I trade for a living and do very well at it. I dropped off EVE to focus. I specialize in options.
That being said, I won’t exactly explain why my method for EVE works. But one of the reasons it works is no one in EVE seems understand market liquidity and its relationship to the bid-ask spread.
I understood very quickly that liquidity was the issue and devised a unit method to find the most liquid items at the profit target. And just flipped them like crazy. Mostly select battleship hulls.
You might pick a battleship hull for a reason and sit on it for a day or 10.
I’d flip a battleship a day or less. Not by random either. Until the liquidity dried up.
That being said here’s the basics.
$4 Bil capital.
Turn over inventory about every 2 days.
Isotopes, drones, hulls.
always out bid. Don’t worry about the taxes/costs you’ll almost never burn up your profit.
Easy spreadsheet calculator to know how much I was going to make.
I don’t know the taxes now but it was something like you could relist buy orders 20 times and sell orders 5 times in total before you burned profits.
I put everything into units per $10mil profits. So if it was $20mil that was 0.5 units.
Using the unit system allows you to instantly know the liquidity of the market.
Finding the right liquidity for the right unit = turnover. So I’d expect a 0.2 - 0.5 to trade once per day and I’d look to see if it would. A unit of 1 might trade 2 - 3 times per day.
Units were useful for determining how many isotopes to buy. Otherwise your inventory was too slow.
Knowing this system let me hop on, look at the market prices, get the units for what I was interested in. Place the order such that the unit = 1 or if a hull then the hull was 1 or less.
Took less than 15 minutes to look. Place the buy orders. A few seconds to up tick each order. Then just flip the item and repeat with sells.
I’d hop on before work for 15 minutes. Then hop on after work to manage the inventory.
bid-ask spread is just one indicator of market liquidity right? so ur just using the BAS to determine how many items you can reasonably expect to buy or sell in a given time frame with a given profit point?
this solves the issue of trying to find markets that aren’t so illiquid, which is a consequence of what exactly? is it just a consequence of some markets being so competitive, driving the BAS closer together and increasing transaction costs, thus decreasing liquidity?
In your explanation, you kinda lose me when you say that
using your example of a commodity with 20mil profit and 0.5 units, does this mean that because our unit goes into 1 twice, we can expect 2 units of the commodity to move per day? Thus, we’d only put in an order for 2?
Obviously, these examples ignore taxes and brokerage fees, changes in the market causing BAS shifts or more product being sold than avg, etc. so that’d be factored in as well, but does that capture the concept? Would love some elaboration on the more market theory side of this, as well as some feedback on the above as it’s all just from googling and shi.