Station trading guide

“Station trading guide?” Like i trade my station for your station?” – Corp member

Station Trading guide

(updated 15/6/2009)

This will be a small guide on how to station trade. Some people find it easy, most don’t. This is not a trade route guide. Trading through system’s go’s way over my head, and although it is much more profitable then station trading, station trading requires me to check the market every five minutes while i do whatever on my main account.

A station trader will require an alt. You could have a character slot on your main account as a trader, but it will take about a months training to cut down on the tax and broker fees via skills. Also, if your unable to update your market orders then you probably wont make enough isk to bother logging on and off all the time.

Skills

The skills necessary for a station trader are;

Trade: This should be trained to level 4. It is a perquisite to the two most important trading skill’s.

Accounting: Accounting lowers the transition tax by 10%. With station trading, you will probably find lucrative trades with high end modules, of which the transition tax will bite a large chunk of your income from the item. Training this to level 4 or 5 will save you millions of isk after a days trading. Transition tax takes effect when buying and selling items.

Broker Relation: This is another tax that will reduce the amount of isk you earn. The Broker Relation skill reduces this tax by 5% per level, but can also be reduced with a  This only takes effect when your buying items.

Social and Connections: Unless you have a caldari main account or have access to lvl 3 or 4 caldari navy missions, you will need these two skills. Social level 3 is a perquisite for connections. Connections will increase your base standing with caldari state and navy, which in turn will lower your broker fee even more. This is only relevant if you make a Caldari trader with the intentions of trading in Jita! If you make a minmatar character and move to Jita, connections will only rise your minmatar corp standings and not caldari. Same for every other race. If you plan to station trade in another hub then make a character who’s faction is the same as the stations corp owner.

If you choose to trade anywhere else then Jita then you are at a big disadvantage. Jita moves alot of isk through it everyday. You will have a much better chance filling your buy and sell orders in Jita then anywhere else. For any newbies, the main trading station is Jita IV – Moon 4 – Caldari Navy Assembly Plant.

Buying and selling

Buy high and sell low (or buy low and sell high?). Alot of trade guides do not really cover this, and assume the reader know’s how to do this already. It is simple, but doe’s require a bit more then just buy and sell orders.

For example, let’s use the Tempest (i actually got one of these through the buy orders once!). Make sure you are viewing the cheapest sell orders and the most expensive buy orders

Ignore traders that are not trading in your station (i.e the top buy order).

There is around 6.1 mil difference between the lowest sell order and the highest buy order. Sounds great right? if you Factor in the tax’s it will cost 648k in brokers fee to place a buy order and roughly a small bit more in BOTH transition tax and broker fee’s when selling.

To try and make isk trading tempest’s, you will want a buy order that is on top of everyone elses. You are trying to buy from people too lazy to set up a buy order themselve’s. Some people will see a -1.4 negetive value on the market and think “eh, to small for me to care about”. that small value is Your 6.1 mil if your lucky.

So, the perfect buy order here would be 79,300,000,24 isk. This will put your buy order above whoever is trading for 3 tempests. Now, this is where diligence and patience comes into play. Whoever is trading for tempests as well will try and take the top place. Maybe in 5 minutes your order will be replaced by another with a 79,300,000,25 isk. There is a 5 minute period where you cant modify your order. Once that has finished, you simply put yours back on top after refreshing the market screen, and replacing it with a higher number.

The same princible applies to selling, but you want your item to be cheaper then everyone elses. So with the top order at 82,483,195,99 isk,  you will want to put your order at 82,483,195,98 isk. This puts you at the top slot, and anyone buying a tempest will buy yours first. Again, everyone else is after that top spot, so you will need to regulaly check and mofidy your order to stay there.

Station trading is as simple as that. Much like trade routes the isk is not in the as much in the  items, but rather the routes, or in this case the items your trading. These tips are from my own personal experience’s of this kind of trading.

Tip # 1 – Sometime’s people are not after making isk but want a very quick sell. These people can ruin a good trade run. They kickstart a trend which pulls most people out of that market, everyone but traders who dont really seem to mind making around 1mil rather then the 15mil they were making 15 minutes ago. An example is; Tempest is trading at 76.6mil isk. The cost is going up in tiny incriments… intil someone puts a sell order for 79mil. Soon after this, the small incriments start again but around this new 79mil isk mark. You can either follow the same path and trade at a huge lose of potentual income, or wait it out. The market will “correct” itself at some point, where it will be profitable to trade in this item again.

Tip # 2 – Learn the market. Some item’s trade at certain peaks in gap difference at different times of the day. Popular items will do this kind of cycle every day or two, and others have a cycle of around a week. I have no idea why it does this, maybe something to do with the amount of people online?

Tip # 3 – Find a few items that make you isk and add them to the market quickbar. Once you found the item from search, just right click and add to quickbar.

Tip # 4 – You might find an item with a huge gap between the buying orders and selling price, but some items simply do not move on the market. A bad example is Ferrogel, (but its the same concept). Look at the  buy orders and see how many rounded quantity numbers there are. All those buy orders are people making a bad mistake.

Tip # 5 – When you log off for a good amount of time, set your buy orders a good deal below the current trading mark. Sometimes a market will fluctuate badly, and you will log back on only to find you managed to buy your items, but the gap between the buy and sell is now in a different area. For example, Item A is buying at 12mil with the highest selling order at 15mil. you set a buy order for 12.1mil and log off. When you come back, the buy order has moved to 9mil and the sell order is now at 11mil.

Another good way of seeing if its a moving market is to check the price history, and select “show table” at the bottom. If you times the quantity by the average price you will get a idea of how much isk is moving through that item on the market. If its below 500mil then its probably not worth it.

I will update this, tidy it up and add more tips when i find out what i have missed. This is my first Eve guide and i would really appricate feedback to anyone who has read this. It can be about the grammar, layout or about the guide itself. I really hope people will read this and find it very helpful. I had the basic’s down for trading, but not station trading. I believe there is one guide out there which is very brief on this kind of trading and does not go into this kind of detail. Again, let me know if this guide was helpful. Hopefully i will have more guides on various aspects of the brilliant mmo that is Eve.

Kai.