I think the end of the “Margin Trading” skill is very positive. It was about time…!!!
For the rest it seems that they are trying to make the Market Trading less predatory and less advantageous for automation “BOTs”. Choosing the correct Starting-Price for an Order will be very important. Any subsequent price changes will be much more significant and costly.
As always, Players will continue to look for different ways to take advantage of Market Trading Mechanics.
This basically boils down to short term small volume daytrading being the only right way of trading. Large long term orders will be either too expensive in maintenance or hurt liquidity too much. Proliferation of small quantity orders will make shopping wholesale for large quantities a nightmare.
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This funny thing is, this is not how the real world markets work, and we are all used to the real world. The game now simulates a market mechanic which has no example in real life, and would never work there. Hope it somehow works in EvE.
One example, the high frequency traders / algorithms and speculative actors in real life markets create two important things: liquidity and fair prices for everyone else, because inefficiencies are arbitraged away.
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Big volumes can move to contracts …
Personally I have nothing against players who play the 0.01 isk game to push their orders. The same happens in real life. I have nothing against players who mine x hours every day. But only if there is a real person behind the keyboard, and no automation whatsoever. If they want to play that way, that’s okay in the sandbox.
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Why on earth wouldn’t I be allowed to change my sell order from 999.99 to 998.01, but only to 989.99 thereby reducing or nuking my profit margin ? Part of the fun is to be among the first to sell. Waiting in line with the rest of the players who refuse to sell below net profit is not even a part of any game, let alone in real life. It doesn’t look healthy for future pricing either.
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With the change to margin trading it seems to me that cash flow problems for honest traders will be more pronounced. I’m quite sure that a system with a confidence rating of traders should be possible to provide them with room to move.
Having player stations that were exempt of the normal ISK sinks was a silly oversight, so good riddance.
I’m not an economist or a trader at any level in real life, and only a very casual one in game, so I may see and feel this the wrong way. Sorry if I am wrong here.
Overall, it seems to me that the inability to fight automation (botting) successfully in its many forms and guises is a tax that is levied more often than not on the honest players.
And before I forget, 
need to go too, in case you forget
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Great… so CCP killed Margin Trading scams only to move more people to flawed and easily exploitable contracts, have fun searching for right contract with excel sheet to find out the per unit price and triple checking for scams.
You can. 998.00 is 3 significant digits (998). You can’t set it to 999.98 though, because that’s 5 digits of significance. The first non-zero digit in the price has to be no more than 3 places away from the last non-zero digit in the price.
But effectively that’s how it works in the real world. Yes, technically Amazon can set a price with an arbitrary number of significant digits, but when you have a choice between paying $145.90 for an item and $145.91 for an item there is no meaningful difference in the prices. And there’s certainly no reason for the seller with the “more expensive” item to bother reducing their price by one cent to match the competition.
On the other hand the current EVE market creates a system where a minuscule difference in price, far less than a buyer can even perceive, is the difference between zero sales and capturing 100% of the sales until someone else undercuts you by 0.01 ISK. That’s just gaming the system and rewarding sheer stubborn determination to monitor your prices 23/7 instead of making genuine changes in the price of the item.
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sorry to disagree with you on this example, 998.00 has 5 significant digits according to normal rules as used in e.g., scientific reporting, 998 has 3. For the sake of argument, let me edit it to 998.01 
*Edited my first post too.
Oh look, another person who doesn’t understand how the economy works. You can store your stuff for later and it may have a higher ISK price, but so will all of the things you want to buy with that ISK. You can’t get any meaningful advantage here.
All these things are not so difficult to figure out, so the developers at CCP must know it. I don’t know what exactly they’re trying to accomplish with these upcoming changes, but it isn’t eradicating bots or improving the market.
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It’s not.
Just as a quick example that took me 30 seconds to find?
Mercedes-Benz AMG G 63 SUV: $156,450 MSRP
5 significant digits. Before options. I’d be willing to bet I can convince the website it needs at least that 0 to be something else, and maybe even add in some decimals.
Oh, hey, lookit that:
Lamborghini Aventador S: $417,826. 6-digits.
For scientific reporting, yes. For market trading, no. That’s part of the problem here: CCP’s applying stock market rules to something that looks like a stock market… but is actually a massive retail bazaar.
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You are 100% wrong here. 998.00 has 5 significant digits according to the rules of science, but only because in a scientific context you don’t add the trailing .00 unless you are explicitly doing it to indicate extra digits of precision. In a market context the trailing .00 is always attached to a price even if it has no meaning, it’s just a display convention unrelated to the precision of the number. So a price of 998.00 has a scientific equivalent of 998, both having 3 significant digits.
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Nope, this is how real world stock markets work. If your limit is 0.01 to low/high you won’t get any trade. Though the difference is that prices move much faster in real life, because there is no 5min cooldown, usually a lot more actors and “bots” are the norm and not the exception.
Exactly, I was thinking the very same thing. They allowed the market to be played like a stock exchange.
But again, NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE EXACT PRICE. If Mercedes added or subtracted $0.01 to/from the price of a $150k luxury car it wouldn’t change buying behavior one bit, and the overwhelming majority of customers would not even be aware of the change. If two adjacent dealerships had a price difference of $0.01 it wouldn’t be worth your time to walk across the street and buy from the cheaper one.
Meanwhile on the EVE market adding or subtracting 0.01 ISK to/from the price of a $150 million ISK ship is the difference between capturing 100% of the market or 0% of the market.
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Congrats CCP !
You have screwed over all my income streams other than 1 in less than a year. Come on you know you can make it 100%.when you going to F*** up Pi?
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The EVE market is not a stock market, it’s a retail market selling goods to the end user (sometimes via intermediate steps).
That’s hardly relevant as a matter of ‘why should sellers be forced into specific pricing structures?’, though. We definitely care about exact price when it comes to expensive items. And I don’t just mean in-game. Component pricing often hinges on tiny differences in price when—as is the case in EVE—there is never any possibility of difference in quality.