Expanding Your Empire

I have given a lot of thought lately as to why I experienced such amazing profits relative to my liquid capital when I first started trading and how poorly those profits scaled with an increase in capital.  The principal seems sound: what I can do with 100 mil, I should be able to do twice as well with 200 mil.  Why was this seemingly extremely simple concept not translating from a sound idea on paper into a working theory in EVE?  I began to look at exactly what I had been doing to increase my involvement in the market as I grew in wealth and how I could change that to increase my profits and I believe I have figured it out.

Previously, the way I had increased my stake in the market was to increase my investing in a blanket fashion.  Whereas before, I might have been investing 10 mil an item into 10 items, I was now investing 20 mil an item into 10 items.  This pattern continued with slight variations; although I did invest in more items, I continuously put more ISK into the amount I was investing per item as my wealth increased.

That is the reason my profits were increasing at a snail's pace: the correct way to grow as a trader is not to increase amount invested per item, but rather amount of items invested in.

Had I gone from investing 10 mil an item into 10 items to 10 mil an item into 20 items, my profits would have approached, if not achieved, a level twice as high as they previously had been.  The reasoning behind this is simple, once you think about it: if it takes an hour to move 10 units of X at a profit of 1 mil/unit, and I have invested enough ISK to purchase 10 units of X, I should make 10 mil ISK/hour off of X.  If I invest enough ISK to purchase 20 units of X, I should still make 10 mil ISK/hour, but this time for 2 hours.  However, if I invest in 10 units of X and 10 units of a near-identical item Y, I should make 20 mil ISK/hour, 10 from X and 10 from Y.

Though it seems as though investing in double the amount of an item and then going twice as long between updating orders is a sound idea, you have to consider that the real world is not the perfect example I included above, and in reality, there are other people like you, sitting in a station, spinning their ship, and updating their orders to stay on top.  When you invest in an item, you are much more likely to be undercut than you are to have your order completely filled.  Each order I place on the market is generally undercut at least 10 times before being fulfilled completely.  By investing in more items, in addition to having the chance to make more ISK per time, you also have the opportunity to avoid being undercut; if you are trading in item X and you are undercut, you immediately lose the ability to profit, whereas if you are trading in X, Y, and Z, and X is undercut, you continue to profit off of Y and Z.

I have been practicing this method of expansion very stringently the past few days, but today I kicked it into overdrive, and the results were very satisfying.  Today alone, I went from about 2.65 bil to 2.85 bil, a profit of about 200 million ISK.  That's a return of about 7.5%, which isn't bad for one day's investing.  However, this practice comes with a price: with my skills, I have a maximum of 113 orders on the market at any given time.  For the majority of my trading today, I did not have more than 20 remaining orders available to me.  This level of expansion means that in the near future, I may be required to train up my skills in order to be able to make more market orders (or make another market alt to put in a different hub, or both).

All I know is, since beginning to use this strategy, I've noticed definite increases in my profits, so unless something changes in the future or I discover a better method, this is the method I will continue to use as I grow my empire, and it is the method I will recommend to others in their expansion as well.  Good luck increasing the size of your empire and fly safe o7

Of Code and ISK Part II: I Just Wanna Tend the Coffers

After my last post, Of Code and ISK, I received some feedback indicating that although I accomplished what I had in mind, I could have done so much more.  For those of you who don't feel like reading my other post, I assembled a sequence of programs that would allow me to scan the entire market of a station, export all orders to a CSV file, read those orders, perform some analytics, and spit out a list of items that would be profitable to trade.  The downside to this method was that it would take a matter of hours to scan the entire market of a station.

Some of the comments I received led me to the EMDR, or EVE Market Data Relay.  I had been adverse to using this tool previously fearing many a spoofed order or inaccurate data, not to mention difficulty implementing it into my code.

I was so wrong.

I spent a few hours today tweaking my code and have managed to truncate my entire line of software to an HTML file and two Python files (one of which does nothing more than host a local HTTP server to make accessing the HTML file easier).  All I have to do is run both Python files, navigate to my server in the IGB, and refresh the view once in a while to see the latest data on my screen.

For the webpage, I took advantage of the fact that the IGB supports HTML5 by using a button that runs a XMLHttpRequest function to pull my file into a table I have in the page.  This table uses the jQuery Tablesorter to keep everything organized, allowing me to easily read and interpret the data.

I have to say, I am very impressed with how easy to use EMDR was and how much nicer this is compared to my previous method.  I will include some samples of my code to make life a little easier for those of you who wish to make something similar.  This is the Javascript code to parse a file (outputhtml.txt) which is stored in the same directory as index.html and set the contents of the div with id='main' to the contents of the file.

 function doStuff () {

            var oReq = new XMLHttpRequest();

            oReq.onload = reqListener;

            oReq.open("get", "outputhtml.txt", true);

            oReq.send(); 

        };

        

function reqListener () {

            document.getElementById('main').innerHTML = this.responseText;

        };

If you wish to use EMDR in your Python program, check out the data format guide so you know what you're dealing with.  In case their example didn't make it clear, you're going to be dealing with a series of dictionaries.  In the case of orders, each dictionary will have a key ('rowsets') which contains an array of dictionaries, each of a different item or region.  Simply configure your calculations and have the program output your results to a text file.  Be sure to format them properly in HTML for easy importation into your webpage.  I will also include a method for outputting your data in HTML while linking the name of each item to its market details:

<a href='javascript:void(0)' onclick='CCPEVE.showMarketDetails("+str(itemid)+")'>"+ rec.name+ "</a>"

Finally, a screenshot of my site.  It's nice, clean, and simple, and can be sorted by any column.

And with that, feel free to ask any questions you may have and I will do my best to answer them.  Thanks for reading and fly safe o7 

Of Code and ISK

One of the great things about EVE Online is that a very large portion of the people who play it work in the field of IT.  This results in a huge amount of third party tools (EVEMon, EVE Mentat, Elinor, EVE-Central, most alliance's websites, and the list goes on and on...) as well as a great deal of support for developer's from CCP's end.  The possibilities are nigh endless in terms of the applications that can be developed with some code know-how, some hard work, plenty of Googling, and a vision.

It all starts with an idea.  As most of my readers will know, one of my favorite/main activities in EVE is station trading, which is where I make much of my ISK (and try to put in as little effort as possible).  However, when it comes to the things I've tried coding to make station trading more profitable, I've put in many hours of effort, but I dare say that sometimes, I've enjoyed them more than EVE (looking at you, siege fleets).  One of the most difficult parts of station trading is deciding which items you'll be trading to turn a profit.  A lot of factors must be considered when making the decision, such as the stability of the item, the volume traded, the profit margin, the cost, etc.  The end result is that although a profitable item is not hard to find, one that will give consistent and high returns can be.  Then it hit me: why don't I make a program that will tell me what items offer the highest margins and meet my criteria for items that I want to trade?

I'm no code genius, but I have limited experience in web design (HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript/jQuery), as well as software development (Python and some C#).  My original plan was to design my program in a way that allowed the entire thing to be operated from the IGB in EVE.  The program would first scan the market (every item) to put them in the cache, then scrape the cache, calculate the margin for each item, filter the items through some criteria, and finally output the results to a web page that would be readable in the IGB.  My hopes were dashed as I quickly found that such a system would be much more trouble than it is worth.

To begin with, I needed a webpage that I could load in the IGB that would scan the market to load every item into the cache.  Rather than start from scratch, I butchered my code from the order scanner page of masterpiece of EVE market software known as EVE Mentat.  Using that as a starting point, I now had an HTML page that would open the market details for every item in my list.  To make life easier, I set up a simple HTTP server with this script (courtesy of stackoverflow).  Simply save that as a .py file in the same directory as your HTML file (which you should name index.html) and run it.  You can access the file by going to 127.0.0.1:8000 in the IGB.

Now I found myself with a webpage capable of scanning the market, but no item IDs for which to scan.  I downloaded a data dump (which was from Incarna, so I'm probably missing some items but they shouldn't be too big of a deal) from the EVE forums here and through the magic of MySQL pulled out a list of every item in the database which exists on the market (some items can't be purchased on the market, but a quick Google search taught me how to select only those that can be).  This data was placed in the HTML page I had made earlier and when I ran it, it worked!  However, the import turned up over 6000 items, meaning that with a 3 second interval (the minimum I'd need to use to avoid going over the maximum number of market requests I could make, which would make the script continue to run without actually pulling more data), it would take hours upon hours to scan the market.  I solved this by just letting it run while I slept.

At this stage, I was left with the market data for (almost) every item on the market in my cache.  What to do from here?  I used the dumper tool from EVE-Central to scrape the cache and export the market orders for every item into one CSV file.  This process unsurprisingly took quite a while.  However, it also meant that much of the hard part was done, as Python was undoubtedly my strongest language of all those I had used so far, and all that remained was to use it to process the data into a user-friendly format.  Some quick code calculations yielded a script which analyzed the orders for every item, threw out those with no data or those with only one type (buy or sell) of order, calculated the % profit margin for each item (taking my skills into account), and threw away any item with less than 30 mil worth of potential profit currently on the market.  Entity's Reverence library provided me with the means to pull the names for the items from their item IDs.  The results were exported to another HTML file in the form of a table, which using some jQuery magic, gave me the ability to sort the data by column.  I included columns for volume and margin, so I could play with the data as I wished.  I also made each item's name into a link that would open the market data for that item, to make checking on/trading desirable items easier.

I am fairly happy with the end result, and it's not hard to see why; I now have an easy to use table that contains data on most of the items worth station trading.  I only actually went through the list for a few minutes, but in those few minutes I found at least two new items to invest in with profit margins in the thousands of percents that looked very promising.

For the time being, I do not think I will be releasing this file.  Though I love helping the community, which gives me indirect competition, I have never released any of the items I am trading in because I would like to avoid directly competing with my readers as much as possible.  Releasing this file to the masses would make my life absolute hell whenever I try to station trade.  However, I spent about two days making this program, and I did not have available to me (most of) a step by step guide on how to do so.  Anyone with a simple background in code or the ability to Google should be able to recreate a lot of what I've done here simply based on reading the above guide.  Though I probably shouldn't, I have a soft spot for helping people out, so if you have any questions, leave a comment or PM me on reddit (/u/toxicity959) and I will see if I can help you work through whatever problems you may have encountered.

Thanks for reading my blog and keep on developing!  Fly safe o7

Ratting for ISK

"Ratting" in EVE is the process of killing NPC pirates to collect ISK.  There are multiple ways to rat, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Belt Ratting - Belt ratting is when you warp between the asteroid belts of a system killing the rats that spawn to collect bounties.  In general, the lower the security status of the system is, the higher quality the rats will be.  This means they will be more difficult to kill, but also have higher bounties, increasing ISK/hour if you can handle them.  Three types of special spawns are possible when belt ratting.  Hauler spawns are comprised of an escort and a hauler, which will contain minerals in its wreck, most commonly just over 3 million units of Tritanium.  Faction spawns, such as Dread Gurista rats, can drop expensive faction modules, and they have increased bounties.  Officer spawns are the rarest special spawns, and their loot can be worth billions of ISK, the best quality items in EVE.  A faction spawn usually occurs once every 20-50 spawns cleared, and an officer spawn is even rarer, occuring once for every 20-40 faction spawns, or once every 400-2000 cleared spawns^[1].

Anomaly Running - Anomaly ratting consists of using your system scanner to find anomalies in space which are similar to 1-pocket missions.  Anomalies do not have acceleration gates.  They are wave after wave of rats, providing many opportunities for making ISK.  To find an anomaly, open your scanner and open the System Scanner tab.  Select your On-Board Scanner and hit scan.  After 10 seconds, you should see a list of all available anomalies in the system.  A list of the difficulty levels of various anomalies can be found here.  Each anomaly is different in structure, but the basics remain: warp in and shoot everything.  Like belt ratting, bounties are the main source of income from anomalies.  Anomalies can also contain faction spawns, like belts.  However, anomalies cannot spawn officers.  Instead, they have a chance to produce an escalation.  An escalation will make a bookmark in your journal for a DED complex in another system (see below).

Complex Running - Complexes are similar to full missions.  They have waves and acceleration gates.  However, complexes give rewards in the form of ISK from bounties, as well as loot at the end of the complex.  Complexes can either be scanned down with probes or acquired as escalations from anomalies (see above). Complexes from escalations are more difficult than the anomaly that escalated to them.  They can offer loot such as faction type modules (eg. Pith A-Type Large Shield Booster) and Overseer's Effects, which can be sold to NPC buy orders for ISK.  They can also be disappointing, offering only Overseer's Effects, which will amount to about the same ISK/hour as regular anomalies with a little more work, or very lucrative, with billions of ISK worth of loot as a reward.

The general rule with ratting is that the lower the security level of the space you're ratting in is, the better the spawns will be.  This means tougher spawns with higher bounties in the case of belt ratting, or more/more difficult anomalies/complexes spawning.  This also rings true for the truesec of a nullsec system (eg. a -1.0 will offer the best ratting, while a -0.3 system will offer worse ratting).  In most cases, ratting/exploration in high security space won't be worth it.  Your wallet would be better off if you spent your time running missions or some other activity.  Ratting gets better in low security space, but it really shines in nullsec.

To properly rat in nullsec, you need to fit the right ship for the space you're ratting in.  The factors you should take into consideration are how safe you are in that space and the type of rat you'll be fighting.  The first step in choosing and fitting a ratting ship is to figure out what kind of rat you'll be fighting and choose accordingly.  A simple list of the type of damage your ship should deal and tank based on the faction of rat you'll be fighting is^[2]:

• Guristas: Kinetic then Thermal damage
• Blood Raider: EM then Thermal damage
• Sanshas Nation: EM then Thermal damage
• Serpentis: Kinetic then Thermal damage
• Angel Cartel: Explosive then Kinetic damage

In general, the type of damage you want to deal to a rat is the same type of damage the rat will be dealing to you.  Different ships will do better against different factions, so choose with care.  For example, the Ishtar is a popular ship to rat Guristas with because of its naturally high base Kinetic/Thermal resists and the fact that its drones will do lots of Kinetic/Thermal damage.  

Once you've figured out the type of damage you'll want to tank, you need to choose a ship based on how safe the space you're ratting in is.  A blingy faction battleship might be a good idea if you're ratting in the middle of a blob of friendly nullsec, but for "ninja ratting" in hostile territory, you'll want something smaller and faster.  Another reason the Ishtar is a popular choice is because it's small and fast, like a cruiser, and using a high slot for a cloak won't hurt your DPS since it's a drone boat.  Other popular choices include T3s for their ability to fit cloaks and interdiction nullifiers to escape gate camps.  If you plan on running complexes, remember to fit a probe launcher (preferably a Sister's probe launcher with Sister's probes to minimize scan time).

The same basic nullsec rules apply regardless of the space you're ratting in.  Keep an eye on local/intel channels and watch for neutral/red players.  If you have access to a dockable station/POS, dock up/get in shields when you see one of them in local.  Otherwise, head to a safe spot and turn on your cloak if you have one (which you should if ratting in space without safe stations/POSes) and wait them out.  Hopefully they'll leave soon and not try to scan you down and blob you.

For those of us lucky enough to have access to space from a big alliance, ratting is pretty easy since intel channels tend to have the area locked down.  Otherwise, your best bet will be to head to NPC nullsec and rat there.  To choose a good section of space, open your map by hitting F10, scroll to the Statistics folder and click Ships destroyed in the last 24 hours.  Look for a few systems that are quiet and don't seem to have many kills in them.  Also try to be quick and mobile, which will reduce your chances of getting blobbed and blapped.  Ratting for hours in an expensive Tengu will only make you good ISK if you don't end up losing the Tengu two hours later.

As long as you fit the ship for the right purpose (cloak if in hostile space, probe launcher if scanning for complexes) and for the right rats (make sure your damage and tank are the right types) and you keep your eye on local, you should be fine.  

Death and Taxes (But Mostly Taxes)

Though you see them every time you make an order, most of the time you probably ignore the minute taxes you're charged each time you make an order.  You're probably thinking that these fractions of a percent's worth of taxes aren't something that will amount to too much ISK.

You're wrong.

A post on the EVE forums that I'm far too lazy to look up claimed that with an average profit margin of 10% on each item traded, someone who trades their way from 1 billion ISK to 2 billion ISK will lose 20 billion ISK to taxes.  I'm not sure of the validity of this statement (again, I'm far too lazy to do the math) but I wouldn't rule it out completely just yet.  Keep in mind that the default tax on each buy order is a 1% broker fee, and the default tax on each sell order is the same broker fee in addition to a 1.5% sales tax, amounting to a 2.5% loss.  It might not seem like much, but when you're filling hundreds of both buy and sell orders a day, these numbers add up.

Luckily, two skills come to the rescue.  The Broker Relations skill reduces your broker fee by 0.05% per skill level up to a max reduction of 0.25%.  This fee applies to both buy and sell orders, so though it might not seem like much, ridding yourself of a 0.5% loss with each item traded makes a significant difference to your income.  In addition, the Accounting skill reduces the sales tax you pay with each sell order by 0.15% per skill level, up to a max reduction of 0.75%, resulting in a sales tax of 0.75%.  Again, this might not seem significant, but it certainly is.

Skills aren't the only thing that can reduce the taxes you pay when trading.  Your standings with the corporation that owns the station within which you're trading also influence the broker fee you're required to pay (unfortunately, the same standings do not influence your sales tax).  Having someone run a few missions for that corporation and turn them in with you in fleet is one way to raise your corp standings and therefore reduce your broker fees when trading in that station.

That's all great and all, but now that you know about these standings, how will you know what items are worth trading and what items aren't?  An item with a huge volume moved per day but only a 1% margin between sell and buy orders might seem like a great item to trade, but in reality, it'll only shrink your wallet.  The formula for calculating this margin is very simple: % paid per buy order / % received per sell order.

For example, let's assume there's a station trader with both Accounting and Broker Relations at level 5.  His sales tax is 0.75% and his broker fee is 0.75%.  This means that when buying an item, he pays 100.75% of the item's cost to buy it and receives 98.5% of it's price when selling it (100% - 0.75% - 0.75%).  100.75/98.5 = 1.0228.  This means that to make a profit off an item after taxes, the raw profit margin on the item needs to be at least 2.28%.

Now let's take a pilot with neither Accounting nor Broker Relations trained.  101.5/97.5 = 1.041.  A pilot with both skills untrained needs to trade an item with a minimum raw profit margin of 4.1%.  This means that a pilot who trains both skills to level 5 can make profits off of trades that have a raw profit margin almost half the size of a pilot who has neither skill trained.

It goes without saying that this makes a big difference.  Though it might not seem like it to an aspiring trader, once you're managing hundreds of items, it tends to get harder to find items with decent profit margins to trade.  Training these two skills means that the variety of items you can trade and profit with is greatly increased.

TL;DR: Taxes suck, train Accounting and Broker Relations up if you want to make good money trading.

EVE Mentat

EVE Mentat is a very powerful trading tool that can boost ISK/effort when trading immensely. It's a little tough to get a hang of at first, as everything EVE-related always seems to be, but when used properly, it can massively cut down on the amount of time it takes to update orders and it can make life a lot easier for a station trader.

After starting EVE Mentat up for the first time, you're going to have to feed it your API information.  Go to File -> Manage Characters and add your character(s) to the tool.  I didn't see any point in adding any character besides my trading character.  Once your character(s) have been added, click the Update now button on the right side.  It might take a little while for the program to complete the process of updating everything it needs to from the Internet.

Now we need to configure the preferences to make everything a little easier.  Hit File -> Preferences (or Ctrl+O) to open up the preferences menu.  First, click the Orders import category under the Import tree and change your default import source for your character orders to File.  Your API is limited to a certain number of pulls per hour, while you can keep updating your orders from file as frequently as you'd like, which I'll go into detail with later.  Next, check the next two categories, Market orders import and Market favorites import to make sure that the path to your client is correct.

The next step is one of the most important, but also one of the easiest.  open the IGB menu at the top of the page and click Enable IGB support.  This is one of EVE Mentat's most useful features and it will make your life a hell of a lot easier.

Now that the configuration's all done, let's go over some of the information available on the main page. On the bottom left corner is the Balance and actives panel, which displays a bunch of useful information about your wallet.  The Total value is very useful, as it represents the sum of your wallet balance, your sell orders, and the ISK you have in escrow for your buy orders.  Most of the rest of the information here is pretty self explanatory.  Just above the panels you'll notice a few tabs that display some very helpful graphs.  Your Balance graph will give you a nice visual representation of the changes in your ISK balance (hopefully this graph will be nicely sloping upwards).  Next is the Trade graph, which will show you the total amounts of ISK incomes and outgoes you have.  The Trade skills graph usually won't be very useful to you, but it's a nice place to check out your skills if you need to figure out what other skills to train.

Now comes the fun part: using EVE Mentat to simplify your life.

First, EVE Mentat can be used to show you the profit margins on various items you might be interested in trading.  At the top, click the Market browser tab to open the market browser, and click the Cache import button to import your market cache into the browser.  Your market cache contains the market information of every item you've looked up in the in game market.  After you've imported your cache, you'll notice that the previously empty Navigator menu on the left now has some items in it.  Clicking on an item will reveal information about it in the market browser.  However, a lot of this information isn't too useful for a station trader, especially as it's region-wide rather than station specific.  Luckily, EVE Mentat gives us a way to fix that.

You'll notice that in the Navigator menu, you're given a bunch of information to filter data by location.  How this should be used to filter results differs between station trading and region trading, but for the purposes of simplicity I'll assume you're using a character that never undocks to trade in just one station.  Go ahead and filter your results by region, then by system, and finally by station to get just the results that are relevant to you.  This data is nice and all, but how does it help you?  On the bar right underneath the tabs at the top, you'll notice a button that says Deviation on the right side.  Click this and choose the Best buy/sell price option.  You'll notice the numbers under the Deviation column in the main browser window change.  Go ahead and sort that from lowest to highest in the sell window.  What you're looking for is the lowest number.

In the picture to the left, you'll notice that I've selected the data for the Tycoon skillbook being sold in Jita.  The lowest number in the Deviation column is 22.5%.  That means that there's a 22.5% profit margin on this skillbook; buying a Tycoon skillbook with a buy order and reselling it with a sell order at these prices would generate a 22.5% raw ISK profit.  Now keep in mind that these numbers do NOT include taxes.  The real margin is going to be lower depending on your skills.  Obviously, the higher the number, the better.  Keep in mind that this number isn't everything; a high margin is great, but it doesn't mean anything if you can never sell the item.  You'll still want to check out the market data for the item in game to check the volume moved per day and make sure it's not one of those items that moves once every month that you're tying up all your valuable ISK in.

Now that you've found the items you want to trade, you're going to have a lot of orders.  While you may not have a huge amount of orders starting out, it isn't unusual to see traders with hundreds of orders per character once they have more capital.  Going through orders one by one to update them stops being feasible after a point.  Luckily, EVE Mentat is here to come to the rescue.

Remember the IGB option we enabled earlier?  It's time to use it.  At the top, click on the IGB menu and click Copy IGB url to clipboard.  Now, open up EVE.  First, open up your wallet and hit the Export button at the bottom to export information about your orders to a file.  Next, open your in game browser (click on the big E in the very top left corner, go to Accessories and click on Browser.  Now, paste the URL we just copied into the browser.  You'll also want to bookmark this for later use.

From here, click the Market scanner: character orders link at the top.  This fun tool contains a list of every item you have an open order on.  Its purpose is to go through each item on the market, saving the latest data about the item to your cache.  The default scan delay is 3 seconds; I find that with my computer and connection, it's safe to set it to 2 seconds to save time.  You can change it as you like, but make sure that it provides enough time for the market window to load the orders available for an item before it moves on to the next one, or else you'll be missing out on data on your orders.  Start the scan and sit back and relax while it goes through the list pulling data for each item.

Once it's done, go back to EVE Mentat.  In the Market browser tab, click on the Cache import button again to import the latest market cache, which will now contain data about each one of the items you have an order up for.  Next, click on the Character orders tab and click on the File import button at the top.  Your window should now display each one of your orders, and next to each, it will display the status of the order.  Orders that say Fulfilled have been filled; if your orders have been fulfilled, you'll want to remake them in order to keep trading items you want to.  Orders that say Ok are currently the lowest sell/highest buy order on the market, meaning you won't need to interfere with the order just yet.  Orders that say Price overrode, which will likely be many of them, are orders that are currently not where you want them to be in the market.

If you click on the number under the Price column of one of these orders, you'll notice a fun window appear with information about your order, as well as the orders of your competitors.  Take a look at the information displayed to decide if you should change the order to be the best on the market.  Sometimes, someone might undercut you heavily with a single unit of an item, forcing you to change your price so they buy you out.  Other time, the item might have gone too low for you to make a profit on, and so you should hold off until the market recovers.  As fast as it would be, it is unwise to blindly copy numbers over to update all of your orders.  If you decide to change the order, EVE Mentat has got your back.

You'll notice a Copy new price button in this menu.  By clicking this button, EVE Mentat will put the new suggested price for the item in your clipboard, ready to paste in EVE.  The default is to go 0.01 ISK above/below the current best order, but this margin is adjustable in the preferences.  There is also a check box on the right that you can check to make EVE Mentat automatically copy the new price to your clipboard upon opening this menu, further reducing the amount of effort you have to put in to make boatloads of ISK.

Once the price is copied to your clipboard, all you have to do is open up your wallet window in eve, right click -> Modify Order on the relevant order, and paste the new price in and hit enter.  Using EVE Mentat to manage your orders will make your life a hell of a lot easier and it'll cost you a lot less time to go through all your orders and make sure they're the market best than it would take you to do it by hand, once you get the hang of it.

You can download EVE Mentat here.  Note: As of 2-17-13, the website says this is the latest version, but in fact it is not.  Once you start up EVE Mentat for the first time, you will be prompted to update to version 1.2.16, which you should do with the automatic updater tool.  

Station Trading 101

You asked for it, so here it is: my guide to making your fortune by playing the market in EVE.  I'll be covering the basics of station trading in EVE.  This guide is written from my perspective, working my way up from an initial investment of 500 million ISK to about 2 billion in ISK + assets in about 2 weeks.

Table of Contents:

1. Preface
2. Skills
3. Home Base
4. Choosing Items
5. Setting Up Orders
6. Checking and Maintaining Orders

1. Preface

This guide is written from my personal experience trading.  The techniques used here may or may not work for you.  That being said, I believe that once you get a decent amount of ISK to start with (hundreds of millions), the best way to further your wealth is to do station trading with the ISK.  Unless you find joy in spreadsheets and numbers and never undocking, I recommend the creation of an alt to use for station trading only.  I have an alt that I use for trading that does nothing but modify orders.  No ships, no undocking, just numbers.  Before beginning, here is what I recommend you have:

• An alt that you don't mind not flying with again on an account that can spare a few days of skill training time.
• Investment capital.  I suggest starting with at least 500m but as low as 100m will still generate profit that is not insignificant.

2. Skills

As a trader in EVE, you'll need a few skills to make a profit and make sure that this profit is as large as it can be.  There are plenty of of skills in the "Trade" category, but many of these are not needed for basic station trading.  Many of these skills are not strictly necessary for trading; it's very simple to flip items and make a profit.  However, to maximize your profit margins and ensure that you can always keep up with your orders, it is a good idea to train these skills to respectable levels. For now, there's not much reason in bothering with the skills that modify the range at which you can modify buy and sell orders as you'll likely have an alt that will remain in one station trading permanently.  There are three groups of skills we need to train. 

The first is to decrease the amount of ISK that is taken from our market orders through market related costs.  The skills Accounting and Broker Relations are used to decrease this margin.  These are good skills to train because they reduce the amount of ISK that is taken out of your pocket by game mechanics with every transaction. 

The second group is a single skill: Margin Trading.  This skill reduces the amount of ISK you have to put down when you make a buy order.  Without the skill, if you make a buy order for 1,000 units of Tritanium at 1.00 ISK each, you have to put down the entire 1,000 ISK required upon making the order.  However, with Margin Trading I, you only have to put down 750 ISK to make the order.  The other 250 ISK is subtracted from your wallet upon completion of the order.  This way, you can have many more active buy orders than you have ISK. For example, I currently have 869 million ISK in active buy orders.  Because I have Margin Trading IV, I only had to put down 163 million ISK.  I have 464 million ISK remaining in my wallet.  This means that if all of my buy orders filled simultaniously, I would not be able to pay for them all.  Although this might seem like a bad idea, in reality buy orders usually fill very slowly, and the ISK you make through sell orders comes through at a rate fast enough to replenish your wallet before it is drained by buy orders.  This makes this skill very handy to have. 

The third group of skills is the group that modifies the amount of active buy and sell orders you can have.  The amount of orders allowed by these skills grows with each progressive skill, starting with 4 orders per skill level of Trade and increasing to 32 orders per skill level of Tycoon.  Earlier on (high millions/low billions) you will likely not need to train above Wholesale, if at all.  Later on, if you choose to increase the volume of orders you manage, you may wish to train further.  Keep in mind that although more active orders = larger income, it also increases the time you need to go through all of your orders and make sure they remain on top.

Skills:

• Trade
• Knowledge of the market and skill at manipulating it. Active buy/sell order limit increased by 4 per level of skill.
• Accounting
• Proficiency at squaring away the odds and ends of business transactions, keeping the check books tight.  Each level of skill reduces transaction tax by 10%.  Requires: Trade IV
• Broker Relations
• Proficiency at driving down market-related costs.  Each level of skill grants a 5% reduction in the costs associated with setting up a market order, which usually come to 1% of the order's total value. This can be further influenced by the player's standing towards the owner of the station where the order is entered.  Requires: Trade II
• Retail
• Ability to organize and manage market operations.  Each level raises the limit of active orders by 8.  Requires: Trade II
• Wholesale
• Ability to organize and manage large-scale market operations.  Each level raises the limit of active orders by 16.Ability to organize and manage large-scale market operations.  Each level raises the limit of active orders by 16.  Requires: Retail V, Marketing II
• Tycoon
• Ability to organize and manage ultra large-scale market operations.  Each level raises the limit of active orders by 32. Requires: Wholesale V

3. Home Base

Once you've started skill training and feel that you've trained enough to begin trading, you'll need to choose a home base.  Your home base depends on the amount of time you'll be able to dedicate to trading.  Someone who updates their orders every 15 minutes will find that they will make much more money in Jita than in Rens, while someone who updates their orders once or twice a day generally won't make as much ISK in Jita as they could in another trade hub where their orders will not be undercut as often.  The top three trade hubs in order from largest to smallest are Jita, Amarr, and Rens.  Here is a link to a table of EVE's 30 top trade hubs.  If you find the hub you're trading in to be too competitive, it might be a good idea to find another one farther down on that list and switch to that hub. 

My experience trading in Jita 4-4 has been a positive one.  It is frustrating to see people undercut my order by a large amount, but in general I have enjoyed the fast paced market and the quick ISK generation.  After settling on a home station, get your character there and dock up.  Enjoy the sights as your ship is towed into the station, you won't be seeing them on that particular character any time soon.

4. Choosing Items

Now that you've got your market alt created, skilled, and docked in the station you've chosen at your home, it's time to get down to the nitty gritty of trading.  A good program to use for identifying items is EVE Mentat.  It's an amazing program with a lot of cool features that would require a whole seperate guide.  Even without the aid of software, it is still pretty straightforward to find an item to trade. 

First, open your market browser.  Open up the Ship Equipment category to start and navigate to your favorite type of module.  In this example, I'll use shield extenders to demonstrate how to choose an item.  This is the market page for Medium Shield Extender I.  Looking at this page, we can see that the current highest buy order in the station (because remember, this is station trading, we want to only deal with items and orders in this station.  I don't want to be running around collecting loot at all) is 20,592.06 ISK, and the lowest sell order is 41,187.99 ISK.  This means that for every unit of this item I buy through a buy order and then sell through a sell order, I'll be almost doubling my ISK (after taxes).  Sounds great and all, but keep in mind that this item is very low value.  At 20k ISK a unit, I won't be making billions off of this item alone.  Because of the amount of ISK I have, I have decided that I do not want to trade this item, as I can trade other higher value items in higher volumes to make more ISK with my order.  However, for the purposes of this guide, I will demonstrate my process with this item. 

What we can see from this screen is that the profit margin on this item is about 100%.  This means that when I make a buy order for the item and then sell it through sell orders, I will be making a profit of 100% on my investment.  Next, we click on the Price History tab towards the top.  This screen shows the 3 month price history of the item.  From this chart we can tell quite a few things.  First I will break down what each part of the graph means.  Put on your thinking hats and get ready for some SCIENCE! (Not really)

• The red line represents the 5 day average. 
• The green line represents the 20 day average. 
• The yellow dots and red silhouette represent the volatility of the item.  The narrower the silhouette is, the less volatile the price of the item is. 
• The green bars on the bottom represent the volume of the item being moved every day. 

Now let's analyze this graph.  Together.  Take a look at the red line.  It seems to be spiking in some areas.  However, the green line is mostly stable.  The areas where the item's price spikes are the areas in which the silhouette is the widest.  This could indicate that the spikes are caused by market anomalies, while the price for the item seems mostly steady.  Now looking at the bars on the bottom of the graph we can see that an average of 2,000 units are moving through the market every day in this region.  That's a possible 2,000 * 20,000 = 40 million ISK profit every day, if your orders are ALWAYS on top.  If you have a life, this is very unlikely; expect much less from the item.  However, it is obvious that there is ISK to be made.

What I look for when choosing an item is a good profit margin (>30%) and a good volume being moved every day, along with a steady price line.  This meets all of the above.  Before making an order, I want to add the item to the market quickbar.  This is a list of my "favorite" items on the market that makes it easier to manage my orders.  By adding the item to the list, I won't have to navigate through so many market menus to see it, all I have to do is click on the quickbar tab in the left pane of the market window. 

For those of you who would like to go more in depth into choosing an item, I recommend reading this article from E-UNI. It's a method called the Bullworth Burger.

5. Setting Up Orders

Now lets go ahead and make a buy order.  Here are the settings I use for my buy orders.  I set the price to 0.01 ISK higher than the highest buy order in my view that has a green bar on it (green bar means they can buy items in Jita.  This means that green bar = competition).  I set the minimum quantity to 1, the  duration to 3 months, and the range to the current station (like I said, I don't want to do any hauling).  It would be a good idea to tick Remember Settings now so that you won't have to modify those portions of the order window when next you choose to make an order.  As for the quantity, I choose a number that is less than or equal to the daily average of how many of the item move through the market.  If the item is expensive, I limit my orders to a max of around 200 million ISK; otherwise, my quantity usually matches the daily average.  As my buy order begins to fill, I make a sell order.  Generally, I will start selling items as the estimated value of the stack approaches or exceeds 5 million ISK.

6. Checking and Maintaining Orders

Now that I've made my buy order, all there is to do is to wait for it to start filling.  Every so often, I will have to update my orders to make sure that mine are on top.  To do this, open up your wallet and hit the orders tab.  Double click an item in the tab to open it in the market window.  To make it easier to manage your orders, open up the market window and hit the settings tab at the top.  Check the option labeled mark my orders.  Now open an item you have an order on in the market window.  The orders with blue bars around them are yours.  If your order is not the highest buy or lowest sell order, click on your wallet and right click the order.  Click modify order.  Change the value of the order to 0.01 ISK above the highest buy order or below the lowest sell order to make sure your order is the one that's moving product.  It costs 100 ISK to change an order and it can only be done once every five minutes for each order.  If you keep on top of your orders and make sure that you're currently leading the market, you can sit back and watch the ISK roll in.

antarioo has contributed this wonderful advice:

"Time expenditure or Isk/hour
The same as With mission running you also have to take your time spent to gain isk in mind, if you babysit your buy orders but only make a 100 mil profit over 4 hours then you might as well run missions. Key to this Strategy is playing into the hands of the weekly and period fluctuations of the market you bought into.
Take the shield extender example, its price changes has a 25% bump every couple weeks and has a small fluctuation upon the weekly cycles (meaning the difference in player activity and ships destroyed over the course of a week). Thought this item will most likely only be influenced by supply rather then changes in demand due to its meta 1 status.
To cash in on this drift your better off in markets like manufacturing materials, LP rewards and frequently used modules. As player activity rises during the weekend, so does the supply in remote areas, while manufacturers buy in bulk in jita and haulers sell in bulk at the same time. Managing the difference between buy and sell price at these moments can yeild some good results but dont require a lot of updating your buy orders. Simply wait a few hours and the next missioner or freighter comes in and fills your orders and the 5 above yours.
While the demand for modules increases somewhat due to the increased activity of combat.
Combine all these simple techniques together and you can spend very little time sitting in your chosen hub updating and more time doing other activities. Turning trading into a very nice passive income
This is recommended for players with a high bankroll or for those simply looking for a place to invest their isk, professional traders should also incorporate a few elements. Since remember: time=isk!"

That's it for this guide!  I hope you learned a lot.  Anyone with any suggestions please feel free to PM me and I would be happy to add your suggestion to the guide and credit you.  If you liked the guide, feel free to share it so that others can see it.  If you'd like to donate, I accept ISK donations on the character JustCallMeDaddy very happily.  Thanks for reading, and fly safe! o/

tl;dr:

1. buy low

2. sell high

3. ??????

4. profit!!!

I have created an in game chat channel, reddit trading for use by the community to talk about trading in EVE.  Feel free to join the channel and chat each other up!