Cruiser fight: Aideron vs Sniggwaffe

Feast yer eyes on this slaughter! Sniggwaffe pilots spread their damage so thin that they only manage to take out one of our combat ships while we cut them to pieces. Our Vexors and Exeqs take on their Exeqs/Celestis/Thoraxes and it's a very one-sided battle. I'm flying logi and spend a good chunk of the fight jammed by their Celestis or ECM drones, including the point near the beginning where I'm trying to repair Rajeet as he loses his slicer.

The Atron was lost was actually due to friendly fire. A friend of mine, not a member of Gallente Militia, was flying with us in order to try out PvP. He showed up as neutral on the overview of the Blackfox fleet which arrived and they took him out. He has sinced joined Aideron (smart move!) and is settling into low-sec life after just a few weeks since starting Eve Online.

A major lesson to learn from this video is to notice how the Sniggwaffe guys spread their damage. My watchlist, covering about half our fleet, shows lots of our guys taking damage at the same time. We were easily able to repair this (except when we were jammed). We, I think, focused our fire better and took their ships out one by one.

Fantastic new video intro put together by Baynex - thank you!

First Ghost Site and Lots of Other Stuff

My first successful ghost site

I had a busy Eve weekend, with a couple of fleet engagements, setting up some T1 industrial activities, lots of station trading, an encounter with a Jita scammer, building ships for other people, recruiting a friend to join Aideron AND I ran three ghost sites!

Ghost Sites

I'll start with the ghost sites, which I'm pleased to say I ran in a gifted Vexor hull. I've watched videos about these sites, but never seen one and figured they were just too rare. I think CCP might have made a recent change to make them easier to run and, my speculation, more common? Waaay back at the start of this blog I talked about a kind capsuleer who read a post I made on reddit. The Vexor she gave me was still packaged and sitting in my hangar. I owned another Vexor, combat fit, but what I needed here was a simple fit like the ones I'd seen in the videos. I unpacked the Vexor and threw on 1600MM armor, 2 ENAM IIs, a damage control II, data site analyzer, 10MN MWD and cargo scanner. Done; no weapons, no drones, no rigs.

The first site was too challenging (I only have hacking III) and the tower blew up in my face, taking me down to about half armor. I thought about trying another can, but didn't want to lose the ship so I docked up and repaired it, then hit the second site. Success!  The first tower contained a blueprint, which I knew are the best thing you can find here; I hacked it, grabbed the goods and left, not wanting to risk losing it. The third ghost site I ran was in Fliet a day later (3 in two days after never seeing one?! It really looks like CCP have made these more common) but the two cans I hacked didn't yield anything great.

Fleet Activities

I had mixed results from two fleets this weekend; Aideron took out armored cruiser fleets several times and I was able to join two of them. The first resulted in getting sent packing back to Fliet; I think it was a communication and intel issue. We hadn't confirmed that our allies were going to enter the medium plex with us, and our scouts were unsure how to use eve-dingo.com or another tool like it. Luckily my Exequror survived; I'll post video later (see post above, on 2/28/2014). The Sunday night fleet went much better; we hit a Sniggwaffe Celestis/Exequror/Thorax fleet and took out 17 of them, losing only two Atrons and a Stabber Fleet Issue on our side. I am tasked with distributing the loot from that fight, which the FC generously awarded to those flying logi.

Station Trading and Scam Attempt

My station trader alt got a lot of attention this weekend, since its an activity that I can perform in very short bursts; if I have a couple of minutes to spare I can update several orders. She bought and sold several cybernetic arms and tattoos, but the trend seems to be more buys than sales. There are some items of which I have two or three because buyers aren't coming along fast enough; I was as low as 300M cash, while I had about 4B in buy orders. Luckily some sales come along and pushed me back up to 1.5B.

I had listed a couple of valuable items on contract and your character name is publically attached to that contract. This attracts scammers, who try and trick you into giving them the item. This guy convo'd me and, of course, I think "Scammer!" because Jita. He offers me a slightly lower price than I was asking and I say "Sure", wondering how this would work. It turned out to be pretty transparent: he made a contract and asked me to click it, but it would have resulted in me giving him 430M instead of the other way round. I tell him, innocently, "Oops, you seem to have made a mistake." "One sec, I'll fix it, he says". "You have one chance to get this right." I reply. The new contract he makes would pay me 430,000 ISK for the item. I reject the contract and close the window. A rite of passage, I feel :)

She finished the weekend with 4.1B in sell orders, 4.7B in buy orders, 1.5B cash and, I think, 2B in escrow. I think you could make more money sitting down and running level 4 missions, or doing wormhole activities and other time-intensive stuff, but if you just have a few minutes at a time to update orders, with priority interrupts from Real Life taking precedence then station trading at Jita is very effective. Here's my guide to doing it.

One last point about this character, I'm trying to find out if there's a non-grinding way to raise her standings with the Caldari Navy. This would reduce the broker fees that she pays, which is currently about 0.78%. I gave her some training queue time and built her a simple combat Kestrel. I'm raising her Social and Connections to IV before I go out and run missions, but I've also read about Data Centers where you can get one-time standings boosts just by delivering tags, which, of course, I'd buy at Jita first. This will also let me easily run high-sec missions for fun, should I feel like doing it. The use of the "Percentage" on that site is a bit confusing...is that a percentage of my current standings, or an absolute figure that gets added to my standings?

[Update: Later that day...] Yes, the increase you get from data centers IS a percentage of your current standings with that corp and faction, so to do that with my almost-zero standings is a waste. Good news: I don't need to increase standings with the Caldari faction, just with the "Caldari Navy" corp which owns Jita. This can be done by running missions for them (lvl 1 and 2 agents are just 1 jump away, in "Perimeter"), and there are even people who offer this as a service. If you're in their fleet and they share the rewards with you when they turn in the mission, you'll get a standings increase without actually having to go and fight! Google "Caldari Navy standings service" and you'll find them.

T1 Industry and Ship Building

I've felt the siren call of building ship modules, so I made (what else) a spreadsheet and figured out that there are some items, mostly rigs, that I can easily make and sell in low-sec for a big profit. I rounded up all the BPOs I needed and the necessary ingredients and found a nearby factory in a non-faction warfare system. That should keep a steady, if small, income coming to me. It's ironic that Caldari militia pilots are among my was frequent customers :)

Lastly, I put together three simple scanning ships for Aideron pilots to use prior to our exploration fleets going out. We have a weekly event that, so far, has gotten lucky and found good combat sites to run. But with these ships I think we'll be able to more easily search nearby systems for the richest sites to hit.

More Exploration Fleet activity

We had another very successful night of exploration yesterday. With ten people in fleet we ran three combat sites and a couple of data/relic sites in about two hours, raising over 700M in loot. We also got discovered by a pirate fleet during a relic site, but we had seen their scout and were prepared to warp out, which we did safely.

The fleet began in the aftermath of a POS bash; a sort of "who wants to go do exploration?" fleet. I had scanned down two good sites earlier in the day, but one had been run already. I got the guys started on a 3/10, a Serpentis Narcotics Warehouse, and continued probing while they ran it. I found only basic combat sites, but a relic site kept them busy while I continued probing elsewhere. I got lucky and found two 5/10 Serpentis Hydroponic combat sites in the same system and that was our main event for the night. I acted as salvage/loot guy, picking up stuff in the rooms they had cleared. I got a total of about 15M ISK of loot/salvage from the two sites, one of which I only partially cleared because I forgot to make bookmarks when I left.

I'm getting a sense of scale about what kind of combat sites you need to keep a fleet busy. Two 5/10 sites kept nine combat ships (two were logi) busy for an hour or so. Data/relic sites don't yield much, but can keep people busy while new combat sites are being located: a surprising number of pilots haven't run them either, so you can introduce them to that part of the game.

If you have time to find these good combat sites in advance, do it! A happy fleet is one that jumps from one juicy combat site to another without having to wait.

Fliet

We have allies! More friendly corporations have moved into our area, which is helping keep Fliet stable in Gallente control. We are harassing nearby Caldari groups and a feeling of win is in the air.

Trade

My Jita trading character continues to pile up the ISKies. I'm still trading tattoos and clothing as my main game, but a couple of gambles have paid off. A few weeks ago the price of Occult Augmentation decryptors dropped to 6000 ISK, so I bought a bunch. They're up to 40-60K each now. It's a nice profit margin, though not a lot in absolute terms, but it has given me the confidence to try similar things on more expensive items. The general plan is this: if an item is as cheap, or cheaper than its ever been, buy a big pile of it and wait for it to go up in price. The exception to this would be an item whose price has dropped because of something CCP did, like the 'Esquire' clothing item that got handed out to everyone, flooding the market, or a nerfed gun that nobody wants any more.

Busting a Gate Camp

From flickr user andy castro

We took an open fleet on a roam last night, but all the usual hot-spots were quiet. We caught the odd small fry here and there, but whenever we found a large group on d-scan they inevitably turned out to be friendly.

Militia chat mentioned a five ship gate camp in Hevrice. They were snaring incoming ships from highsec. This posed a probably for our FC, Marcel, as he (and one of our interceptor pilots) cannot go to highsec. His solution was a clever piece of organizing and it all hinged on not spooking the gatecamp into running away from the large group of Enyos, Exequrors and interceptors that we were bringing.

The following plan was composed on the fly; you could almost hear the ideas coming to him as he realized what restrictions were placed on him by the game mechanics. He divided the fleet into four parts: a neutral "bait" ship, two (or more?) interceptors to apply tackle (2 of these were in low-sec, the rest in high-sec), and the DPS (Enyo) / logi (Exeqs) ships. We needed to approach this gate camp from the high-sec side: if we all went through low-sec and appeared in Hevrice local, we'd scare them away.

We divided into the four parts of the fleet and Marcel and Huard shepherded us to the right places. When we were all in place, we sprung the trap! The bait ship went in and drew aggro from the gate camp. Then the interceptors and tackle ships jumped in and pointed the gate campers. The DPS/logi ships were on their way too, and when we arrived we hit their Rapier (444M) first, then the Myrmidon (120M) and Gnosis (83M). They had a Devoter too, but it managed to get away through the jump gate.

We lost a couple of Atrons before logi arrived, but our four Exeqs kept everyone else alive. The loot was good; a 146M warp disruptor and a 28M skillbook they'd looted off someone, plus assorted other stuff.

--

I heard a funny story on comms the other night. Our British FC was up at 4am his time and someone asked didn't he have to work in the morning. "I'm under house arrest." "WHAT?" The story goes that he committed a minor civil offense (nobody was hurt) and didn't show up to do community service. He was sentenced to house arrest from 7pm to 6am each day for a while.

You're thinking what I'm thinking, and his girlfriend said it too: "Don't they know that's NOT punishment for you?"

Our First Exploration Fleet Night - great fun!

After reading my Grass Is Always Greener post from last week, one of the Aideron directors made the wise decision to ask me to organize a night of alternative activities for anyone that wanted to participate. After some discussion in the forums about what kinds of exploration we could do, I settled on an exploration roam through low-sec. Last night we got into various cruisers (from memory Stratios, Ishtar, Deimos, two Exequrors for logi and several other ships, mostly dealing sentry drone damage) and went a-roaming!

We started with a data site and a 3/10 Rogue Drone Asteroid Infestation. This wasn't a lucrative site but we wanted to start with something small and safe so we could shake the dust off, work out how we'd travel as a group, call targets etc.  A couple of other combat sites were run, including a Serpentis Lookout that led to an escalation in high-sec. We didn't take that, because several of our pilots can't go there. We ran a data and relic site, then one of our two probing ships found The Main Event: Baynex found a Serpentis Logistical Outpost Not only is this equivalent to a 6/10 combat site, it also always escalates, meaning you are given the choice to take another fight with even tougher opponents in another system.

Our ships tore through these sites easily. Our two Exeqs (one piloted by me) easily repped our ships. One thing we hadn't considered was making sure the logi overviews were set up to see friendly drones, who took aggro and got damaged. We solved this by having people broadcast that drone as a target so logi could lock and repair them. Actually, now that I think about it, seeing them on the overview wouldn't help; which drone is taking damage? The broadcast method is better.

We lost no ships during the roam and spirits were high during the fights (thank you Phyridean for FCing!); I think everyone was pleased to be able to use ships they rarely undocked, and best of all, we got to use them together!

Overall we were out for three hours, got about 450M in loot, 7.5M each in bounties and a nice improvement in security status (for those that like such things :) ). It's my job to monetize it and distribute the proceeds among those present, except those who graciously declined to take a share.

While we were gone our corpmates continued to d-plex Fliet, which was down to 11% contested at midnight [Update: At 6AM Tuesday morning, EST, Fliet is now stable! 0% contested. More exploration roams!!) And, in a burst of what must have been good karma, my trader character sold a billion ISK of stuff overnight even though I didn't update her order prices before going to sleep!

Special thanks to Oreb for coming back for this event and staying with us so we could take the second escalation, even though it was ARGH o'clock in the morning in his time zone!

What Could Go Better Next Time?

We didn't find as many cosmic signatures, and thus less combat/data sites, than I thought we would. More scanning in advance would have given us more targets to pick from. We got lucky with finding the Logistical Outpost, but next time I think having three or four known combat sites would be better. This way, everyone can get in fighting ships and quickly run the combat sites in each system.  And its more fun to run a site together than it would be to split up and run them separately.

Alternatively, if you're looking for a smaller scale event, just go out and scan down some sigs yourself one night. If you find something juicy, make a corp bookmark and let your fellow pilots know. Those that are available can come and run it with you. The more there are of you, the faster it will go.

We spent some time working out what we wanted to do or not-do. Wormholes were a particularly sticky topic: when you probe down a wormhole and enter it, you get a lot of war-stories/opinions from those assembled about what kind of ships/fleets can/should go into that class of wormhole. In the end we didn't run any, but I think an exploration night should either focus on wormholes or avoid them altogether.

Despite some talk of salvage before heading out, nobody actually brought a salvager or salvage drones.  We moved quickly, so I don't know if there would have been time for the main fleet to wait for salvaging to occur. We could have had someone designated to salvage all the wrecks -- there were a lot more than I thought there would be and it probably would have added up to a significant amount of ISK. A salvaging Catalyst would have worked well. [Update: actually one of our pilots went out afterwards and looted/salvaged an additonal 19M of stuff, and that didn't include everything.]

Dividing the spoils: we're having everyone give their loot to a single person and have them work out the value and pay out a cash share to everyone who participated. You can use evepraisal.com to give a fair estimate of the value of the items in the contract before accepting it. That person would then organize for the items to be sold to reimburse themselves for making that payout. It's a good idea to have everyone contract their loot to that person, so they don't accidentally lose track of the looted items when they get mixed into their hanger.  When you do a "Trade" in station, the items go directly to the hanger...I'm not sure if you can drag them from the trade window directly to a station container, can you?

Another Glorious Day in the Corp!

Video link - Aideron Robotics Cruiser Roam Fight

Aideron had a really good weekend, racking up a ton of kills and securing our hold on our home system of Fliet. Some of our pilots woke up early in order to deny the Caldari the ten or so un-opposed plexes they been taking after downtime each day. We have taken Fliet from 60% contested down to under 30% and are feeling more secure.

We've also been going out in fleets more often and getting great results! We have 441 kills so far this month; that's as many as we had in the whole of October 2013!

The most unusual incident I saw was the discovery of a pilot-less Guardian at a gate. We had jumped through and seen a pirate Ishtar, who we pointed and killed. The Guardian that we thought was with him sat still through the whole fight, leaving us wondering what was going on. Our FC brought up the radial menu on the ship and noticed that the option to "board" the ship was present, so after some whooping it up and ship swapping, we had ourselves a faction fit 340M isk Guardian! We decided to take it back to Fliet right away and had to dodge a large neutral/pirate fleet that was roaming the area. Props to our scouts for keeping us out of trouble!

I flew my Vexor into four fights over the weekend and despite being in the thick of the action, came out without a scratch :) That includes landing on a gate camp which, for some reason, didn't point me as I warped away. Eventually my luck will run out, of course, but for now it feels pretty lucky!

My Jita trading character had a very successful weekend, though it was quite a roller coaster. After selling a couple of large items she had 1.7B isk in the wallet. I spent it all! A succession of pricey buy orders got filled and I went as low as 50M ISK before the sales starting happening again. Cybernetic Arms and Tattoos (both under the Apparel section) are the heavy hitters for me right now.

The Virtues of Doing One Thing Well

(Tap...tap... ) Testing, is this thing on?

Hi, I'm Hespire Malneant, IRL a friend, co-worker, and bandmate of Your Blog's Proprietor. Back when he started the blog, he graciously extended an offer to let me post here but until this moment I've been too lazy to take him up on it.

You may be wondering (you probably aren't, though I'll proceed as though you were) "What caused him to stop watching porn pick up the keyboard and post to Vic's blog?"

It was my reaction to his most recent post, namely his thoughts about the costs of concentrating on one activity. Make that "being in a corp that concentrates on one activity, and spending his in-game time doing that activity with his corp." I want to point out that this approach actually has a lot to recommend it.

My experience in EVE has been almost the opposite of what he describes: I started a few months earlier than he did, and my attitude was all "I want to fly all the ships, do all the things, and make boatloads of ISKs!!1!" I joined EVE University (a corp that basically makes no demands of its members, other than that they refrain from being a**holes toward other players), created a second account, made 4 alts, trained all of my chars to Infomorph Psychology IV and created 4 jump clones for each, and generally took off in every direction at once. I've tried my hand at market trading, exploration, manufacturing, research, FW, PI... most of the things you can do outside of sov null. And I pretty much suck at all of it (maybe with the exception of trading) because that's just too many different things to attempt with the amount of time I have to play. All while failing to make the kind of social ties that make the game interesting to most players over the long haul.

So I've resolved to spend way less time with my trade alt poring over the market screen and my external trade tools, running around buying BPOs and setting up research jobs, doing missions by myself out in the middle of nowhere, and to put more effort into being at the Uni's Low-Sec Campus, fleeted up and in comms with other Unistas, flying frigates and generally engaging in the sort of activity that Vic has been doing to the exclusion of everything else. The grass on his side of the fence is looking pretty green right now.

The Grass Is Always Greener

From flickr user bulldog1

Our corporation recently moved back into the FW warzone, the system of Fliet, after a few weeks in Yvangier. It was recognized that this would keep us in fighting trim; deliberately putting ourselves in a system that we could lose. If you live in a system that is taken over by your opposition, you lose docking rights at the stations and you have to move out yet again. So you fight and you fight hard to keep your territory under your control. This is what it says on the box, of course: I joined a Faction Warfare corporation: fighting is what we do.

And yet.

I'd love to have a night of doing something other than plexing, but the contested status of Fliet shifts by up to 25 percentage points a day - we can't afford a night of wormhole exploration, or level 4 missioning. I could, technically, go do those things while my corpmates fight the good fight, but who wants to be That Guy? Not I; I like pulling my weight and in fact last night our FC picked me to manage the fleet while he went to take care of some diplomacy; there were about 15 of us at that point and it felt great to be trusted to not get us welped. Our corp directors have said they want to be able to take us into other areas of the game too, but for now, fighting for control of Fliet is the main event.

(side note: I think I did the right things: we were plexing in Heydieles, which was rife with plexes. There were two mediums available while I was in charge and our fleet had two Navitas repair ships. I put one, and half of the remainder of the fleet, in each plex.) Oh, and in an odd turn of events, one of our regular enemy pilots gave me a shout-out for this blog!

I don't want this to sound like a complaint - it isn't. But consider it a reminder; if you join a corporation that focused on one activity in Eve, that's what you'll be expected to do most of the time, especially if the corp's fortunes depend on doing that thing. Our corp also spends significant resources on us, supplying ships, building POSs, free jump-freighting, arranging for boosters; it'd be a churlish move to say "I'm not fleeting tonight, I wanna haul stuff around."

And if you're like me and read /r/eve, and other Eve blogs, you'll read about all kinds of other fun things to do in Eve, things you will probably not have time to do. If you're someone who can only play for a couple of hours a day (like me, married man with a child) you should resign yourself to doing what the corp needs you for and let those other activities go for now.  If you can log in during off-hours, that's a good time to go try those other things. And there's always the possibility that, for us specifically, we'll get Fliet under control and we'll be able to try other activities as a corp.

I could set up an alt that isn't in my current corp and go galavanting around New Eden. But I'd feel guilty at not helping my friends in Aideron, so that option is out.

There are some activities you can manage while plexing. Planetary Interaction is one, station trading is another. With skills like Marketing and Procurement you can even place orders directly in other systems, and create public courier contracts to have the stuff moved for you.

One-Day-Later Update: I'm Julie, your cruise director! I've been put in charge of organizing extracurricular activities for Aideron. We're picking one night a week where, if there's not a crisis occurring, pilots can go off in groups to do the kind of stuff I mentioned above. Its easy to say "let's do this thing" but the friction point is having everyone in an appropriate ship, so my job will be to make sure ships and modules suitable for PvE fits are made available.
--

In station trading news, my Jita trader is doing really well - she just sold 4 'Luxury' tshirts for about a BILLION ISK; the profit on those was about 100-150M each! She has a further 1.7B in sell orders and nearly 4B in buy orders (thanks, Margin Trading!) so - wow!

My Best Way of Getting Space Rich (So Far) in Eve: Trading in Apparel

Me, in space, doing the deals.

I've read a few other Eve blogs that offer advice about station trading, and they mostly avoid telling you specific products to trade in. This is understandable, but I'll like to give you a start and point you to the "Apparel" section at Jita.

Let's start with a quick definition of station trading. You place a buy order on a product and wait for someone to sell you that item at the price you're offering. When you have acquired it, you sell it using a sell order and, when it sells, hopefully you've made a profit! You don't have to buy from other stations or ship the product around. You have to regularly check your orders and, using the right-click "Modify" command, change your prices to make sure you are offering the highest buy price and the lowest sell price.

What I'm NOT covering here is the idea of transporting goods between stations; I don't have much experience with that, and don't have any alts or jump clones that would facilitate that. I am, however, beginning to set up a mutually beneficial trade network within Aideron, where our pilots can sell stuff for each other at various markets.

Apparel

These items are the clothing and accessories that you can dress your character in. There are only a few dozen Apparel products to choose from and the gap between many of the buy and sell orders is at least fifty percent, sometimes far, far more. I started my Jita trader with 100M ISK and sent her a few hundred million worth of datacores from my main, and she now has 2B ISK in cash and escrow and a further 2B in sell orders. I worked my way up from trading pants/shirts/shoes to those groovy cybernetic arms and tattoos, making 100-200M profit per item. Her skills are Margin Trading III, Broker Relations IV and Accounting IV and she can place 45 orders.

That trading was all done at Jita in about a month, and most of the time I was updating orders 2 or 3 times a day, with more intense updating on the weekends. I find it helpful to leave the Eve client running on a laptop and whenever it is convenient, checking and updating my orders. The more often you do this, especially on high priced items, the more you will make.

The criteria I use are simple: is the buy/sell trade profitable, does this product trade AT the buy/sell prices and does it trade often enough? I look at the Price History tab and look for at least 1 in the Quantity column for most of the days shown. Secondly, I check the current high buy and low sell orders, then compare those numbers to the Price History tab. If the current buy price is 1M, but the item has NEVER been bought for less than 10M, don't bother with it.

One area that looks good is Deadspace items - search on A-Type, B-Type, C-Type and you can find plenty of items that meet my criteria BUT there's a problem: the trade in these is SO fast that its very difficult to keep your order at the top of the heap for more than a minute. I've done a little trading in these items but have concluded that Apparel is a better bet. This isn't something you can identify in advance, but if you place a buy order and notice that you're consistently WAY off the top of the list of buy orders, and can seemingly never acquire one, just cancel the sell order and put the money into something else.

One last thing: don't order a large quantity of any one item. Spread your money around and generally buy 1 or 2 of each item. If you get a huge pile of something that sells slowly, that's money tied up which could have been doing something else. Buy small at first until you get a feel for how quickly things move.

Examples

A good starter: Women's Avenue shirt (black). Buy for 10M, sell for 20M. It's sells a few a day and reaches both buy and sell orders.

A really cheap starter: 75mm 'Scout' guns. I have traded these in the Essence region and at Jita. You can buy them for 5-10K ISK and sell them for 40-80K, though you might have to transport them to get the highest prices.

A miss: Men's Command Pants (gold/black). Current Buy Price 5M, Current Sell Price 12.4M. The profit margin is good, the daily quantity of sales is good (only a few zeros) BUT look at the history of the Low price. 5M is a new low - it has not been sold consistently at less than 5M since last October. If you offer 5M you're unlikely to acquire this item and your money will be tied up for nothing.

A high-end hit: 'Phanca' Cybernetic Arms.  There are four of these, ranging from 500-800M on buy orders, and selling for 100-200M above that. That's only a 20% profit, but 100M ISK is a serious chunk of change. If you can afford it, it is worth trading in these simply because one trade can make as much profit as a whole pile of the cheaper stuff. This also applies to the Men's/Women's 'Luxury' t-shirts, plus they are offering 100% profit right now!

A hit: 'Thurifer' Large Capacity Battery.Buy for 85M, sell for 128M. Daily quantity is good and the item sells steadily to both buy and sell orders. I've done four of these myself. (Update four days later...no good any more. The sell price has dropped to 95M.)

Movement

The key to this is to keep stuff MOVING. Don't get emotionally attached to items, nor to the price you WANTED to get. If you bought at 10M and were hoping to sell at 20M, but the market got flooded and prices are dropping fast, do NOT hold on to the item and hope for the price to come back later. It may take days, weeks or months to do so, and in that time you could have take your 17...15...12 million and ploughed it into something else.

Prices do shift, but remember your job as a trader is, once you have acquired an item, to sell it as quickly as possible for as much as you can get. Then you take that money and set up another buy order. Money sitting in your wallet is DEAD MONEY. Piles of unsold goods in your hanger are DEAD MONEY.

Quickbar

I have a folder called "Jita Station Trading", and under that I have a "Cheap" folder and an "Expensive" folder. Into the cheap folder I put the orders for products under about 50M, and in the expensive folder goes the big stuff. If I don't have much time to do an order update, I start with the expensive folder and make sure my buy/sell orders are at the top of the heap. You may also want to have a folder called "Check" into which you put products that are worth watching.

Look Beyond Apparel

There are thousands of items for sale in the market. Set aside some time to look through it all: concentrate on the Faction areas. If you see a gargantuan profit margin you will see that the item almost never trades AT ALL. If the item trades a lot, you'll see the profit margin has been whittled down to almost nothing: this applies to most ships, guns and modules that you see every day. The "sweet spot" lies in between: items that trade just a few a day, for a good chunk of profit.

Things Change

The gap between buy/sell orders will change over time, so you should be prepared to cancel orders and get out of a product. If you set up buy orders, but while you're waiting the sell order price has dropped to an unattractive level, don't be afraid to cancel the buy orders and get out.

That's it for now, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments.