Greedy Goblin

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Business Thursday: Skillbooks

The skillbook market is probably the one that most trader started their career. The reason for that is skillbooks are widely needed and not replaceable. Practically every pilot will buy the Gunnery skillbook.

If everyone does it, isn't it full? No, because we move on. Skillbooks don't provide stellar profit and pretty laborious. I'd rather consider it hauling than real trading, but exactly because of that, very young newbies can start it. All you need is a frigate with inertia stabilizers and 20-30M capital. Based on availability, there are several kinds of skillbooks:
  • Unlimited: these ones are the worst, every school station has hundreds of it. While you can haul them to a hub, usually the margin is pitiful. It's a business for large capital, low time traders who get thousands of it at once and sell them for below 1% profit.
  • Limited stock: my dear Logistics skillbook, the one that I collected in my youth. These books are sold by a small number and if you buy them out, the next batch will be expensive. So you can't buy a billion worth of it, you have to hop around in stations and buy a few at once. Sometimes you have to go to other regions for it. It's practically running courier missions, except for the much higher profit.
  • Region specific: Amarr Dreadnought skillbook can only be purchased in Amarr space. There are lot of others like that too. So you stock up and go to the hub of the other races and sell.
  • LP store/drop: Nanite Control and co. You need to set up both buy and sell orders for them, station trading them normally.
  • Newbie: these are given out as mission rewards in the newbie systems. These aren't expensive but you can have large profit % on them, duplicating your little capital fast. Of course this market is limited by the number of newbies. You set up buy orders in school systems and haul them to hubs.
Skillbooks don't seem much, but they are a good entry to anyone starting his trading career. Don't ignore them!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is there a way to tell for each skill book in which category it falls (unlimited/limited/regional/newbie)?

Gevlon said...

Open the market window. If it's sold in large quantity: unlimited. If it's sold in small numbers for various prices: limited. Visit another faction's region, if it's not sold there, regional. Do the career agents, if you got one, newbie.

Anonymous said...

You have to learn which category each book falls into. This is part of "learning the market."

Some books, like Mining Connections, or Security Connections are only available through loyalty point stores.
http://www.ellatha.com/eve/LPIndex-21


Some books like Amarr Encryption Methods or Armor Rigging can come from both radar/mag sites as well as NPC merchants.

The Science books like Sleeper Technology only come from radar/mag sites and are pretty rare, but you only need them if you are making COSMOS items and those really are not worth making.

One place to check the source of books would be checking Eve-MarketData.

For example: http://eve-marketdata.com/price_check.php?type_name_header=Gas+Cloud+Harvesting

See the red writing "NPC"? Those are NPC merchants selling the item. Most of Gas Cloud Harvesting NPC merchants are in null sec. A few are in low or high sec.

Another way to see if an NPC is selling an item is to check the market. If the days remaining are 364-365 days, then that is an NPC. Players cannot put things up for sale longer than 90 days.

Anonymous said...

I just started playing with the aim of earning money to plex my account and a ganker (hail to the New Order!). <3 logistics <3 transport ships skill books