Limited Success Station Trading

Starwalker was not interested in making ISK but definitely needed it for flying in space. Between him and Starstepper they had less than 100m ISK left in cash, although Starstepper held a fair stock of various ships and fittings. While it sounded like a lot of money it represented perhaps two fully fit battlecruisers or three assault ships.

Starstepper had heard about people creating a semi-passive income stream from station trading and he had tried that over many months now. His experience had met with limited success and these were some of the problems he had run into:

• ISK attrition wars where people will raise their buy price by 0.01 ISK or drop their sell price by 0.01 ISK almost immediately after your item is listed. This "game" continues almost indefinitely
• Volume is small and infrequently traded, so whilst the individual item margin may be very good the volume over time is small
• Price has large jumps or falls shortly after a trade, usually in the wrong direction and resulting in either holding stock, losing significant profit or in the worst case making a loss 
• Margin trading where the differential between the buy and sell price starts off as good but then gets decimated by other buyers or sellers
• Large buy or sell orders are nibbled at over time with low volume trades so that no real economy of scale can be made from moving high volumes at low margins
• Arbitrage between regions or trade stations such as Jita and Rens required tediously moving items and trading was subject to all of the above vagaries

Starstepper had made some good profits where the best example was buying 25 items for 2m each, transporting them to another station and selling them for 6m each but it took around 6 months to sell the items. 

Some of the current stock of ships could be sold for a profit, in particular the 10 Drakes that were bought for 34m ISK each and could be sold for 50m ISK but that potential profit was more by luck than design.

However, the term luck was probably inappropriate as the original intent was to fly those ships and now their expense made that somewhat impractical. Despite that Starwalker was coming around to the view of fit and fly them anyway - every ship explodes, the only question is when and how.

Overall, ISK had been made but it probably equated to around 15-25m per month. It seemed that he had neither the patience nor the nose for smelling out the good trading items (and stations) that would make a substantial monthly profit. Time to look elsewhere for ISK making opportunities.