substantially and profits plummet.

Another good reason for not going too much into the specifics is just copying exactly what I do may not work for someone else. There are many reasons it might not work, location, local competition, post timing, post frequency, pricing, availability, volume, how much capital you have to play with, etc. What works for me on Hek doesn't work quite the same on Jita. What works for me on Jita probably won't work for someone else working a mission hub deep in null. What works for me selling high value items probably won't work for someone trying to corner the local ore and minerals market.

New traders need to find their own markets and discover what methods work best for them. There is no surefire guaranteed secret that will make you rich. All we bloggers can do is give you ideas and examples. We can help you get started but in the end it all comes down to you taking our methods and ideas, then using your own experience and knowledge to make adjustments so they work for you. Read  blogs and guides for new ideas, learn from what experienced traders have to say. Get methods, ideas and strategies from others but make them your own by changing the details to suit you better.