TL;DR - We as traders are few in number and if we work with large producers (who can be identified) we can create a true brokerage…moving product for producers at more reasonable prices that trade faster.
I feel like the Market is a mix between dumb producers grossly undercutting their own value, and a bunch of hyenas who would rather bite off their own ankles than make a decent profit.
This thread is to feel-out the idea of a Cooperative/Collective of actual Traders.
I trade all the time, about 99% of my activity in EVE for the last year has been trading.
I’d say I complete about 40 orders a day, landing me anywhere between ~100-400million isk profit a day, so I have a pretty good understanding of the market (I THINK).
For instance, the isotope market is greatly undervalued right now and I MAY have fixed the Nitrogen Isotope market, at great “expense” to myself. It still is profitable to do so but boy did it take some capital.
But the Oxygen, Helium and Hydrogen markets are still broken, I can see this based on the volume of buys versus the volume of sales, what’s happening is producers are not THINKING, they see one low price and dump more product onto the market at that low price. The isotope market is rather elastic and stretches a great deal. Another way of thinking about the isotope market is it is very “viscous”, like molasses. Not much of a financial term but it’s pretty obvious what I’m getting at.
If some idiot wants to sell his isotopes for -20% the market value, it will take a WHILE for the isotope market to recover.
But, if you liquidate his position and reposition it at +10% of the market value, that change will ALSO have permanency.
Enough about the nuts-and-bolts, the idea here is we can cooperate as TRADERS to actually do what traders actually are supposed to do. Make markets optimal.
Right now, thanks to CCP, Eve Markets are like a bunch of ripped assholes shitting on everyone. Mineral and Ice changes have really created un-realistic volatility in those products, and the Pi changes are about to do the same to the Pi market.
If a well organized team of friendly-competitive traders gets together, we can probably restore the “rational” margins of 2-5% to the market, and also fix the stupidity of these producers who are basically selling at a loss right now.
I am not sure how well we can cooperate when in a way, trading is like a game of Chess, and the veil of secrecy is where the money is made, but I think the first place we can start is the following:
- Determine the big competitive markets (minerals, isotopes, inputs for production, etc.)
- Identify what margin we want…probably 5% but 2% is do-able (but very difficult to compete at 2%)
- Identify what the buy price can support, we may need to gather some units and sell-out some high-priced buy orders to bring that down…but controlling the sell price is easier.
- Once we know what buy is achievable (and that’s pretty obvious based on lifespan of order and how many units are near the top versus how many units are traded volume daily).
- Then we can determine a sell price to meet the margin, and knowing how much ISK value is below that sell price we can determine if that market is “fixable”.
For instance if we determine we need to buy out 10 Billion isk worth of idiots from a specific market, we COULD say we each will buy 1Billion worth and initiate trade at xxxx.xx price…that starts us with say 3% margin, and then its competitive after that…
Something like that can be achievable if we cooperate and I’m pretty sure just a few of us can determine markets in EVE.
Most of the Market seems to be intelligently traded by less than 20 persons I’d say…I have my fingers in most everything and I do not see a lot of intelligent trades. So either bots, or fire-and-forgetters who are not important.
Most of the trader-money in Jita is probably consolidated in less than 20 persons.
There is A LOT of money in producer-money…but producers tend to be “fire and forget” types and put 10s of billions of isk at prices that often aren’t being traded at all.
Or small percentages are traded when a market pushes toward where they put their prices. And they are happy with sitting with 10billion isk worth of crap on a market and waiting a year for all of it to sell.
I can get into a whole thing about “Producer-Trader” consortium, but that would be what we call a BROKERAGE.
