Trading can be one of the most profitable career’s in EVE. I dare to call it a career because depending on which avenue you choose, it can be more of a passing interest. Unlike most isk making methods in EVE, trading generates the best kind of income, passive. Once you set up a buy or a sell order, it can run up to 90 days without you even looking at it. Whether it succeeds though is a different story.
The paths to trading
Before beginning a trading career, you need to decide which path you plan on following. Depending on who you ask, there are at least three basic methods of trading; moving items from low sellers to high buyers, buying items with the intent on reselling them and buying items with the intent of reprocessing them. The first method, generally known as hauling, I’m not going to discuss much about this method as it’s more of a branch of trading as it doesn’t require you to place buy and sell orders. Hauling is merely looking on the market for items that you can buy, move to another location and sell. There are other more specialized methods of trading, some involving contracting and some involving faction ships and items. The types of trading this blog will focus on are the two major ones, retailing and reprocessing.
The first thing you need to be able to do is recognize the value of items. Almost every single item in EVE, with the exception of raw minerals, components and items that cannot be reprocessed, has two distinct values.
The first value is the retail or intrinsic value. The best way to describe it is the difference between a Hyundai and a Mercedes. Both of these cars are well made and will get you from point A to point B. However the Mercedes typically tend to cost more and retain their value better. This can be attributed to a number of factors but the underlying truth is the same, they both provide transportation. The market value is determined by what people are willing to pay to own the Mercedes.
Many items in EVE have this same distinction. While their performance may be only slightly better than a lower meta level of the same item, they command a much higher price because most players in EVE want the best items on their ship. Rare items, such as officer drops, command some of the highest retail values in the game.
All items that can be reprocessed also have a mineral value. If you were to take the item, reprocess it and sell the minerals on the market, you’d have a second way of determining what the item was worth, completely separate from it’s retail value.
Because of these two independent values on items, there are two distinct ways of trading. Retail traders look to buy high value items in low quantity and make large profits from a handful of sales. One good example of retail trading is in the implant market. Some implants can easily be valued at a billion isk. However, they’re fairly rare. A retailer might only get the chance to buy one once a month. However, when they do, they may only pay 50% or 70% of it’s retail worth. They then place a sell order for that implant and wait for someone who wants it to buy it.
Reprocessing traders deal in bubble gum. Bubble gum manufacturers learned a long time ago that if you have a product that sells for very little, but you sell a lot of them, you’ll make money. Reprocessors typically place buy orders for items that are well below what the mineral components of an item are worth. Rather than resell the item, they reprocess it into it’s mineral components and either sell the minerals to industrialists outright or they use those minerals to build more desirable, more profitable items. An example of a reprocessor’s trade would be Small Pulse Laser 1′s. These items are typically much less desirable than the named versions and therefore can be bought at a much lower price. Furthermore, the quantities of these lower meta level items are usually much higher than that of named items. The goal of the reprocessor is to buy lots of these small pulse lasers and to reprocess them into minerals and make a few thousand isk off each one.
Each of these trading methods has it’s own merits and it’s own detractors which I’ll cover individually in another blog. Regardless of whether you decided to specialize in a certain area, for example implants or you move on to dealing in faction hardware, gaining an understanding of the two basic methods of trading in EVE will help you better understand the specialized field you want to enter.
May all your instincts see opportunity and all your opportunities be profitable.
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