Public Courier Contracts

In the last week I've expanded to 6 new regions which means I'm buying a lot more stuff and it's spread out over a much larger area. Since I want to spend less time flying around picking stuff up, not more, I had to try something different to cut the time down.

In the past I rarely used public courier contracts but for the last week I've been using them a lot more, especially in the larger regions and in or near low sec PvP areas.

I'll fly around gathering up buys in a small area and dropping them off in 500 mil+ lots somewhere convenient. Then I courier the whole lot to my main base of operations in the region and continue doing pickups without having to fly back to base all the time.

I make long trips to and from base far less frequently and I can do all the long trips on autopilot without fretting since I'm always flying them empty now.

Any station that has stuff on it worth about 500 mil or more I just courier to my base in the first place without even leaving base.

Anything way out in the middle of nowhere 15 or 20 jumps away from base and far from any other pickups I'll just courier to the closest station I get a lot of stuff at. Assuming doing so is profitable, otherwise I'll just post it for sale right where it is.

For items acquired in low sec I've started using public courier contracts even if it's only a jump or two away. That's been working great too, especially in PvP areas and near gate-camps.

Public courier contracts have been working out a lot better than I expected so far, in all ways. I really didn't think there'd be many takers on public contracts paying a few million (300-500 k per jump) with 500+ mil collateral but it's been working great for me so far. I didn't think there'd be many takers on public contracts in close proximity to a major gate-camp either but it looks like I was wrong on both counts.

I set realistic collateral values 10-20% higher than I expect to sell the items for (usually that's quite a lot more than I paid for it). Even if someone does steal a load (hasn't happened yet) all he'll really be doing is providing me with a quick turnover at a better than expected profit.

So far all my public courier contracts have been delivered within 24 hours. AFAIC that's fantastic, it's as good as or better than RFF service between hubs.

Newbie Business Plan - Trading Skill Books

The 10 million and under skill book market segment has been very good to me. I've made billions off it but I just pulled out (reluctantly) because it's the low end of my business now and my business has grown so much it became impossible to continue working this segment properly.

Over the last 3 days I've pulled out of the 10 million and under (school price) skill book market in Lonetrek region and 4 of the 5 main hubs (I'll be pulling out of the 5th soon too). Already buy prices are plummeting and sell prices skyrocketing.

Conditions are now perfect for new traders to set up in this market and make a lot of ISK.

In particular, right now would be a great time to set up in Lonetrek buying skillbooks under 10 million regionally. Full regional, 5, 10 or 20 jump buy orders will all work fine, just remember the larger your buying range the more work you'll have flying around picking them up.

Start out buying one or two of each and update prices at least once a day. As your capital builds up slowly increase your order sizes. Sell what you can on Sobeseki, Torrinos, Nonni or one of the many smaller hubs in the region and unload overstock on Jita (preferably on another alt there).

If you're short on ISK start out with just the books going for 5 million or less.

If you're a true newbie and really short on ISK, work the cheapest skill books first (under 1 million at schools) until you can move into the 1-10 mil market. High Speed Maneuvering (350k at schools) was one of my best items in my first weeks. I bought stacks of them for 75-150k and resold them for 350k+.

Best named modules (meta 4 for the most part) are great starter items for newbies too. Item's like Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field, Local Hull Conversion Nanofibers and Eutectic Capictor Rechargers. You can buy huge stacks of them cheaply in Lonetrek and move them to Jita for nice profits.

If you have plenty of ISK but are short on orders start out with books going for 5-10 million instead.

If you have plenty of both ISK and orders, start out using buy orders for 5, 10, 20 or more of each book. Obviously bigger orders for the cheaper books and smaller orders for the more expensive ones.

One of the best things about the skill book market is the vast majority of books are sold by schools which sets a soft cap on prices and prevents rich players from manipulating prices too much. Nobody can simply buy them all out and jack prices sky high. Even when margins are extremely tight, as long as you're paying less than school price and selling for more, you're golden.

You can make billions every month off this business alone. I did. The only drawback is it's fairly time intensive. It's great at first but the bigger you get the more time it takes.

Any book with the word "Specialization" in it trades well, "subsystems" and science books are pretty decent too. Some books do sell better than others and some sell a lot faster on a main hub than they will in Lonetrek but all books in the 1-10 million ISK range are good to trade. Weapon books (like those "specialization" books) and spaceship command books sell well just about anywhere.

The same strategy works in any empire region, I suggest Lonetrek because IMO it's the best place for a regional skill book business like this. There are plenty of customers around but the business is spread out on multiple secondary and small hubs all over the region, meaning no-lifers and bots are less of a problem than they are on the main hubs.

I almost forgot. Do not use a big, slow industrial ship for this type of business. The items aren't bulky, all you really need is a small fast T1 frigate. Fit it for speed and agility (nanofibers) and use Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer rigs if you can. Mid slots you can either tank or use cap rechargers (very useful for low skills alts having trouble making warps all in one shot).

Even better if you can use a Covert Ops frigate or best of all a Blockade Runner, either of which makes low/null pickups a whole lot safer.

If you're in an NPC corp (no wardecs) and aren't a criminal you can autopilot most of the time as long as you realize you will get ganked eventually and lose a load. Be careful about using autopilot in 0.5 systems though, especially Litiura (assuming you're in Lonetrek) and never use autopilot in low or null.

Don't even bother passing through EC-P8R (null sec) or Aunenen (low sec), it can be done but it's just not worth the trouble. If you buy something in or behind those major gate camps it's a whole lot simpler to just put it up for resale at a good price (for the buyer) right where it is.

Lonetrek really is a great place to do business! More on that later.

Margin Trading

IMO, the most important trade skill for serious traders is Margin Trading, that's why it's the first skill my traders train to V now. I used to train Retail V and Wholesale IV before Margin Trading V when I was training my first few traders.

Margin Trading is simply amazing for buyers, it allows you to leverage your ISK to place more and bigger buy orders, enabling you to buy a lot more stuff.

It may seem counter-intuitive but I believe it's even more important for new players short on cash than it is for alts of established players who already have plenty of cash. If you have 70 mil ISK it's very well worth spending 35 mil on Margin Trading. It doesn't take very long at all to get Margin Trading high enough to more than double your buying power, so spending half (or even a bit more) of your cash to get the skill is definitely worthwhile.

Of course if you never use buy orders you don't need Margin Trading at all. But if you use buy orders much, it's huge! Train it to V ASAP!

Training Another Trade Alt

I sent my "spare" Jita trader off to reopen shop in Clellinon with a different trading strategy a while back. That's working out extremely well especially during the recent Fountain war. Just imagine my surprise when several fairly pricey stacks of faction mods (with 10-20 mods/stack) all sold within hours of posting. =)

Then I decided I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I missed my "spare" trader on Jita and wanted him back so I started training yet another new character to add to my growing army of trade alts.

I made a new character on the main's account and sent him 600 million, enough to buy a PLEX, a bunch of skill-books, a clone, a couple implants, and still have some left over.

I used the PLEX to activate dual training and started training.



First I trained Cybernetics I so I could install implants and train everything else faster.

While waiting for Cybernetics to train, I bought +3 Charisma and Memory implants plus the basic skillbooks I needed for the first week or so. Social (pre-req for Contracting), Trade, Retail, Contracting, Broker Relations, Marketing and Accounting.

I also bought a Clone Grade Theta (7,750,000 SP) and the books for a bunch of spaceship command, engineering, navigation and mechanic skills I find extremely useful for brand new traders (non combat pilots that is).

Once Cybernetics finished training I installed the implants, remapped to Charisma 30, Memory 24, queued up Social I and Trade I-IV.

Nearly 5 days later here's what his training queue looks like:

Besides trade skills I learned key skills that reduce flight time by improving flight performance or allow me to fit modules that do the same. Early on that mostly means improving capacitor performance so I can make most trips between stations and gates in a single warp.

The 2 most important skills for warp/cap performance are Warp Drive Operation (10% less cap per level to initiate warp) and Astronautics Rigging which allows me to fit Warp Core Optimizer and Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizer rigs. Warp Core Optimizers reduce cap to initiate warp by 40% (like having Warp Drive Operation IV) and Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizers increase warp speed by 20%.

A single Warp Core Optimizer is absolutely terrific for very low skills alts but later when the alt has 3s and 4s in all the applicable cap performance enhancing Navigation and Engineering skills you don't really need it anymore. At that point I usually go with 3x Hyperspatial Velocity Optimizers which brings the Vigils all my new traders fly up to 10.4 AU warp speed (nearly 70% faster warp speed).

The plan from here on is to get (in order) Accounting IV, Margin Trading V, Retail V, Wholesale IV, Accounting V,  Marketing IV, Wholesale V, Tycoon IV, Daytrading IV, Tycoon V, Trade V, Daytrading V and Marketing V.

Right now he's just training and not actually doing any buying or selling yet. When he does start buying (probably not until he has at least Margin Trading V and Wholesale IV) he'll train his navigation and support skills up a little higher and get the rest of the basic navigation skills (everything except jump skills) too. I'll install intelligence, perception and willpower implants then too.

At some point I'll get Procurement I-IV and Visibility I-IV too. Though I don't really use them now I'll eventually train both to IV just in case I decide to use a remote buying strategy later and need them.

Moving Stock Away From Major Hubs For Good Prices

Sometimes getting a good price requires trying new items and finding new places to sell them at. Lately I've been selling a fair number of ship hulls (among other things). I buy them on Jita and ship them off to carefully chosen stations to sell at (stations besides the 5 main hubs that is).

Here's an example.

Some buyers even bought more than one at a time!

I shipped another 20 manticores out to the same station today and priced them a little higher since there were no others listed.

Manticores normally go for around 20 million in sell orders on Jita so that's around 33% profit. I've bought stacks of 10 or 20 at jita market sell prices, shipped them off via courier contract and resold them for as much as 40 million (100% profit). Some were only shipped 1 jump away though most were 10-20 jumps.

Manticores, Drakes, Crows, Tengus are just a few of the ships I've been selling.

Ships are slowly but surely becoming a bigger part of my business. Away from the main hubs I find the competition on ships isn't as bad as on most things. When prices are too close to Jita prices I'll often post over market, wait a day or three until the competition sells out and then mine sell at a much better price. I figure the competition isn't as bad because shipping hulls takes a lot of cargo space, many players don't have a ship big enough to move hulls in or can't move very many at once and aren't willing to pay for / wait for courier service.

Don't just sell the same stuff everyone else is selling, a lot of things sell well everywhere. Try some of your best sellers in other places, especially high volume items, they'll probably sell just about anywhere. I've had a lot of success getting excellent prices for things nobody else was selling in the area. In some cases nobody (according to market history anyhow) had ever sold one in the entire region!

Knowing who's in the area and what they do can help you figure out what they're likely to buy and what they might pay a nice premium for but don't be afraid to take a chance on something unusual. Sometimes you'll be amazed at what sells and just how much you can get for it.

Mailbag - Order Posting?

This post covers several points I've wanted to clear up for some time about my order posting/updating process. A few days ago I received an in game email with questions along the same lines. After answering that email I realized with a little polishing and expansion on a few points posting it here would be a great way to finally get that blog post done.

The email

love the blog

From: Zosius

Sent: 2013.06.11 10:19

To: Moxnix Induli,  

Hello Moxnix,

I love your blog. have been reading it awhile. I have few questions that i was hoping you can help me with.

When it comes to trading how do you do your order updates? I own 3 accounts in major hubs and update buys and sells 1by1 moving through quickbar simultaneously in all ccounts. This is to see the price balance and reallocate stock or trade more cautios if price is out of balance between the hubs.

This method takes time but is quite profitable. I noticed that I can manage to 1-1.5bil a day if I spent 2-3 hours updating orders one time a day including houling (30min). However after sometime i burned out and got demotivated. I felt in position where finding new ventures was costing more isk/effort  than just updating my items list.

I constantly read that you update very casionally. How much time do you spend updating orders a day and how frequently you do it to sustain such large growth. If you update sells and buys sepearetely, don't you get annoyed once you are done with sells, you move back and update buy orders only to see your sell order is far behind already.

thanks for any advice and regards,

Zosius

Re: love the blog

From: Moxnix Induli

Sent: 2013.06.14 08:24

To: Zosius,  

My Response

Thanks, it's always nice to hear from my blog's readers.

My order updating process is fairly simple but difficult to explain properly. I mostly just use common sense, a simple priority system (do the most profitable things first) and make most decisions quickly by using simple rules of thumb. But there are a lot of rules, special cases and exceptions to the rules which makes it seem far more complex than it is and makes it very difficult to explain in detail.

I also like to mix things up frequently to keep the competition on their toes. When I say I do something a certain way it doesn't mean I never do it differently it just means that's what I usually do most of the time. Hence why I use words like "usually", "mostly" and "generally" so much.

At the most basic I start by checkiing my inventory for newly purchased items. I post most of the new stuff and while posting I'll also update existing orders (both buy and sell orders) for the same items.

Sometimes that's all I do though I'll generally do it on 3-5 of the most important characters. The ones that tend to move items in the highest volume and make the most ISK.

Once that's done, I'll usually (but not always) check all my sell orders on those characters and update those too. When I do that I'll usually update buy orders for those items (the ones I have sell orders for) too.

I also tend to concentrate on the most profitable, highest priced and highest volume items. There are many days about all I do is spend 5 or 10 minutes on each of the 3-5 most important characters checking nothing but sell orders and the top 20-50 items on each character.

If I have more time I'll do a few more characters and maybe update all buy orders on a couple too. I do try to update all buy orders on at least 2 characters once or twice a week but sometimes I skip that and take it easy for a week or so too.

My cuts tend to be big, generally around 10% of the difference between buy and sell orders and I don't normally camp, but there are exceptions to everything. Sometimes I'll cut by 1 ISK either to confuse the competition or because the profit margin is so low I'm only cutting to keep the no-lifers and bots on their toes. Large cuts discourage camping no-lifers and bots, when margins are low they'll often not cut you and let your items sell. It might take a while but after a few days of big cuts once or twice a day they'll usually slow down or stop camping and your stuff will sell. Raising buy prices at the same rate ensures that when the price gap closes it'll be at a decent profit over the price you bought at. Conversely if you don't raise buy prices by large increments too the campers will just continue 0.01 ISKing you out of business.

I hate camping but very rarely when my sales on a particular station have for a long time been greatly reduced by obsessive, perpetual campers constantly 0.01 ISKing me. I'll camp for a short while (a half hour or so), updating several key items every 5-10 minutes to see how the no-lifers and bots react. I'll adjust prices with large cuts and quickly reduce profit margins until I either find the sweet spot where the no-lifers and bots slow down enough that my items start selling again or margins are so low it's not worth my bothering with anymore.

Slightly more often I'll do what I call semi-camping, leaving a character logged in all day while I'm mostly afk (not even in the same room as the computer) but able to drop by and spend a couple minutes checking key items periodically throughout the day. The character might be online 12-16 hours but I'm only actually at the keyboard a few minutes at a time for maybe a half hour in total. This is extremely useful both for finding out just how hard a particular market is being camped and for screwing with the no-lifers and bots that are camping it. It's also a great way to sell off some overstock and balance assets, sell orders, escrow and cash in hand on a character that has too much in assets / sell orders and not enough liquid cash without becoming an obsessive camper and starting a perpetual cut war myself.

I don't worry too much about the price balance between hubs. Generally I have a pretty good idea of the usual prices and when I'm unsure the estimate I get from mouse hovering over an inventory item is usually close enough. I do usually notice when something is priced very high or very low and buy, sell or ship items to take advantage of it. Also there are certain items I tend to buy on 1 station (mainly Jita) and ship off to 1 or more other stations to sell.

Burnout... That's why I sometimes go for a week or so where I don't do much other than let orders sit and post new purchases. It takes maybe half an hour to do that on 4 or 5 characters. Sometimes I even go a few days without doing anything, I just let everything sit for a few days.

I usually spend 1-2 hours a day but there are days I spend far less time and there are days I spend 3 or 4 hours instead. On average it's about an hour a day when I'm taking it easy and 2 hours a day when I'm being more serious about it.

It does take patience and at times it can be difficult to be patient enough. When I find myself getting annoyed or angry is when I realize I'm starting to take it too seriously. I'll log off then and not do very much at all for a few days. The really interesting thing is markets often rebound nicely after leaving them be for a while like that.

Anyhow I hope this helps. I'll probably base a blog post on it later. I'd include your mail in the post but not your name unless you tell me posting your name ok with you.

Notes

1. My response has been edited to correct minor mistakes (typos/grammar fixed, ambiguous wording changed).
2. My response has also been expanded upon in several places to make things more clear and bring up a few additional points I wanted to make.
3. Zosius' mail to me is un-edited. It's a straight copy/paste of the in-game mail he sent me.

Populating the Quickbar Quickly

There's a quick and easy way to populate your quickbar for some items. It doesn't work for everything but it works great for some things.

Basically it works great for mass adding entire segments of the market to your quickbar. Items that are all in the same market category like for example, skill books. It doesn't work very well for doing things like adding all Caldari Navy modules because they're scattered all over the place in many different market categories.

For example I recently redid the skill book section of my quickbar to look like this:

In the past I'd always added items to my quickbar one at a time and then moved them into folders. This time I decided to do it differently. I simply opened browse, right clicked the "skills" category and added the entire "skills" category to my quickbar.

Then I opened the quickbar and went through all the skill folders, removing all the low priced books I don't deal in. Basically everything priced under 1 mil at school stations.

Note: for a new trader who doesn't have much ISK yet, I'd recommend moving the cheapest books into a "< 1 mil" folder and concentrating mainly on those at first, particularly the ones worth 90k - 1 mil. Delete them later when you have enough ISK it isn't worth your time working the cheap books anymore.

Next, I made 2 new folders, < 5 mil and 90 mil +, for the cheapest and most expensive books. There are 184 skill books I trade. I moved  43 books into the < 5 mil folder and 27 into the 90 mil + folder leaving 114 others in their original market category folders. I left the 20 subsystems books (5 mil books) in their original folder because it makes sense to me to keep them together yet separate from other 5 mil books.

The 90 mil + folder makes it quick and easy to check the most expensive books on any character. The under 5 mil folder makes it simple to ignore the cheapest books on characters that deal with more than just skill books and don't have enough orders to cover all 184 books..

The 2 new folders are incredibly useful, far more so than I expected. They really help streamline my routine and make checking the skill book market on different characters in different locations a whole lot easier. In fact it's working so well I'll probably make another folder for skills worth 5-10 million ISK soon and I might start putting some mods and implants into low and high value folders too instead of grouping them all by faction (mods) or type (implants).

Also see copying market quickbar settings to copy your settings to other accounts.

Using Market Search Efficiently

You'll often hear other players say you should never use market search to find items. They claim it's a waste of time typing item names in and that the quickbar is always better / more efficient.

While I do agree it's very well worth setting up a well organized quickbar I don't agree search is a waste of time or that it should never be used. The quickbar isn't always faster or more efficient, sometimes search is the fastest, most efficient way to find an item or group of related items.

Search is particularly useful for finding specific items and items you don't often need to lookup.

You can drag and drop items from chat or inventory into search to quickly find an item.

You don't have to type in the full name of the item you're looking for. You can type in partial names to quickly find subsets of items you want to check on. For example "Navy" to find all mods with Navy in the name, "Caldari Navy" to find just Caldari Navy mods, "basic" to quickly find +3 attribute implants and so on. Very useful when you just want to look at a specific group of related items and also extremely useful for adding groups of related items to the quickbar in the first place.

The following is a list of some of the search terms I use frequently.

connections
systems
specialization
caldari navy
federation navy
ammatar navy
navy
republic fleet
fleet
domination
dread guristas
true sansha
gist
pith
05
10
basic
improved

The search bar also remembers prior searches so if you've typed in "caldari navy" once before, all you need to do is type "c" and click "caldari navy" in the drop down menu that appears. For touch typists though it's usually faster to just type the whole thing in.

Burn Jita is Great for Business

Burn Jita is upon us again. Those flying big, slow hauling ships have reason for concern but for those flying small, fast ships Burn Jita is terrific for business.

Many (probably most) of those big, slow haulers are avoiding Jita. Consequently there are less items being shipped in and out of system. Prices are dropping on export items as supply goes up and prices are rising on import items as supply runs low. That's a big opportunity for those who can get valuable cargos in and out of Jita without much risk... Couriers with small, fast ships and traders specializing in valuable items that don't take up much cargo space.

Small fast ships can run on autopilot into major hisec hubs without a problem most of the time even when carrying billions in cargo. If you're flying manually it's almost completely safe.

note: nothing in Eve is ever absolutely completely safe unless you're docked

For the most part, gankers are neither expecting nor looking for valuable cargoes in small ships. In addition, even if they do look at it, they generally aren't quick enough to kill a manually piloted ship that aligns fast.

Gankers look for big, slow ships, easy targets like industrials, freighters and mining ships. Most of them won't even bother targeting or scanning small ships, far less, locking, pointing and shooting at them. The ones that do target and scan small ships usually aren't fast enough to target, lock, point and kill you before you've warped out or docked.

Last year Burn Jita was very good for my business even though I didn't do anything different. This year I was expecting it and much better prepared. So far it's exceeding all expectations. Since yesterday I've bought and sold billions of ISK worth of items on Jita. I've moved billions more in and out of Jita without trouble too. I expect to do at least double my usual business on Jita for the duration.

So get in your small, fast ships (T1/T2 frigates, Covert Ops ships, etc) and take advantage of the enormous opportunities Burn Jita presents!

Stirring Up the Bots

Sometimes I post something just to piss off the no-lifers / bots and mess things up for them. Here's an example on Jita with a very heavily camped item.

Not only did I post a big stack on Jita just 10k over the current bulk buy orders on station, I posted a bunch of cheap ones in various places around the region.

I'll probably cut it again tomorrow after a bunch of bots and no-lifers cut me and continue pushing prices down for several days.

It's hard to say for sure what will happen in the end but things like this can drive them into a frenzy of vicious undercutting. Big, high priced buy orders start disappearing, huge stacks get dumped in sell orders, momentum builds up and prices plummet.

Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few days.

Edit: Someone bought the Jita stack out a few hours later. Oh well I kinda half expected that, next time I won't post about it.

Market Orders - Posting Strategy and Tactics

Expanding upon a previous post, I wanted to talk more in-depth about the posting strategy and tactics I use to "make so much ISK in so little time". This is turning into a very long post so I'll just cover the basics today and go into more specific details on tactics, exceptions and examples another time.

My overall market strategy is extremely simple but the details are complex. I use a lot of different methods (tricks, tactics w/e you want to call them) to facilitate the overall strategy.

No-Lifers and Bots

I can't really talk about my order posting strategy without touching on the biggest underlying reason behind it. Competition from no-lifers and bots. They are a huge problem not just in Eve but in any online game that has a market or auction interface players can use to sell each other items in game.

No-Lifers spend excessive amounts of time online obsessing over babysitting market orders, trying to ensure they always have the lowest sell order and highest buy order on every single item they're working.. They're online 12-16 or even more hours a day and rarely take a day off. They're constantly undercutting sell orders and overcutting buy orders by the minimum possible amount (0.01 ISK in Eve).

Bots are even worse. They do exactly the same thing as no-lifers except they can be online indefinitely (virtually forever) and can cut even faster with inhuman machine like precision. At least no-lifers have to take a break occasionally to eat, sleep or w/e,  can only post/update orders so fast, and even the most obsessive, sleep deprived no-lifer can only run so many clients at once. Bots on the other hand take no effort on the part of the player running them other than configuring the bots initially, can post/update orders with unbelievable quickness and can run as many clients as the botter's hardware can handle.

Overall Strategy

My overall strategy is really pretty simple. Following the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle I use easily implemented systems and simple rules of thumb to keep things running smoothly without requiring hours spent obsessing over details.

1. Squeeze the competition from both ends. I raise buy prices and lower sell prices until margins are low enough most of the competition (no-lifers and bots in particular) leave the market and I get a fair share of it. Margins on my best, most profitable items are rarely more than 20% (there are exceptions) and most of them are usually in the 5-10% range.

2. Aggressive pricing. I use big cuts on both buy and sell orders. Usually around 10% of the difference between the lowest sell order and the highest buy order.  There are of course exceptions. Sometimes when a particular market is ridiculously high I might cut by 50% or more and obviously when margins are extremely tight cutting by 10% might not be very smart (though sometimes it's the right move to correct a market).

Huge Cut on a ridiculously overpriced item

3. Buy in bulk amounts when possible. Terms like bulk and high volume are relative and don't even apply to some things. The absolute values of terms bulk or high volume are very different for ore and minerals than they are for implants or modules going for over 100 million each. High end officer mods don't drop in sufficient numbers to even supply a bulk market in the first place.

4. Concentrate mainly on the best sellers, expensive, high volume, high profit margin items and characters in the most profitable locations. Which items and characters those are can and does change frequently, however some items and some characters are better than others. I tend to focus primarily on those items, prioritizing working the Big Head over the Long Tail.

5. Post "guard" orders on items with extremely slim margins. Anything with under 2% margin between buy and sell orders isn't worth bothering with, especially when considering taxes and broker fees eat up a big chunk of that 2%. When a guard order gets filled that's usually my first indication the no-lifers and bots have abandoned a market, margins are rising, and it's worth working again. With higher volume items I'll often put up a second set of middling volume orders at price levels a bit higher and lower to catch the wave when margins inevitably increase.

6. Check inventories frequently, post recently acquired items and update or post new buy orders for the same items. This is a very important, high priority step. Basically, combined with the less important step #5, it's my inventory control. I don't have to worry about losing track of an important item and not having any buy orders up for it because I always go through station inventory as one of the first things I do when logging onto a toon. That way I find newly acquired inventory from buy orders, post them for sale and update or post buy orders at the same time. No spreadsheets or inventory tracking software required.

For the most part I pay decent prices for the items I buy. I have to be careful not to get greedy and try selling them for too much profit though. Whenever the margin between buy and sell orders gets too high the no-lifers and bots jump all over it and I get very little if any business. When it's in the sweet spot I buy and sell in bulk for big overall profits.

Working Big Head Long Tail Theory

There have been some questions about my time management and profits claims lately. How can I possibly make so much ISK with so little time spent posting and updating orders?

Today's post is a short explanation of how it's possible with a few screenshots showing I actually do make the kind of profits I claim. All screenshots were taken on just one of the many stations I operate on. Most of the items were purchased elsewhere and shipped there for better sell prices.

A small number of the items I cover (usually 5-10 items) bring in nearly half my profits (as per Big Head Long Tail theory) each month. Big Head Long Tail theory basically says a small number of inventory items accounts for a disproportionate amount of sales volume and profits. In my Eve business that's mostly relatively high priced items with good volume and profit margins. Which items those are changes constantly due to competition but a small handful of items still accounts for a large chunk of my income each month. I pay far more attention to a handful of Big Head items and work them much more thoroughly than the hundreds of items in the Long Tail.

That doesn't mean it isn't worth working the Long Tail at all though. Here's an example of a Long Tail Item (also taken on the same station as the screenshots above)..

I may not sell a whole lot of each individual item in the Long Tail but many of them are low volume high ticket items with big profits or high volume items with lower but very steady, consistently reliable profits. There are a lot of them and it all adds up. Once you get your prices set right to discourage most of the no-lifers and bots, it doesn't take very much time at all to work them (almost passive income).

I update Big Head item orders on a few of my most important traders most days. The less important traders and Long Tail item orders get updated less frequently, sometimes going a week or even longer between updates.

Here are a few articles on Big Head Long Tail theory as it relates to real life business.

The Science of Retailing
Chris Anderson
The Misguided Bobbing of the Long Tail

Using Courier Contracts

Courier contracts are a great way to move items around between stations. You don't even have to be in the same region to view items in assets and set up contracts to move them around.

Just a few reasons you might want to use courier contracts are:

- They save you from the tedium of making long flights between hubs.

- Collateral transfers the risk of being ganked and losing the shipment from you to the courier pilot. If he gets ganked the shipment is lost but you get paid the collateral.

- They allow you to move large volume shipments without you having to train skills for flying big cargo ships.

Of course there is a cost, couriers don't work for free. The courier I use, Red Frog Freight (aka RFF), comes out to approximately 500k ISK per jump for hisec only routes. RFF will accept contracts for up to 860,000 m3 volume and covered by up to 1 billion ISK in collateral. They also run Blue Frog Freight and Black Frog Freight for higher collateral and low/null sec contracts respectively.

Personally I never use Blue Frog because it costs about the same as sending multiple contracts to the same destination via Red Frog and Red Frog has a 3 day contract expiration requirement while Blue Frog is 7 days. Usually the same guy will pick them all up and deliver them at the same time anyhow.

As for delivery times, I find RFF delivers most of my contracts within 24 hours, contracts between major hubs usually take less than 12 hours and contracts originating from or being delivered to Jita often only take an hour or two.

Here's how I set up courier contracts using Red Frog Freight as the courier.

1. Send items via private contract (not a courier contract, that comes later) to the character on the destination station.

2. Accept the contract(s) on the destination character and transfer any funds by right clicking the name of the character who sent the items.

3. Open assets on the destination character. The items should be showing on the origination station now. If they aren't you probably opened assets before accepting the contract. In that case simply wait a few minutes for assets to refresh again, or log out and back in to force an immediate refresh.

4. Select all the items (in assets) you want to move and click "create contract" to begin setting up a courier contract to the destination station.

The reason for setting up courier contracts on the character who will be receiving the contents is that way the items will automatically appear in his inventory upon delivery without having to log onto the sender to check for delivery, create another contract and accept it on the receiver.

5. In the contract window check "courier" and "private".

6. Enter "Red Frog Freight" in the name field.

If you don't want to use a courier corps like RFF don't check "private" and leave the name field empty. You can get cheaper service that way but it might not be as quick or as reliable.

7. Click the Next button to go on to the next part of creating a contract

8. A "Pick Items (2/4)" window opens showing all the items in inventory on the contract originating station. Items in the contract will have an X in the box beside them indicating they are in the contract. Assuming you selected everything you wanted in the contract in the first place you don't need to change anything here just click next.

9. "Select Options (3/4)" window opens.

10. Enter the name of the destination station here. Note you can enter partial names like Amarr and hit "Search" which will find all stations in amarr and pop up another window allowing you to select one of them.

11. Enter the courier payment in the "Reward" field. If you're using RFF go to Red Frog Freight to calculate the fee.

Another alternative courier corps with a good reputation is PUSHx

12. Enter the collateral amount in the "collateral" field. With RFF the maximum allowed is 1 billion so enter 1 billion. It doesn't cost anymore to enter high amounts than low amounts so always enter the maximum 1 billion. Make sure collateral isn't less than the value of the cargo, otherwise you're just tempting the courier pilot to default on the contract and keep the contents for himself.

13. Set "Expiration" to 3 days. That's the standard for RFF contracts, other couriers may have different standards.

14. Set "Time to deliver" to 1 day. That means after a courier pilot accepts the contract he has 1 day to deliver it. If he doesn't deliver on time, the contract defaults and you receive the collateral payment as compensation. I've never had RFF default on a courier contract.

15. Click next.

16. "Confirm 4/4" opens. Double check you entered all of the information correctly. If something is wrong use the "Previous" button to back up and fix it. Pay particular attention to the Reward and Collateral fields. Once you're sure everything is good click Finish.

17. A final "Are you sure" type window pops up. Click Yes.

18. The actual contract opens up. Triple check everything is correct. If not Delete the contract immediately and redo it.

That's all.

Copying Market Quickbar Settings

Market quickbar settings are saved at the account level, all 3 characters on the same account have the same quickbar. To copy quickbar settings to other accounts all you need to do is copy this file. However this file also contains many other settings like window positions, overview, etc. so don't copy the file to accounts you don't want to lose other settings on. If you're unsure, backup the original to be safe.

The exact location of the file you need to copy depends on your OS. For me, running Windows XP, it's in:

C:\Documents and Settings\<USER>\Local Settings\Application Data\CCP\EVE\c_program_files_ccp_eve_tranquility\settings

<USER> is the windows user name.

The file containing the quickbar is core_user_*.dat

for example core_user_9999999.dat

* is a number (it's a 7 digit number on all of my accounts). I don't know how CCP comes up with the number but it's some kind of account ID. For my 6 accounts the smallest ID number is the first account created. The larger the number the later the account was created. You can figure out which file is for which account as long as you know the order the accounts were created in.

Find the file with the settings you want and copy it to the files for the accounts you want the same settings on.

Don't forget doing this will change a lot of other settings too, not just the quickbar.

Buyouts and Resetting Prices

Market prices can trend upward and downward. Sometimes when prices trend low you can make nice profits by buying an item out in bulk and resetting the price to normal or a bit higher than normal levels.

I don't do very many buyouts in Eve yet because buyouts tend to be capital intensive and can be very risky, especially if you're short on capital to keep buying more as others dump stock. With over 130 billion ISK I might seem rich to many players but I'm really not all that big a market player yet. I'm still relatively new to Eve, some of my competitors have trillions of ISK, huge stockpiles of items and years of experience following long term market trends. Trying to outmaneuver those guys without enough capital for expensive, long, drawn out price wars is a great way to lose a lot of ISK fast. If you don't have plenty of surplus ISK to play with, you have to pick your spots carefully.

When I see a good buyout opportunity that doesn't require too much capital I'll go for it. Recently I noticed someone dumped a huge stack of 900+ Navy Micro Auxiliary Power Cores for a little over 4 million each. Several other sellers undercut him quickly with stacks of 100-200. In a few hours there were close to 2000 for sale, all under 4 million each. I thought about buying them out then but that was an awful lot of stock to move and a fairly large investment. It would take a while to move that many and I wasn't willing to tie up that much capital for very long.

I put up a buy order at around 3.2 mil each and got 50 or so that way. Two or three days later there were 173 left priced under 4 mil each with the next cheapest just under 5 million. I bought all 173 of the cheap ones, giving me 220+ in total. I posted 120 or so for 4,999,997 each on Jita, split the other 100 up and shipped them off to other hubs where I posted them for even more.

Jita

Rens

The Jita stack didn't get undercut for a least a full day and most of it sold during that time. Over the next few days (after the screenshots above were taken) I got undercut a few times but still sold the entire Jita stack for 4,999,99x ISK each. About half the ones on the other hubs sold in the 6-12 million each range. Those have been undercut a few times since but they're still selling for 5-10 million each.

Trading Systems Skill Books

Ok, here's one of those specific detailed examples everyone says traders don't talk about.

Systems Skill Books are a market segment that's been surprisingly good for me in spite of constant competition from an obsessive (probably botting) camper and low profit margins per book. I'm not worried about supplying this information because I'm certain if doing so winds up creating so much competition it permanently ruins the market I can always find something else to replace it.

These skills are required to fit subsystems on T3 cruisers. There are 5 systems books for each race (one for each subsystem) and 4 races for a total of 20 different systems books. Schools sell the books for 4.5 million each which places a soft cap on just how much traders can sell them for. Many buyers will pay a little more (even a fair bit more) for the convenience of buying at a trade hub and not having to travel to a school system but most won't pay too much more.

There seems to be one major camper with alts covering systems books with large stacks for sale in all the major hubs and several smaller hubs too. Prices, cut amounts and timing vary from time to time but they match up so well across all the hubs it's highly unlikely different players operating in different places are responsible. He'll usually cut by just 0.01 ISK and do it quickly (with seconds or minutes) but sometimes makes large cuts and/or slows down the frequency of his cuts. When that happens it happens everywhere at the same time.

In my experience (and this holds true in 2 different games), for most markets (there are of course exceptions) campers start dropping out when profits are under 20%. Most campers will disappear once profits are under 10% and under 5% only a few will be left. The less volume there is in a particular market the faster campers drop out and the fewer will stick around to the end.

The subsystem book camper's preferred selling price is 6 million but he'll undercut anything under about 4.6 million. He really doesn't like going that low though and usually slows down before the price gets there. Sometimes he'll even go under 4.55 million but that's always followed up with a buyout of anyone who cuts even lower yet and jacking sell prices back up around 6 million.

He likes to buy lowball but he'll generally overcut any buy order under 4 million quickly. He'll go as high as or even a little over 4.3 mil sometimes but slows down over 4 mil and usually stops somewhere between 4.2 and 4.3 mil.

The camper cuts quickly when buy prices are low and/or sell prices are high. When prices get around 4 mil buy and 4.7 mil sell the frequency of his cuts slows down greatly. He will go higher and lower than those prices just not nearly as quickly or as often as usual.

I usually buy for around 4 - 4.3 million and sell for 4.5 - 4.8 million because those are the price ranges where the camper backs off enough I get good volume. My average profit per book is around 500k (10%+) profit though profit per book can be as low as 200k (4.5%) profit. Sometimes much higher, if I can sell for 6 mil each that's over 1.5 million (25%) profit each. The same if I can buy for 3 mil or so and sell near the school price of 4.5 mil.

I started working these books by placing buy orders for 2-4 of each on Jita only. Buy prices were very low, mostly well under 1 million each. A little later it was 4-6 of each on all 5 major hubs with buy prices mostly over 3 million. Then it was 10 of each on all 5 hubs and Lonetrek region with buy prices around 4 mil. Now I buy 20 of each on all 5 hubs plus Lonetrek with buy prices mostly over 4 mil. Prices seem to be pretty stable now, they don't spike all that often  anymore and when they do spike it doesn't last long.

Most days my purchase orders bring in 10-20 of each book between all the hubs. I don't have much trouble selling them all within a few days either so I never wind up with too much stock of any one book.

10%
500k
10+ daily volume per book

Those numbers might not look very good at first glance but once you do the math it really isn't bad. Between all my traders I buy and sell over 200 systems books a day. 200 a day at 500k profit each is 100 million a day or 3 billion a month. That's more than enough to cover my monthly subscription costs for 5 accounts and that's a conservative estimate, it's usually higher and can go much higher. With more frequent price updates sales volume, market share and total profits all go up.

The real trick in this market (and most markets for that matter) is setting prices so I get good volume and reasonable profits in spite of campers trying to control the market. If there's too much of a spread between buy and sell prices the camper is all over it and I won't be getting much business unless I camp too. I don't like camping so I squeeze him from both ends (higher buy prices and lower sell prices than he really likes working with) until he backs off, then I make a decent profit.

The Art of Lowballing

Lowballing

Lowballing is the art of placing buy orders far lower than the usual going prices and counting on some of them eventually getting filled. Lowball buy orders are typically 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000 or even less of the usual going price. While simply putting up buy orders at 0.01 isk each on random items certainly does work (to an extent anyhow), there is an art to lowballing and increasing the chances your orders get filled.

Lowball orders can be thought of as similar to lottery tickets only with much better odds of hitting. They don't all hit and the ones that do hit don't always hit but they do hit and when one does hit it sure is nice. Several of my trade alts didn't really get going good until a lowball buy order got filled.

Lowball orders work best when there either isn't much competition or there's enough volume reasonably priced orders get filled and then some of your lowball orders get filled too. They work well in regions that don't have a major hub and/or a lot of regional buyers.

Tips and Tricks

When placing lowball orders don't worry about station buyers or even a few normally priced, low volume regional buy orders. You're after the lazy and the stupid, sellers who either don't know what an item is worth, don't notice how little you're paying, don't want to travel even 1 jump for a better price, or just don't care. The type of player who just sells to the highest buy order in range and couldn't be bothered checking prices.

The exact price you buy at can make a big difference. You don't want prospective sellers to think about the price or double check prices at all. Choose your numbers carefully to make it look like what they're expecting to see. If the usual sell price is say 500,000,000.00 and the highest buy order is a *station order for 490,000,000.00 it's a good idea to put your *regional buy order up for 490,000.00. Sometimes an intelligent seller (not the usual lazy or stupid player lowballers depend upon) will notice that 490 *million buy order, decide to sell for that price, but make a mistake and wind up selling to you for 490 *thousand instead. That's 3 less zeros, the seller expected to see 490 mil, when he hit sell 490k came up, he didn't look closely enough thought it was the expected 490 mil and sold to you for 1/1000th of what he thought he was getting. If you'd priced it at 500,000.00, 499,999.99 or just about anything else chances are he would have noticed and not sold it to you. The trick is to make your price look just like the other guy's price (or in the absence of competition, the usual going price) only missing a few significant digits.

Always make lowball buy orders full regional, buying at these prices you really don't care where it is, you'll make a big profit even if you can't dock to pick it up and have to resell it on station. In addition if the seller can't sell the first item he wants to sell due to no buy orders being in range, he may travel a ways to sell it. That travel could bring him within range of higher priced orders for other items he's selling thus causing you to lose out on even more deals.

Patience is key to lowballiing successfully. Don't expect your lowballs to get filled quickly. Place them and leave them alone (other than maybe occasionally modifying them if someone keeps 0.01 cutting them). Sometimes a few lowballs will get filled quickly but most of the time lowballs just sit there waiting until someone lazy enough or dumb enough comes along and fills a few.

Examples

Just a few examples of lowball buy orders that worked out very well for me in the past.

Shield Extenders

I was going to be moving into a new ship soon (I forget what ship) and decided to buy 3 small shield extender II modules for it ahead of time in order to save some isk. At the time they were over 500k in sell orders and buy orders were just over 400k. I wanted to place my buy order for 3 extenders at 412,000 ISK each but I mistakenly entered it as 412,000 extenders at 3 ISK each. I noticed my mistake right away but decided to leave it up for a while and see what happened. There were no other regional orders for them so what the hell. Within a day someone had already sold me a couple, by the end of the week I had 20 or 30. Eventually others noticed and started cutting me, after a month or so I wound up with about 100 all bought at 6 ISK or less each. Then the cutters started placing large full regional buys in the 300-400k range.

Not bad at all, especially for what started out as a silly mistake.

Tycoon Books

I started several alts on shoestring budgets of 5-10 million ISK. For these alts I mostly just put up a bunch of lowball buy orders and waited for something to hit. Tycoon books were one of the best. I bought at least 5 or 6 Tycoon books for under 1 mil ISK each, one alt even got 2 books at the same time. That's an easy ~90 mil profit on each book, increasing the capital the alts had to work with by 10-20 times. Some of those orders got filled within a few days, others took a month or so before they got filled.

Titan Books

My single most profitable lowball order ever was a Caldari Titan Book I paid 4.9 *million for and resold for 4.4 *billion. I only had about 8 billion in total at the time so that one item made a huge difference. I'd put the order up just for the heck of it and left it alone. Then a couple months later someone filled it. I couldn't believe it at first. I double checked the item name and price several times, I even wondered if I was dreaming before I finally did believe it.

There was a buy order up on Jita for 4.4 billion. Not a bad price, I thought about selling to the buy order but figured I'd see if I could get more for it first. So I posted it for 4.9 billion and waited a few days. No joy. I changed the price to 4.8 billion and waited a couple more days. Still no joy. By then I'd decided if it took a week or more to sell i'd be better off taking 4.4 billion and reinvesting it immediately rather than sitting on it hoping for a bit more for any longer. So I sold it to that 4.4 billion buy order. I put up a buy order of my own for 4.9 million on Jita but that was a waste of time since within minutes the perpetual titan book camper had another 4.4 billion buy order up again. You'd think CCP could manage to catch blatantly obvious market bots like that.

Since then I've had similar buy orders up for all 4 titan books in 6 different regions and haven't gotten another since. :(

Trading for New Players

New players start out nearly broke and often have trouble making ISK at first. One million ISK is next to nothing once you've been playing for a while but it can seem like an awful lot to new players. Trading is the best way for new players to turn a little ISK into a lot of ISK.

Experienced players usually tell new players to mine, rat, salvage or grind missions to make ISK. The problem with those methods is they all scale mostly with time. You need time for skills training and rep grinding before you start making decent ISK. You need better ships, weapons, fittings, etc., which not only take time but cost more ISK.

If they do mention Trading, about all they say is "Buy low, sell high" or "undercut by 0.01 ISK to maximize profits".

Most players seem to think buy low sell high means insanely low buy prices and ridiculously high buy prices. It even works if you don't mind babysitting your orders for hours at a time and updating them every 5 minutes like a machine... The perfect strat for no-lifers and bots.

For the rest of us who don't want to spend all our game time camping the market about all 0.01 undercuts do is ensure our stuff doesn't sell. Using 0.01 cuts just plays into the hands of the no-lifers and bots. If you only undercut them by 0.01 they'll gladly undercut you right back by 0.01 ISK  (usually within seconds) and keep doing it forever. What works best for me is updating orders once or twice a day with cuts around 10% of the difference between the highest buy order and the lowest sell order.

The no-lifers and bots will sometimes leave large cuts be especially if your orders are only for singles or doubles and not large stacks. Even if they keep undercutting for a while yet, after a few days of big cuts profit margins will usually be slim enough most of the bots drop out and go looking for bigger profits elsewhere.

Trade mostly scales with how much ISK you invest in the market. The more you invest, the more you make. If you make 10% a day, your money doubles every 7-8 days. You'll make more ISK (a LOT more) selling several per day at 5-10% profit than selling 1 a month at 100% profit.

My own personal experience was it took me less than a week to make my first 500 million from scratch. After that my money doubled every 10 days (very consistently) until I hit about 25 billion. Then it slowed down, mostly because it was starting to take too much time updating all orders on all characters every day.

For a little while I just updated about half my orders every day but that was taking too much time too so I switched from regional trading to straight station trading on most characters. Not long after that most of my traders got Wholesale V and Tycoon IV, more than doubling the number of orders. Between all my traders I had over 2000 orders and updating all of them was taking too much time too so I changed my routine again.

Now I run 2 regional (10 jump buy order) traders and 6 station traders with 2 inactive traders (my main and the least trained trade alt). On average I'll update sell orders on about half the characters most days. Buy orders get updated more sporadically, anything I have in stock gets updated at the same time as sell orders, the rest only gets updated once or twice a week.

My next time saving step will probably be to go back to lowball lower priced regional (only 10 or 20 jump though) buy orders on most characters. A lot less work on a daily basis and less total profit but far larger profit margins per item.

Contracting (other than using contracts to move items between characters) is beyond the scope of this article.

Skill Mapping

Your basic attributes (Charisma, Intelligence, Memory, Willpower, Perception) can be remapped taking points out of some areas and putting them into other areas to optimize training time for specific skill sets. Attribute remaps shouldn't be done lightly, you only get one per year, plus two bonus remaps.

IMO you should only remap if either:

1) It's the main character on the account, you have a long term plan and will be staying in the remap for at least 6 months (preferably even longer), or

2) It's an alt (not the main character on the account), you'll be in the remap for a few months to get a specific set of skills trained (Trade skills for example) and won't be doing any further training that'll require another remap for a long time (ideally not until after the yearly remap cooldown resets).

For accounts with 3 alts that all share training queue time roughly equally there is no real main character. In that case I spend 4 months on each alt training skills. By the time they all finish training a year has passed and they all have another yearly remap.

For brand new players on their very first eve online characters I recommend you DO NOT REMAP until you've been playing for at least 3 months. You'll probably wind up training a lot of different things in the first few months so a remap really won't help very much anyhow. It's more likely blowing remaps early will actually slow down your training over the long run because later you won't have a remap available when you could really use one. Also, while you might think you want to train one way at first, by the time you're 3 months in and know more about the game, you'll probably have completely different plans than you had in the beginning.

Save those remaps until you're certain you'll make good use of them!

It's always a good idea to train Cybernetics before anything else so you can use attribute implants to speed up the rest of your training a bit more. If the remap has fewer combined points in Intelligence and Memory than your current attributes then train Cybernetics before remapping, otherwise remap first and then train Cybernetics to save a little more time. Cybernetics I allows you to use +3 attribute implants, IV is necessary for +4 implants and V for +5 implants. For most characters I or IV is all you want, V takes a long time to train and probably isn't worth it for most alts.

Since we're talking about trade skills here we'll be remapping Charisma/Memory. That's marginally better for training Cybernetics than the default attributes new characters start out with so you'll want to remap first and then train Cybernetics.

For trade skills the attributes used are Charisma, Memory and Willpower. The best remap is Charisma/Memory so that's what we'll use here.

You could cut another 5 days off this plan by using 2 remaps (more on this later) but IMO it's not worth blowing a bonus remap just to save 5 more days on a relatively short skill plan. If you do so you'll probably regret it later when you need to train something else and could really use another remap. Saving that remap for later can easily save you 40 or 50 days per year on long skill plans.

Skill Training Plan

Based on my own experience training trade skills on 10 characters this is what I feel is the best training plan for trade skills.

You could shave another 5 days off the plan by using 2 remaps, Willpower/Charisma  to train all the skills with willpower as the primary attribute to V first and then Charisma/Memory for all the rest, but there are a couple problems with that. First, I don't think it's worth blowing a remap just to save 5 days and second, the character becomes a useful trader with a well rounded basic skill set quite a bit sooner following this plan.

Remap Charisma 27, Memory 21 and start training:

Cybernetics I

plug in +3 Charisma, Memory and Willpower implants. On a brand new character you might want to consider a Cerebral Accelerator too (+3 to all 5 attributes for 35 days) if you can afford it.

Train in the following order:

Social I
Contracting I (requires Social I)
Trade I - IV
Retail I - IV (requires Trade II)
Accounting I - IV (requires Trade IV)
Margin Trading I - IV (requires Accounting IV)
Broker Relations I - IV (requires Trade II)

Retail V
Marketing I - II (requires Trade II)
Wholesale I - IV (requires Marketing II and Retail V)

Margin Trading V

Marketing III - IV
Wholesale V
Tycoon I - IV (requires Wholesale V and Marketing IV)

Acounting V
Broker Relations V

That'll give you 269 active orders with all money skills maxed. If you don't need or want the entire plan  I've put breaks in the list at the most sensible points to stop training at. If you want the maximum possible number of active orders (305) then train:

Tycoon V
Trade V

If you want/need remote order skills too then train the following (anytime after Margin Trading IV):

Daytrading I - IV (requires Trade IV)
Marketing I - IV (requires Trade II)
Procurement I - IV (requires Marketing II)
Visibility I - IV (requires Procurement IV)

That'll give you 20 jump range on all remote order skills. If you want/need full regional range on remote skills then train your remote skills to V (preferably after Tycoon IV):

Daytrading V
Marketing V
Procurement V
Visibility V


TLDR version: Trading is one of the most profitable professions in Eve with low entry requirements making it ideal for new players. 0.01 ISK cuts are for no-lifers and bots. If you're not a no-lifer or bot don't play their game, all that'll do is ensure your stuff sells very poorly if at all.

Trading T1 Best Named Modules

Best named modules (meta 4 for the most part) are always in demand. Besides expensive faction and deadspace mods, they're the best fittings new players with low skills can use. They're typically as good or close to as good as T2 equivalents while taking less cpu and/or powergrid which makes them easier to fit than T2. Consequently they're often better for players who can use T2 modules too.

The following is a list of some best named modules that sell well. There are others, these are just some of the most popular ones that I've used and traded myself.

Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I
Eutectic Capacitor Charge Array
F-90 Positional Sensor Subroutines
F-90 Positional Signal Amplifier
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler I
Limited IMN Microwarpdrive I
Local Hull Conversion Nanofiber Structure I
Phased Muon Sensor Disruptor I
Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron
Upgraded EM Ward Amplifier I
Arbalest missile launchers (all types but particularly heavy, light and rockets)
Regolithic Shield Extenders (all sizes large, medium and small)
Photonic CPU Enhancer
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I
Faint Warp Disruptor I

My absolute favorite T1 module to trade is Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I. I've been trading these since my first week playing and I still trade them now. Plentiful supply, they drop everywhere and are in extremely high demand. Prices can be very spiky with sell orders ranging from extreme lows of under 75k to extreme highs of 2 million plus when someone tries to corner the market.

Someone has been trying to corner the market on all best named modules for a couple weeks now. He's camping and throwing an awful lot of isk at the market trying to dominate sales and keep prices propped up high. As a result all the best named modules are extremely high priced lately.

This means right now is a great time for new players to break into trading best named modules. As the little guy your advantage is you can spend more time concentrating on a smaller area, fewer items and smaller orders than the big guys can. Update and renew your orders frequently and transport stacks of modules to sell on whatever nearby hub has the best sell prices. Buy them cheap in out of the way areas and sell them on main trade hubs and/or major mission hubs. If you do it right you can sell well under his prices, make big profits and easily more than double your money every day until your volume gets large enough to start slowing you down.

For a little market pvp fun I like to put up a 10 or 20 jump buy order for 100 or so just a little over the highest priced 40 jump / regional order. That way I get the close ones and the regional buyer trying to corner the market with massive buy orders gets stuck having to travel 10, 20 or more jumps to pick up all the ones he gets.

One caveat, if you engage in this type of market pvp be aware a smart market manipulator would have amassed huge cheaply purchased stockpiles *before raising prices. Assuming he did, eventually he's going to dump those stockpiles so make sure you don't buy too much at high prices now and get stuck with them when prices go down again. Only buy what you can reasonably expect to sell in a few days.

Please feel free to comment on other best named modules that sell well and I'll add them to the list.

12 Tips for Eve Beginners

Eve can be a harsh place, especially in the first few days. The game is unlike other MMOs and has a very steep initial learning curve (usually compared to a cliff inclined towards you). Nothing works the way you've come to expect from playing other games as you'll find out the moment you leave the starting station and try to use your usual keyboard movement keys to fly your ship. Which brings us to tip number 1...

1. Eve doesn't use keyboard movement keys. You'll have to learn how to use the UI, particularly the overview and right click menus to control your ship. Actually you can use traditional movement keys inside stations but you'll probably never do that once you become comfortable with the UI.

2. Right click is your best friend. When in doubt about how to do something, try right clicking on the object in question or even in empty space. Right clicking brings up a context menu which usually has the command to do exactly what you want.

3. Do all of the tutorial missions and career training missions. Besides teaching you how to do many different things, they'll provide you with ISK (game currency), loyalty points, reputation, skillbooks, fitting modules and even ships. Read mission descriptions carefully and do exactly what they tell you to do. F12 brings up the help menu, you can access the tutorials and career agents from there.

4. Regarding tutorial/training missions and steep learning curves, the part that gives new players the most trouble are the scanning missions. To save yourself a whole lot of time and frustration go watch this Probe Scanning Tutorial when you get to the scanning missions.

5. There's a Rookie Help channel. When you get stuck on something don't be afraid to use it, the people in that channel are there specifically to answer new player questions and can be very helpful.

6. Don't forget to keep your skill training queue full. You don't want to waste training time by having the queue finish and not be training anything for a while. Try to make sure the queue is full when you log off for the day and put a skill with a long training time at the end of the queue whenever you'll be offline for more than a day.

7. Security Status. Every system in Eve has an associated security status.

High Security systems range from 0.5 to 1.0 and while no place in Eve is completely safe hi sec is relatively safe. Players cannot attack you in hi sec for no reason without consequences (getting their own ships blown up by Concord). However if you attack them first or take their loot, you become fair game and Concord won't get involved.

Low Security systems range from 0.1 to 0.4, Null Security systems are 0.0 and lower (negative security status). Players can and will attack you in either without provocation or consequences. While there are significant differences between low and null sec new players can simply consider both dangerous places to avoid at first.

On the other hand besides a few specific systems most of low and null isn't as bad as the horror stories claim. Don't let the horror stories scare you from ever entering low/null, just be smart about it and whatever you do, do not go afk or fly on autopilot while in low/null.

8. Don't fly anything you can't afford to lose. Especially not in low/null. Don't carry anything too expensive in cargo either, not even in hi and especially not into a major market hub while on autopilot.

9. Can flipping. Cargo Containers (cans), ship wrecks and so on that belong to you are white. They're your's to loot, nobody else can loot them without giving you the right to attack them if you wish. Cans belonging to other players are yellow. Taking loot from a yellow can or wreck means you have aggressed the owner and he can now attack you without consequences. Blue cans belong to no-one and may be looted by anyone without aggression.

10. Don't forget to train Capacitor, Navigation and Fitting skills. They're important. You really can't go wrong training them all (except jump skills) to III early in your skills training plan. Or better yet, just train all the skills required for the basic Core Competency Certificate.

11. Fitting skills allow you to fit more and better modules on your ships. Engineering and Electronics are particularly important fitting skills and Weapon Upgrades is the next most important fitting skill. IMO if a character is going to be doing much flying around at all, the very first skills you should train to IV are Electronics and Engineering. They should be among the first skills trained to V too. Weapon Upgrades should probably be trained to III soon and IV eventually but you shouldn't need V for a long time yet.

12. Scams. Scamming (the in game variety, not the real life / real money variety), is allowed and scammers are everywhere. Scammers like to work with contracts and chat channels, especially local chat channels at major market hubs. The simplest way to avoid most scams is a) consider everything in chat to be a scam in the first place and b) read any contract very carefully before accepting it, especially if it's a contract you found in a chat link.