Trading Up

Inner Space Merchant

I've been a busy space cadet! Our corp is cranking up the level of activity after a winter break and we had our annual all-hands meeting. The future direction of the corporation (Aideron Robotics, for those playing along at home) was discussed, and a bright and glorious future it is. We have over 100 pilots now and big plans in several areas. It's nice to be part of active and supportive corporation.

Trading

My trading character has done really well and currently has 430M in sell orders, 1 BILLION in buy orders (thanks to Margin Trading III) and a big wad of cash burning a hole in her pocket.  My station trading pattern is pretty simple: I'm going for thinly traded items with huge markups! Look at the Apparel group and for Faction/Deadspace items of all kinds. I look for items where the buy order is half the price of the sell order, and at least 5M ISK difference between them. My biggest sale was also very quick; I bought a large capacitor battery for 80M and sold it a couple of hours later for 135M, though my efforts to acquire a second one have not worked yet.

I then check the price history - you're looking for the following characteristics: at least 1 order each day (the odd zero is ok, but not too many), sales at the buy order AND the sell order price at my station (Jita). There's no point putting in a buy order if nobody ever sells to those buy orders. This happens more frequently than you might think, so watch for it.

The other alternative is to try and participate in quickly traded items, with hundreds of sales a day, but small profit margins. I haven't tried this yet, though the frustration of trying to buy/sell these big items can be annoying and could drive me to that option.

Either way, the more often you update your orders, the more sales you'll make. Over the weekend I updated my orders at least every couple of hours; it only takes a few minutes. The quickest way is to put all the items that you're trading into a folder in the quickbar. Then you can simply click on each item and make sure your orders are at the top. And don't forget that you can use the mouse scroll wheel to shift your order price by 0.01 ISK while the cursor is over the "Modify Price" popup form.

Ippy Dippy My Spaceshippy

I have graduated to the next TWO classes of spaceship and am now able to fly battlecruisers and battleships. I've acquired my first Brutix, which I'll be using for PvE, running level 3 missions. I fit it thusly: 

[Brutix, Lvl 3 YouTuber]

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Armor Explosive Hardener II

Armor Kinetic Hardener II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Optical Tracking Computer I, Tracking Speed Script

Cap Recharger II

Cap Recharger II

10MN Afterburner II

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

Small Remote Armor Repair System I

Medium Hybrid Collision Accelerator I

Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I

Hammerhead II x5

The basic setup came from this video.

Obviously the two Armor Hardeners can be switched for whatever the mission rats call for. I have a mobile tractor unit and mobile depot in the hold, as well as Iron M and Thorium M charges.

I find this aspect of the game a bit weird: CCP must know that nobody goes on a dangerous mission without looking it up OUTSIDE the game (on eve-survival.org, for example) to determine what damage to protect against. And if you don't do so, you could lose your ship, so everyone makes sure to do it. So why doesn't Eve itself tell you what to do? The agent's text could include a line about damage types: "Be sure you take X and Y damage protection, capsuleer!" The only people who are hurt by NOT doing this are noobs that don't yet know about damage types and won't understand why the rats are tearing them up so easily. They'll get mad at the game for being too hard, and be more likely to quit.