Trading 101
Trading in Eve Online
Trade in eve is a little difficult to understand initially, but eventually becomes clear why trade in this system is so great.
Understanding trade and hanger usage can really help. When you really get into it, taxes come into play as well.
If you lost something, check out Hangers in the table of contents. Alt-T opens the Asset Inventory and can show you where you have items.
Trading 101
We will use Antimatter Charge S (Meta Modules T0) as our example item in this.
All Sell and Buy orders are centered on a Single Station. You can remotely buy something, but you cannot remotely sell something unless it has range, explained below.
Buy orders is someone who has requested 'I would like to pay 17.64 isk per round'. This value has to be HIGHER than everyone else or the other higher value ones get filled first. Sort Buy orders by highest price.
Sell order is someone who has said 'I have this item for sale that you can buy for 17.65 isk per round'. This value has to be LOWER than everyone else, or the other people's orders get bought first. Sort Sell orders by lowest price.
In the example below, the person who did the 17.65 sell order messed up most likely, and they set that value only 20 minutes before my screen shot, because the previous buy order of 17.65 got changed 40 minutes earlier.
There is the idea of 'split', which is common among friends: the difference between these two numbers. If someone bought out the messed up order in this case, it would be (19.00+17.66)/2=17.89.
You could also have someone paying 95% of jita, which means 95% of jita sell, which is 17.65*.95=16.77. Which is not a great deal, but the person doing the selling doesn't have to deal with it, and the buyer can make an easy 5%.
All listings have to go in a single station, but those can cover an area. In the example below, the one in green bar is a wide range buy order. The yellow means it's just a system in your route to your next location.
Sometimes it makes sense to travel to buy/sell something. In the case below, you could go to Unpas to buy 42 for only 14.90, but that profit isn't worth it. however, taking 8k antimatter from jita Sirseshin to sell for 3.61 profit per unit is only 28,880 isk profit for burning that many jumps.
Immediate sales have zero taxes. Long term buy/sell have tax rates associated with them, listed below.
Hangers
You have 3 types of hangers that everyone uses:
Cargo hanger. Alt-C brings up your ship cargo, no matter where you are, can is what your ship holds. This is everything in your 'pockets' when travelling around. If you die, you lose that stuff, and 50% is destroyed forever while the rest sits in your wreck.
Item Hanger at each of the places you have stuff. The 'Personal Assets' window helps shows this the easiest, Alt-T. These are things you have bought, stored, or moved around in a ship at one point.
These are 100% safe in an NPC station, like 95% safe in a player owned Citadel in known space, and can be lost inside wormholes if the structure is destroyed. There are exceptions, but won't get into those just now.
You can have 1,000 items per item hanger, but can make Station Container or other containers to hold 1,000 per container.
Ship Hanger is a specialized item hanger that is just ships.
The cargo screen shows everything at the place you are docked.
There are other hangers like ore hangers, fleet hangers, corp hangers, delivery hangers, etc, but those all line up next to these we listed.
You might have to close the window, undock, and then reopen it from time to time to get it to update. This is called a session change, and will cause the database to refresh.
Trading is the great leveler, where everyone is equal.
A day one player with a knowledge of markets of buying low and selling high can make money faster than any other thing in game.
Eve has the most robust economy of any video game out there. One dollar is equal to around 141 million isk circle 2023 Q2 by selling 20k plex for 94 bil isk that costs $650.
Even modern day players who run massive mining fleets or multiboxing supers to run CRAB Beacons cannot compare to a good trader.
To be a trader, you need to train these skills:
Accounting 5. Omega only. Require to lower your taxes on sales.
Broker Relations 5. Required to lower your taxes on making orders.
Honestly, that's it. There are others that can help though:
Advanced Broker Relations. Helps with relisting items at a lower cost. Relisting cuts into profits but is required sometimes to compete.
Trade -> Retail -> Wholesale: the progression in doing continually amounts of trading amounts.
Daytrading, Marketing, Procurement, Visibility - All these skills help modify the ranges and range you can modify trades.
Contracting - Helps create more contracts. not 100% require, but helps.
Social, Connections - Only on improving the tax rates explained below
And a few ships that are helpful
Spaceship command - Helps you get into warp faster (For your Sunesis/Blockade Runner/Deep Space Transport)
Evasive Maneuvering - Helps you get into warp faster
Hauler 5 - For Omega only, Cannot do real trading without Hauler 5 and ...
Transport Ships - Anything under 10 mil isk can be popped easily with a 2 mil destroyer, so you need omega and this.
Cloaking - T1 can go on the Deep Space Transport like the Occator. T2 needed for your Blockade Runner like the Viator. These two makes moving goods safely easy!
Make sure to use Shipping services if you're in a null sec/wormhole group.
Finally, you need spreadshets and tools to help you track prices, profits, and plans. You might need to contract people shipping things around, but realize that hauling is GREAT way to go broke in eve! :D It's a difficult game and easy to make a wallet ending decision, but you will recover!
But once you corner your first market... woo buddy, you end up with a character named OxygenIsotopes!
Cutting Taxes
This is primarily aimed at players planning on playing for more than three months.
Creating a jita alt is a threshold that nearly every long term player crosses at some point or another. Do you do enough combat to warrant buying/selling your own stuff using buy/sell orders? On the low end, this costs a couple hundred isk to save percentage on things later, and on the high end, costs upwards of 150 million isk. (Remember to buy skill books off market inside trade schools instead of straight injection, saves you 30%!)
The skills to train on these characters are pretty straight forward: trade and standing skills. https://wiki.bravecollective.com/public/dojo/wiki/station_trading_complete_guide has a better rundown that I can do, but this is a beginner course here. (note, the advanced broker skill for adjusting skills is helpful.)
I would start with your trading and contracting skills: Trade, Retail initially, and Contracting. Contracting is important.
Later on, you can move up into doing buy/sell orders, which is when you want to start reducing your taxes as well. Note, taxes only come into play when doing standing orders and NOT when doing immediate buy/sell. But I always recommend selling in jita with standing orders, which require multiple skills.
I've pasted some examples of the savings you can see by doing skills and standings. but even doing the small skills can make great impact on your buy/sell orders.
Let us know if you have questions. Thanks!
edit: 30.6 million isk later and like 10 hours of work later: standings went from 7.86/3.93 to 8.32/5.11, causing my taxes to drop from .768% to .714%. So... 4.3 billion isk later in sales orders, i'll recoup my isk but not my time.
edit2: the tax holiday is over, this is more severe now:
Edit3: did the Blood Stained Stars to boost my faction statndings, broker's fee went from 1.21% to 1.2%. welp. :smile:
edit4: https://www.pandemic-horde.org/foru...y-character-in-new-eden-fast.2701/#post-22990 More detail on getting faction
edit 5: made new jita alt, with much lower corp faction and higher alliance faction: cal navy 6.53 and cal 5.42. lost an extra 0.05% from the 7.86/5.11 before.
How to improve faction standings
Faction standings are important but not THAT important, except for a few key critical jobs. Often, Corporation standings are enough. Raising your faction standings is hard, while corporation standings are easier.
The factions in empire are split into three 'groups'. Minmatar and Gallente, the 'Right' side, and Amarr and Caldari, the 'Wrong' side, are the two majors. Then you have a loose confederation of hostile organizations like Guristas, Sansha, Rogue Drones, etc. Generally, almost all factions are tied to one of these power blocks. Some are exceptions, like the blood stains arc through Sisters of Eve. https://eve-survival.org/wikka.php?wakka=MissionReportsEpicArc has details on those arcs, btw.
Generally, you can improve your through a couple main activities:
The epic arc, as mentioned
Career agents, which if you didn't do, you REALLY need to do to understand the game.
Doing missions for one of the corporations inside those factions, every 15th mission gives you a faction mission.
Turning in items for cosmos, it's a way to buy your way to success, or run the missions to get the items.
Datacenter missions, where you turn in pirate tags, another way to buy yourself to success.
You can also accidently lower it.
Shooting their ships, usually in a faction mission.
Shooting or repping anything in an edencom system/trig system.
Declining a mission too frequently
I'll point out that your Jita alt can use a bit of standings as well, as it gives you a VERY slight improvement with Caldari Navy taxes if you have good standings with them. 😄 If any of your standings get low enough, some ships can shoot you, but if it's not edencom, it takes a lot.
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Data_centers
Note, there is a series of location agents that some people use as well, which require high corporation standings.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/bd1s6v/list_of_systems_with_the_most_locator_agents/
List of systems with the most locator agents by u/Nimos in Eve
if you want to know which is easiest to get locator agents for.
Trading 101 inside Pandemic Horde
Sunesis fit
Because of suicide gankers, you can EASILY be killed in high sec in most non-tanked ships. You need at least 20k EFHP and a sub 2 second warp to be 'safe'ish. You generally have to pick between high tank and sub 2 second and higher hauling capability and still sub 2 second. Training Evasive Maneuvers and spaceship command is a MUST to fit this ship properly.
See High sec mining for more details on why haulers are easy to catch and kill.
This is a one that holds 1.16k m^3 and only needs evasive manuvering 3 or 4, i forget. Just make sure it warps in under 2 seconds on the fitting screen without the mwd on, otherwise put on more inertial stabs. Cloak is optional along with the core probe launcher and ec drones etc. Not suitable for null sec/wormhole space.
[Sunesis, T1 Hauling Sunesis]
Expanded Cargohold II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Multispectrum Shield Hardener II
5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Medium Shield Extender II
Medium Shield Extender II
Core Probe Launcher I
Prototype Cloaking Device I
Small Cargohold Optimization I
Small Cargohold Optimization I
Small Cargohold Optimization I
Hornet EC-300 x4
Core Scanner Probe I x8
This is a one that holds that only holds 975 m^3, requires evasive manuevering 5, spaceship command 5, but warps sub 2 and has a 17.5k tank with the hardener on.
[Sunesis, Tanky Hauling Sunesis]
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Multispectrum Shield Hardener II
Medium Shield Extender II
Medium Shield Extender II
Medium Shield Extender II
Festival Launcher
Core Probe Launcher I
Prototype Cloaking Device I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Hornet EC-300 x4
Core Scanner Probe I x8
Yoiul Festival Snowball x41