Hi all,
Apologies if this is a silly topic (It’s my first topic!) but I am struggling with getting to grips with trading. I understand to set up buy orders and sell orders etc but my orders are always outdone within minute by 0.01 ISK so I never get any of my orders filled. Can anyone give my some pointers please? Thanks 
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not much you can to about the 0.01 ISK warriors (Market Bots), other than to try and ignore them and doing your thing.
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Bid higher.
Seriously, you don’t need to bid 0.01 ISK above someone else, and the downside as you see is that someone else will come along and outbid you. Unless you are trying to manufacture profitably (or station trade yourself), it often isn’t worth your time to constantly babysit your orders and compete with the traders looking to flip things. If they keep 0.01 ISKing you, just bid significantly more, or offer for significantly less until they stop.
If you are trying your hand at station trading, then you are playing the same game and there isn’t much you can do. One strategy however is to learn Margin Trading and some skills to have lots of orders and make many orders yourself with the expectation that only a fraction of them will fill. The Margin Trading skill allows you to make more orders than you have the ISK to fill to increase your chances at filling some of them.
Lastly, you could move somewhere less competitive. Even moving to Amarr over Jita may improve your chances at filling orders.
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I buy in Jita and Amarr, and sell elsewhere. Way less competition, I consider that a service for all the ratters and miners in the outskirts of Highsec.
But you need patience, you won’t sell your stuff within minutes or you have to sell cheap in Jita.
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The .01 isk-ers probably are NOT bots. You’ve probably grasped the idea that it’s hardwired into the system that the “best” qualifying orders automatically get filled first. Thus, you can think of it as the .01 isk-ers are playing the market game at-keyboard instead of AFK. AFK play should always pay less. Seriously undercutting or overbidding will only screw up that segment of the market for everyone, and sometimes it can never ever recover (I did that once… whoopsie daisy.) It’s unlikely to drive out enough of the .01 iskers for you to get a quick sale, because they wouldn’t be .01’ing if they themselves weren’t after a quick sale.
If you want to AFK the market, you’ll either:
- need to accept the idea that your orders might not get filled until the active guys take a long enough break that their orders all get filled
- figure out gaps in the market that are more suited to afk play
Gaps in the market can include under-served trade locations, under-served items, low-volume items, atypical order settings.
I have a favorite example of something I like to do is when I need to buy ammo for mission running. My buy order is several jumps away from a trade hub, where I do missions. I’m actually willing to buy from the low sell order price, but I never need to. I set my buy order for slightly less than sell order price, I set my qty high, and my min qty the same as my qty (so I get my ammo supply in 1 big transaction.) This means I have about 3 or 4 criteria that makes my orders novel, which means my orders are absolutely unique in my region, and I always get what I want, where I want it, and at a price i’m happy with. Because I’m not competing with anyone I don’t have to .01 isk, and I can guarantee my order will be filled by my next play session.
It also turns out my preferred mission hub is under-served, so I’ll sometimes put up buy orders for the loot I’m already finding and then just bring it with me to the trade hub when I liquidate.
Just keep in mind active and afk trading are different things and require different strategies. Active tends to go to whoever’s hungriest for it. AFK goes to whoever strategized better.
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Welcome to trading in hubs, where the competition is intense.
#1, I would ignore the talk of market bots. I station trade a lot, and when I was first starting I did so intensively in order to learn how things worked. I think talk of “market bots” are largely an urban legend. And not just because one trader reported ME as a bot user even though I was simply playing intensively.
There are some items – mostly T2 items with low volume and a very high spread – where the price competition is so intensely out of whack with the expected payoff that I think bots could be involved.
But for most other items, you’re competing against real people, not bots. It’s just that there are a lot of them, so your orders don’t stay on top for long. I played enough that I began to identify my major competitors by their trading patterns – and those trading patterns weren’t bot-like. They were simply persistent.
But a lot of people think bots are a thing, so I think there are lot of people who use what they consider anti-botting strategies that are really mostly superstition. For instance, “if I raise my price by 162.17, it will confuse the bot”. No, it won’t. Bots can do math.
Honestly, I think those strategies do more to distort the market than botting does.
Also, people complaining about 0.1 ISKers are actually complaining about being outcompeted. I understand wanting to set your orders, walk away, and have things sell while you’re gone. But don’t be surprised if there are people willing to babysit their orders who constantly jump in front of you. If you want to make money while afk, considering mining. Or joining a corporation that has a good PI operation.
I don’t constantly babysit my orders anymore, but I still do the 0.1 ISK thing, because anything else (except for some things I’ll mention below) is just pointlessly wasteful.
All right, so what can you do? Some people have mentioned good strategies. I’ll try to list everything in one place:
– Offer a dramatically higher/lower price than the current market leader. Fewer people will follow you there, so the competition will be lessened.
– If you couple that with a relatively small volume for your order, people will sometimes choose not to beat your price even if they could, and instead wait for your order to sell.
– Post a large number of orders, expecting that only a fraction of them will be on top at any given time. Downside to this is that an orders update can take a long time.
– FInd a market niche that offers less competition.
– Be willing to accept extremely small margins, and price everyone else out of the market.
– Trade in a secondary or tertiary hub – things sell slower, but there is way less competition and usually margins are significantly higher.
You should also understand that buying/selling moves in waves. For instance, I use a custom-built tool to look for buying opportunities. It has a minimum opportunity size filter, so I only see opportunities that are worth more than a certain amount. When an opportunity pops up, there are usually a lot of smaller orders that are also profitable for me. So I buy them all. I routinely buy up 4-5 small orders that are priced better than the large order that attracted my attention, and another 4-5 orders that are priced a little worse but still profitable. In other words, don’t think that just because there are always some small orders ahead of you that your order will never get filled – if you’re priced reasonably, it will eventually fill.
Finally, consider contracts. If you have specific things you want to trade in, identify a major trader in that item and see if they want to buy/sell by contract. Bypass the market entirely.
In the end, remember that the market is another form of PvP. If you find playing the market frustrating or tedious, then it’s probably not for you. Find something else to do in Eve that you enjoy more.
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Actually if he wants to start a station trading career it’s better not to crush the margins because it will also damage his own profit.
If he doesn’t want to spend time to watch his own orders it will be better to move to another market than the major hubs or simply dump his loot on any available buyer orders (also if he start to crush margins some items might have a so small difference between the bid& ask prices that he might get more profit on a direct sell to a buy order) and simply go outside mine, explore, missioning, pvp whatever
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put multiple orders for same item so you get more chances to get on top within that 5 min cooldown
That only makes a difference if he’s willing to babysit his orders.
That all makes sense except for the minimum quantity part. Why do you care if your order gets filled in one transaction or 300?
Here’s an example of someone doing what your doing, and all it’s doing is leaving their order sitting there while the item sells in truckloads to much cheaper orders:
I think what’s described here is a phenomenon where you’ll put up orders for an item where you don’t have a lot of competing orders, then before your orders are filled, a wave of .01’ers jump in. If you were to just sit, eventually those orders would get filled and that wave would ebb without you having had to do anything. Assuming your price is reasonable, the wave should come all the way back to you.
Along with the whole wave idea, keep in mind the qty’s involved. If you’re dealing with high qty items like ammo and minerals, a buyer will often be buying in bulk. If the .01’s selling below you aren’t very high qty’s, they aren’t really your competition because they can all get swept up by a single buyer, bringing the wave back to you in a matter of minutes. Same idea with weapons… a single buyer may need 5-8 of specific weapon, making under-priced orders of 1-2 not really your competition.
2 reasons really. It makes it attractive to sellers, and it keeps me out of competition with every other order on the market. Part of what I’m paying for is delivery, so guaranteeing that price for a single transaction makes it more worthwhile for my seller. edit: I’m looking at that image and it makes me think most people don’t have the qty the seller is asking for, so it’s obviously going to take a while before his order gets filled. But if he’s not in a hurry he can get it at a fair price without having to compete with either buy orders or sell orders.
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Ah, okay. That makes sense. I learned something today!
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