Hello, I’ve been wondering these days if only being a trader is profitable in this game? I mean, just sitting in Jita station and trading all the day is profitable? There are tools that make it easier to learn this profession?
I’d like to be a trader as only profession in EVE, maybe also industry if that makes it easier to make more ISK, but I’d like to know if it’s profitable or it’s a complete loss of time?
Thanks.
Yeah, if you know what you are doing, then being a station trader can be quite profitable.
I surmise that it’s more of a game of patience and the obvious buy low, sell high. Or you could get into penny wars with people there is always that.
I’ve read stories of people making a new character, using only the starting 5,000 ISK and becoming billionaires by simple trading. Knowledge is everything in this game. Insert learning curve meme.
You can do industry in a system at same region as jita, and manage your market from that station remotely, then bring your stuff to jita and sell it. Works pretty fine. If any question feel free to send me eve mail
Eve is a commodity market and they tend to be cyclical. If you understand the cycle for the commodity you are trading you can set your buy and sell orders for a profitable spread and let the market come to you. This requires patience and a lot of capital but chasing the market down is not a winning game.
In a competitive market like Jita the spreads will tend to be narrow and you need to be careful your trading frictions (brokerage and taxes) don’t consume your profit. Inter-regional trade can improve your margins. Offshore buy orders in Perimeter and then sell the product in one of the smaller hubs. This can be quite profitable even if you contract the shipping. Again, you need to study and understand the market you are serving. There are thriving hubs in strange places serving FW, mission runners, etc…
My preference is to manufacture and sell my own production. The more links of the value chain you participate in, the higher your profit margins will be. Do choose gameplay you enjoy - ISK is easy to make if you invest the time and effort but it has no value outside the game so make sure you enjoy the process!
Trading is one of the easiest and most-accessible ways of making isk. Most of the richest players in eve come from trading.
For a newbie trader, the easiest route would be buying goods from jita and selling them to missions running hubs and stations neighbouring low sec (your customers will be PvP pilots who blow up frequently, so the opportunity for repeat custom is huge). Markups of 20%-100% are common and fair.
Trading is easy. Steal loot. Sell loot. Profits. 
Trading is profitable, but like any other form of income, it only gets better the more work is put into it.
If it was as easy as just sitting in a station and updating orders once or twice a day then everyone would be doing it.
The fact is that a lot of people are doing the same thing so you have many thousands of competitors on varying degrees of competence.
The best traders will have intricate game knowledge, intelligence contacts within large coalitions for inside knowledge and a lot of time.
If you think you’re going to magically make billions sitting in Jita for a couple of hours a day hoo boy have I got news for you.
No, the best traders are bots.
Other than that, the second best traders are who you are talking about.
No one can out-bot a bot.
I would like to disagree with this as a general statement.
A bot can only do the things he was trained for. In most cases, this is a very specific task the machine excels in. Like adjusting market orders for 0.01 ISK every 5 minutes. That is what you are probably thinking of. And you are right. Bots can be very good at this. Because it’s merely repetitive work, which is only “hard” for humans because it is mundane and boring to do the same things over and over again. If this were RL and not a game we play, it would make even sense to automate that.
But like most kinds of automation you have a set of fixed rules a bot works in. It can not or is not allowed to go beyond those rules. No bot will work without a human putting the effort into the bot that makes it work in the first place.
The tool is only as good as the craftsman using it.
And then someone finds out, sees the single mistake you made while setting up the rules for it and exploits your bot while you are asleep, making you poor in the process and then reports you and you get banned for violating the EULA.
Go To Jail Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200
Back to the trading topic.
I remember to have seen some Youtube videos about people doing station trading more ore less professionally. So looking there might be a good idea.
Personally I do it on an alt which I login maybe once or twice a week. I did it once for a week straight on my main character and needed a long break from it after that. ^^
But here is a little list of things that might be useful to know:
Good luck.
At some point, when you have reached the end game of trading things happens exactly like that.
But not by magic but after months or even years of preparation. And so there are many who fail, but their tale remains untold. You have to like it, or it will be just a second working place.
But as OP really seems to like it, this can be quite addicting on the other hand 
It took me years of trials and errors to get it, to see the flow, the breath, the life of the market, but, damn, it’s really profitable.
Station trading seems like it would be quite boring, but I support people doing what they want to do - sandbox game and all.
Why make a second job out of a game? If one is going to spend a large amount of time trading in a video game, why not do that in real life or something else instead and benefit yourself?
That’s the thing, finding a way to make a couple a billions per day while spending less than an hour managing orders.
Ok, great. How long did it take you to get to that point?
eve trading has many easy arbitrage opportunities, plus it’s pretty easy to make enough money in game to make enough isk to get to the point mostly passive methods work. RL not so much. Sure if I had a few million rl dollars I could pretty easily live off the passive income, but I doubt I’ll ever even have a few million bucks in my life.
Some time, but if the OP wants to live the trader life, he should try to forget station trading and start to learn other ways. Station trading is hell.
easier would be to supply other hubs, buy in jita, move to elsewhere, as others said.
Yes, mission hubs, fw hubs or ns connections are good markets for ammunitions and modules and you can buy loot there to sell back in Jita.