The first and most important note to make on the market, is that it is not like any other game market. Many people seem to think it's like an Auction House in some other game, and they quickly look at it differently selling many things too cheap, or watching an order not sell because it's in the middle of the orders.
The Broker
The market is what they call a "broker system". Basically "the broker" who you never see or really know about, takes your money to buy and sell things. Basically you are paying someone to sell something for you, not really sell it yourself. Everything that deals with the market goes through a broker even though most people never notice. We'll get into more detail as we go along.
Sell Orders
First thing is first, open the market and find an item. Now in the "Sellers" part of the market arrange your orders by lowest price first to highest price last (As shown on the screenshot above). These orders are called "sell orders", where someone is selling an item. If you want to buy something, you click on an order and choose to buy it. What happens that you don't see, is that you're giving the broker money to buy whatever item it is, and that broker buys the cheapest order in the station. So even if you bought an item for 700ISK, and the cheapest order was 520ISK, the broker would take your money, and buy the order for 520ISK, but still charge you 700ISK. If you think about it, you'll realize that you cannot buy higher priced orders. The only orders that sell are the cheapest. We'll get into this more in a bit.
Buy Orders
Now let's take a look at buy orders. This is a fairly different system, and I don't know a single person that came into this game understanding how they worked. Buy orders are like putting an advert in the newspaper saying you want to buy something for a certain price. So if you don't mind waiting to get something, you could very well get something much cheaper through a buy order. The broker deals with buy orders similar to sell orders; buy orders only get filled to the highest priced order. So on buy orders you want to be the highest bidder to receive the item that is being sold.
In the screenshot above, we have a buy order form, ready to go. Yes, it is the same page as when you actually buy something from a sell order. Instead, we put a price lower than the lowest sell order, but a little higher than the highest buy order.
The duration is the time that is allowed for the order to fill. The broker only charges you for the orders made not the time of the order, so it does not cost more to have a longer or shorter period of time for your buy order. The only caveat is that orders of the same price are then in order of time left. So if you set your orders to a month you will take priority over any 3 month orders.
The range setting allows you to set where you want to buy the item. You can set it to station, system, 5 jumps, 10 jumps, 20 jumps, and region (depending on skills). What this does is if you set the range further than the station, a player can sell something to your buy order from a station that is in the range you have set. Of course this means you will have to pick those items up.
Next we want to put the quantity, and the "minimum quantity". If you set a ranged buy order minimum quantity can really become quite beneficial as you can set the minimum amount that someone can sell to you. For example if you were buying a mineral of some type with a region wide buy order, you might want to set a minimum quantity of 10000 to make sure that the order it's worth getting.
After all of that, you have a buy order setup. Now you just sit and wait for it to fill.
Basic Market Use
So now that you know how the market works, it's time to use it. You can see your market orders in your wallet, under the "My Orders" tab, as well as the "My Orders" tab in the market. These are the only places you can cancel your orders. If you get fairly big into the market to where you are buying and selling several things at once, you might find it quite helpful to use the market quickbar. Simply drag each of the items you are selling into the quickbar, and then you can just click each one to do updates instead of having to go through "My Orders" to alter orders.
Broker Tricks
Remember us talking about that 700 ISK order earlier? Well even though the broker bought the lowest priced order at 520 ISK, the seller received 700 ISK. If you look at various buy orders, you will see at least one sell order at an extremely high price. What this does is someone can accidentally click on that order, and the lowest priced order sells while getting the amount that was clicked on. So to give an example, you are selling an item for 500 ISK and it is the lowest order. Someone has an order up for 50,000,000 ISK, and is the highest priced order. A pilot comes by and doesn't have their market prices in order, and clicks the 50 million order to buy from. Your 500 ISK order fills, and the broker gives you 50 million ISK for it. You might wonder, who really does that? Well, it happens more than people think. You would be surprised how many times a day orders fill with a different price.
Standings and Skills
With the market standings help with broker fees, and can make your broker fees close to non-existent. The only issue is what it takes to get to that point. The Broker Relations skill helps quite a bit with the fees, bringing the fee percentage down to 0.75% with neutral standings at level V. Next is the faction and corporation standing of the station you are buying or selling from. You can get fees down to 0.185% which is the lowest possible with 10 faction, and 10 corporation standing with the station owner. With that said, I want to point out that this does NOT work for player outposts. Even though the buy page will show a lower broker fee, the broker will never charge less than 0.75%. Standings do not work for player outposts in terms of broker fees.
Well that's it. I hope this has been informative to someone out there, and happy trading!
2 comments:
The below comments are made in the best spirit. I am not trolling you, and I actually do like your website. But I couldn't let this part slide.
"and I don't know a single person that came into this game understanding how they worked."
LOL! You are kidding right? Anyone who has ever traded stock, in virtually any country in the world, should be pretty comfortable with Eve's market system.
There are 2 key differences. Eve bastardizes terminology by referring to "buy" and "sell" prices. They are bids and asks. If you understand what a bid and ask is, everything makes more sense to people. When people use the terms "buy" and "sell" prices, they frequently reverse the two. Allowing this terminology to persist does a huge disservice to the many Eve players who will some day invest in real life on their own if they do not already.
The other difference is how Eve handles prices, and it would be nice if this could get fixed, even though I make quite a bit of isk off of it. In the real world, if I enter a an order to buy 100 shares of xyz stock at $50, but the lowest ask is for say 500 shares at $49, I will NOT pay the $50. But let's say my order is for 1,000 shares. I will buy the first 500 shares at $49, and then the rest will fill at whatever the next level is and so on. That is how the market works and how prices change during the day.
That's understandable. Every new player I've coached on making money off the market did not understand the brokerage system; even ones quite seasoned in real life trading. The fact of the matter is that many people are confused at first, especially players coming from other games who are use to markets that allow you to buy from any player no matter what.
The comment I made in the article was said to make any player feel good about not understanding this system, and not making them feel inferior; like many players already do in other parts of the game.
Yes, I agree that the overflow quantity needs to be dealt with.
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