Before you click off, just know that I have dabbled before in the station trading business. I merely am inexperienced in it. For reference, last time I tried, I made about 800mil in selling stations and astrahuses. Granted, I was playing the 0.1isk game. I am looking for a mentor to teach me, I will give a 70-30 cut(in your favor) to all profits. No investment necessary other than your time. I live in empire space, and am fairly young, so I am playing almost consistently. I am available in the Eastern US timezone from about 5-9 on buissness days and 2:30-9 on weekends. Comment or PM for questions and concerns
TLDR:
-Looking for mentor
-Will split cuts 70-30
-Can communicate almost constantly
-Will join any corp
-Comment or PM for questions and concerns
Buy low, sell high now give me your profits but to be honest, that’s all you really have to do. Stay away from major trade hubs, and all you need to do is set up orders and wait for them to flow in. Over time you gradually realize what’s profitable and what’s not. I personally still have a couple of good things to set up buy/sell orders from, but i doubt any traders will tell you what they buy/sell because if everyone tries to flip items for isk then the profit margins will fall.
As it was already said, for station trading buy low, sell high applies. If you don’t speculate on factors like patch changes or wars and don’t have a set of profitable stuff yet, then there is only the hard work of looking at the tradable goods, understand the pricing and spot good opportunities to buy or sell.
If you’re in for the long game, set your buy and sell orders, ignore the 0.01 ISKers, drink tea and profit from the ebbs and flows of the market.
3rd party tools will help if your not into making your own spreadsheets. As totally biased examples A4E market trends to help find investment opportunities and A4E price history to look at volumes and prices across several years.
I am not a station trader, but I’ve done a little trading and research over the years. So, free of charge for you:
Pick a niche - everybody and their alt is trading the obvious stuff in the obvious locations. So unless you want to spend all day .01 isking in Jita (which is profitable, but best left to the bots and margin-shavers), you are better off learning a bit about how and where people need to buy, and what they need to buy.
They need to outfit ships for the various “How do I plex my account?” strategies they are all googling. So exploration ships, FW ships, Incursion ships, Rorq fleets, etc etc.
They need to restock for mission running, blitzing burners, FW runs, Incursions, etc etc.
They need to sell off the loot/drops they are getting from these activities.
Determine where the need is. What is the refit area of Incursion fleets? Where are the L4/L5 mission hubs? Where are the FW staging areas? Where do Explorers bring their goods back to?
Research items that are decent buy/sell prospects. There are tools out there that will give a list of items with certain margin sizes between the buy/sell listings … but anybody can use those same tools. You can research items yourself using methods like the ‘hamburger’ method: EveUni: Identifying Items for Trade
Once you have picked a location, and identified items to trade in (whether Jita or a more targeted market), ‘station trading’ is merely the process of putting in a buy order at the lowest price you think you can get it, putting in sell orders at the highest price you think will sell, then you either:
Leave those orders to complete whenever, while you do more research and update them periodically, or
Refresh your orders every 5 minutes and play the .01 ISK game to update them.
As said, I’m no expert, so chances are a ‘real’ station trader will come along and tell you to ignore everything I said and do ‘X’ for success. But that is my understanding of the process, at least.
but to be honest, that’s all you really have to do. Stay away from major trade hubs, and all you need to do is set up orders and wait for them to flow in. Over time you gradually realize what’s profitable and what’s not. I personally still have a couple of good things to set up buy/sell orders from, but i doubt any traders will tell you what they buy/sell because if everyone tries to flip items for isk then the profit margins will fall.