Trading Tutorial

 
Trading is the most effective way to make fast ISKS in EVE Online. If you do courier missions you can make about 4kk/hour (after about 10 days of leveling standings and skills to be able to take 4 lvl courier missions), mining will go for 6-10kk/hour (also about 1,5 month of leveling to start using skiff), hunting anomalies in null sec is about 30kk/hour (you need to have raven pilot and second noctis pilot to salvage/loot wrecks and live in zeroes), then trading in Jita can do about 30kk/hour (perfect trader may earn up to 100kk/hour!). The only you need to make ISKs are starting ISKs and skills you can level in a week. After reading the general information about trading in eve, you are ready to start your own trader.
 
Initial skill leveling:
 
Start from Science III and Cybernetics I to install +3 implants (Social Adaptation Chip - Basic, Neural Boost - Basic and Memory Augmentation - Basic). Level Trade skill till IV, get Broker Relations III, Accounting IV, then go for Margin Trading and level it till III. This will half the quantity of ISKs you need to start trading and will also decrease brokers fee and sales taxes. To install more orders you will need to continue leveling Retail till IV. You will be able to install up to 48 orders and this is enough for fast start. Depending on your strategy, you can continue leveling margin trading, broker relations and accounting to increase efficiency of the bot (ROI) or invest more ISKs to trader and go for more orders. Marketing II, Retail V and Wholesale IV will give you possibility to install 120 orders.
 
Update: After relist fee addition and margin trade skill removal you need 4x more ISKs in the beginning and Advanced Broker Relatons skill to reduce relist fee.
 
Perfect trader setup:
 
To make perfect trader you need to maximize skills: Margin Trading, Accounting and Broker Relations to minimize market fees and reduce quantity of ISKs you need to install orders. You will also need to level Trade, Retail, Wholesale and Tycoon to maximize the number of orders you can install. Brokers Fee and Sales Tax will also depend on your standing to corporation and to faction of the station(-s) you want to trade in. If you plan to make perfect trader, it is better to start using courier bot to level standings, while you level other skills for trader. Look here for courier bot tutorial.
 
Starting ISKs:
 
While you can do starting ISks using miner or courier bot, it is much faster if you purchase PLEX from retailers, e.g., here or here. Dont purchase ISKs from ISK dealers. Trader is safest bot, you will do a lot of ISKs with trader if you follow safe botting tips and definately more then initial investment. It is better to not make any links with ISK dealer accounts from the very beginning, because this link may be used to find your bot later when you will have billions of ISKs. Recommended ISK quantity to start with is 6kkk if you plan to pay for omega from bot profit or 2kkk. Some users were able to start with just 200kk (and also here) in the beginning. Perfect trader should have 10-15kkk ISKs and install 150+ market orders.
 
Selection of the items to trade:
 
Update: market analyzer can download bulk market data by api now. This is faster then exporting each item with in game market exporter. You can skip market export part besides if you want to check a few items as in example below.
 
The first thing you should do is to find what items are good for trading. To select items to trade, need to collect market export files with market exporter and analyze them with market analyzer. For example, lets look into basic, beta, standard and improved implants. To start market exporter we disable trader and order installers and enable market exporter:
 
 
 
In market exporter need to clean current list of items and old export files from old runs, if present:
 
 
To add new items to market exporter list you may add them one-by-one using edit field and 'Add' button. But it is much faster if you add group of items with some filter applied. We know that all implants we need to analyze contain strings '- Basic', '- Beta', '- Standard' and '- Improved'. Also all of items of these type belong to 'Implants & Boosters' group. Do following steps:
  1. Check 'Implants & Boosters' group (position 1).
  2. Check 'Apply RegEx Filter' (position 2).
  3. Type '- Basic' and click 'Add Group' button (positions 3 and 4).
  4. Type '- Beta' and click 'Add Group' button (positions 3 and 4).
  5. Type '- Standard' and click 'Add Group' button (positions 3 and 4).
  6. Type '- Improved' and click 'Add Group' button (positions 3 and 4).
  7. If you dont want market exporter to continuously update information about selected items, check 'Shut Down Bot When Done' (position 5).

You should have all required implants (20 items) added to the list of items used with market exporter as on the screen below:

If you did not finish first run, you should do so now. After you prepared settings with first run, select 'EVETrader' as a function (position 1), check 'Activate Client' (position 2) and click 'Continue' (position 3):

Market exporter will start and collect regional market export files. After bot finishes work and close eve client you can open market analyzer and see result. To open market analyzer click Menu->Tools->Market Exporter. In the market exporter form I do:

  1. Check 'Limit Search to Station' and select Jita trade hub as a station.
  2. 'Use files for days' equal one, we just created files.
  3. 'Max order age' equal 90h, we will not take abandoned orders into consideration.
  4. Set brokers fee and sales tax you have if you already know them or leave them default.
  5. Set 'Calc competitors for (min)' to be 30 minutes. We dont have so much orders yet, so we will be able to update then in 30 minutes for sure. If you have more orders, you better increase this value till 60 minutes or more.
  6. Click 'Start' button and wait while bot finishes calculations.

Result of the calculation will look like on the next screen:

I have sorted items by 'Probable Income' column to see what items show good income. Now we should select several items to use with trade bot. Lets use 'Selection Rules' and select items with:

  1. Probable income (isk/day) more then 50 000 000
  2. Competitors less or equal 3
  3. Average Volume more then 20
  4. Average vilume in millions of ISKs more then 5000
  5. And profit in the range of 5% - 50%

Click 'Check Filtered' button to select positions compatible with this selection rules:

Four positions were automatically selected. You can check or uncheck some positions manually to add or remove items from the list, or use other selection rules. Lets export these four items as a task for order installer and start trading.

In 'Export Buy and Sell Orders List' groupbox define ISKs to use in buy orders. If you have margin trading skill leveled increase this value correspondingly or use real ISKs amount you have in your wallet. Set minimal buy order size to 50m to not install too small orders. To not install too small sell orders you can define default sell order percent. In our case it is 25% - if bot buying 100 items it will start sale when at least 25 items purchased. Click 'Sell Selected' button and save list to a file as a task for sell order installer. Default name is 'SellOrdersList.xml'. Then click 'Buy Selected' and save 'BuyOrdersList.xml'. Remember the directories where you saved 'SellOrdersList.xml' and 'BuyOrdersList.xml'. Close Market Analyzer.

Trading:

To start trading selected items you need to disable market exporter and enable trader, sell order installer and buy order installer:

Load 'BuyOrdersList.xml' to buy order installer. Open buy order installer settings and click 'Load' button. ALso check install buy order if profit more then 3% and check real time editor to edit maximal price without restart of a bot:

Load 'SellOrdersList.xml' to sell order installer. Define minimal profit to be 1% and check real time editor to edit minimal sell price in real time:

As you can see, both buy order installer and sell order installer work with the same items. Total ISKs required to install buy orders will be less then calculated 1376846649 ISK because buy order installer will use best prices, but bot calculates total sum using maximal buy prices.

Now we need to edit trader settings (settings bot uses during order updates). We will use the same settings as we used with order installer. Namely, update sell orders if profit more then 1%, update buy orders if profit more then 3%. Also we should check to use station buy and sell orders. Max price change and min volume to outbid may be the same, as shown on the picture below:

Now if you start bot, it will create new orders and start to update them. The more frequently bot will buy and resell these items, the more income you will have.

What is not recommended for novices. Dont try to trade items with unstable prices, you may loose money instead of making. Check price history for each order. Bad positions will look like this:

During 3 monthes price was more or less stable (210-160k), but in the last few days price dropped to 110-120k. Another example of the bad item:

During some days you can buy for 50m and sell for 40m later etc. Good positions will look like this:

Another recommendations are dont run trade bot more then 12h/day, follow safe botting tips