Is there any point in trying station trading?

So Im thinking of getting into station trading. Is it worth it or is it dominated by bots and would be a complete waste of my time.

Not all items are dominated by bots. However, trading this way can be rather tedious. It really depends on how much you need to make to justify the time spent updating your orders.

Your best bet is to decide how much time you want to spend updating orders, then find items where the best/bid ask doesn’t change more frequently than you are willing to update orders. There are technical ways to do this (e.g. analyzing market data), but you can also ask scan market history for items with high volume and many orders. These are often station traded items.

To do station trading proper you will probably have to download some market data and start crunching numbers. You can search manually, but computers are much more efficient. I can’t speak to how many bots are active in this space, but I can tell you that there is competition, especially if you trade in Jita.

I don’t do station trading anymore myself, it was just too boring. At least with inter-regional trading I have a reason to fly somewhere else :slight_smile:

Bots do not seem to have a large effect on any of the markets I trade in.

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I found it easy in the beginning to look at weekly fluctuations on items, the data is available in game. Second to that, learn how to make spreadsheets and pull data, the more data you have, the more flexibility you have in your strategy.

Eve is a commodity market and commodity prices are cyclical. You can see the cycle using the price history tab in the market tool. Look for stuff with good volume and a short period, buy in the bottom half of the cycle and list in the top half - let the market come to you. This requires patience and a fair amount of working capital since it can take a while for stuff to sell but it’s a whole lot easier than playing the .01 game.

Eventually the .01 crowd will get tired of losing money, the underpriced product will sell and the market will snap back - sometimes spectacularly. It’s always fun to catch that bounce.

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I made more in a month of station trading than I made in total in the 5 months before. Definitely worth the time. The trick as always is finding the right product (and having a good amount of capital to get you started of course).

Not getting obsessed with it has always been my downfall. I have to give up stration trading because I can’t multitask it with other eve activities/alts. I can’t stand people outbidding me, so I have to refresh every 5 minutes to check. Its a drug

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Yip don’t get into the 0.01 game its annoying as all hell, but if you follow @Do_Little’s advice its much more enjoyable.

You can make loads of money between the bots, even in Jita. Just try it.

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If you want to try it, try it. I was really intimidating when I started EVE, because a lot of people warn you of almost every career path. “Missions are boring. Station Trading is .01. Mining is Bots. FW is death.” etc. I gave up trying to get opinions on the right thing to do.

Here is what I’ve learned from Station Trading for a few weeks;

  • Read up on the market and how it functions. The Price History Tab is really important, but so is understanding how much competition is in a certain item.
  • Get away from Jita. The other Trade Hubs will have better profit margins, which is what you’re aiming for.
  • It’s a game of patience. I tried to deal in high volume trade, not all of it works. Ammo and drones are a good balance of volume to profit margins.
  • Use Spreadsheets, Eve Trade Master or Evernus to help you out.

Don’t let people tell you what’s worth doing and not. Try everything in the game and see what you like. You might hate Station Trading and that’s fine.

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Damn right. Many people play one or two parts of the game and then call everything else wrong. And then a handful of people have a large position on some part of the game and don’t say anything positive.

I think trading is great but I’d guess a lot of people burn out on it as it can be pretty boring at times. I burned out on it the first few times I tried trading. If you only have a little isk and half ass it, well you aren’t going to see great returns. Now I have a bunch of isk and half ass it and still make a bunch. And if you try to .01 isk every order well that’s just a lot of clicking that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I’ve spent afternoons 0.01ing some orders and they didn’t even move as no one was buying/selling. I’ve also just left orders for weeks/months at a time to come back and they filled.

The last year I really focused on trading and industry and have increased my net worth more than the previous 10 years, constantly reinvesting profits into expanding the number/volume of orders. Now I’m in “low power mode” and actively flipping and building a few things with a bunch of bigger orders sitting on the market waiting for prices to move, Also have a bunch of liquid isk waiting for new opportunities to show.

The problem with EVE-O station trading is that botting IS IN FACT ALLOWED, with a caveat. You are not allowed to automate any in game activity but YOU ARE ALLOWED to automate any out of game activity.

So what happens in eve market trading is that players simply bot out side the game using market scraping software or sites & then Ctrl C & Ctrl V back into the Eve client. Some peeps don’t even bother and just fullly automate the entire thing, they’ll get a slap on the wrist if caught.

An honest player can get transactions down to around 1 per second if using two monitors. You can hot key ctrl c & ctrl V to your mouse additonal buttons for rapid book updates.

To answer your question, if you like market trading then yeah get into it, if you are doing 1 isking you are going to need a bot in or out of game to be competitive. You can get into longer game & slower moving items without a bot though also market manipulations & speculation that bots are pretty terrible at.

I stopped playing eve long ago and just dumped all my isk into PLEX, I suspect as the game slows & people stop buying plex its in game value will catapult.

Also CCP could have put a stop to market botting years ago by not allowing market scraping out of client but hey hum, paint a picture of sincerity about their war against botting with that information. Same goes for POS botting which they have endeavoured to help botters over the years.

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