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Trading into the riches , Part 1

Money printing

Let's talk a little about trading. Below are my thoughts about the subject. It will take a while so lets relax and take easy. I already mentioned, and also a ton of other trading blogs, that trading is where the money is at. There are some crazy rich guys out there who earn billions in a day. To be honest I admire them. I like ISK. I think, like the real world, having money sets you free. You can allow yourself much more and can realize yourself in many ways. When I started I was earning isk from exploration. Which was an ok income, but not too great. It's more like a hobby. Then I've decided to give trading a go. Now if I do something I never do it half assed. I went balls to the wall and subbed 3 chars just for the sole purpose of trading in major hubs. Subbing characters and getting necessary skills is the easy part. Above formula shows how to decrease your broker fees in trading. It might not look much, but in the end it adds up. I won't be getting into details about cost savings, but you can read them here. In the end I estimate of saving around 100-200 mil average a day just on taxes. What did I have to do to get this "advantage"? Cross a god damn EvE hell is what I had to do. And by hell I mean grinding one month standings with missions and COSMOS. Every time I think about it I just want to puke. They were/are so poorly designed and bad, that I was questioning my purpose in this game. I can't believe there are actually people who enjoy doing missions. To me, missions are punishment that you must to do for your losses. It's like when you lose a ship and you have to redeem your sins by doing godawful pve content. I think it is necessary that EvE pve has to be bad. Otherwise everyone would happily grind isk and inflation would go up crazy amounts.  Man... now I realize this game is for masochists.

But enough about missions. After a month of grinding I had reached a balance between being competitive in trading and committing suicide. Now it was time to jump into action. This basically sums up my first experience in trading. Despite reading a lot of material and doing all kinds of research I sucked so much. Buy low and sell high was more like buy high and sell low. Items I traded were going up and down, like a roller coaster. I thought my profit tracking sites were broken as they did not show any green color. It was terrible. Let's not forget that I injected 20 bil investment from my main, which was almost all my isk. 20 bil might seem alot, but when you divide on 3 accounts, have some stuck in escrow in buy orders and some as stock or for sale, you realize that 20bil is more like 20mil. What can you possible do with this pocket change?

I decided to stick with it. After a couple of weeks  I started seeing first green signs in my profit tracking tools. Did a lot of trial and error with what items to buy and sell. Eventually I found the balance. I threw away all the spreadsheets and other "analysis" tools. I was not doing any analysis anymore, because all that was just a waste of time. A time I could spend in updating my orders or adjusting my items list. Eventually you grow a feeling for your items and reach some sort of equilibrium. That is what I did

Once I got comfortable with what I was doing I started setting up myself some goals. In the end, if you want to be successful, everyone says you need goals right? So I set 100bil as my first goal.  A goal that was somewhat unrealistic at a time. It was an interesting road to reach it. Do you remember that first billion you reached it? Or that first 100 million you had in your wallet? I sure do. You never forget your first experiences into something. It is always "special". So it was with my "100 billion isk" goal. It's something i anticipated so much, especially when reached 96, 97 and still feeling few billion short to say with confidence that goal has been met.  So what happened after my goal was reached? Well, everything has changed. My perception about trading has changed a lot, but let's talk about it another day.
at 12:48 AM