Greedy Goblin

Friday, July 31, 2015

Business post: Jita, the cheapest hub

There are many places for you to shop. Actually all stations in the game. However a few stations became frequent in trading, usually one per region. You can see them on eve-marketdata. The largest, having twice the traffic of the second is Jita IV - Moon 4 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant. The second is in Amarr. The next three are about 2/3-1/2 of Amarr: Dodixie, Rens and Hek. They are followed by smaller ones, 1/5 of their traffic.

There are two interesting (and profitable) things in this:
  1. Jita is the cheapest
  2. You can find more buyers than sellers in the other hubs
The two statements are obviously connected: more buyers mean higher prices. #1 is obvious, both the lowest sell and the highest buy order are higher in other hubs than Jita. #2 means that if you set both a buy and a sell order and update them regularly to be the lowest (obviously not by 0.01), your sell orders will be completed more often. This also means that if you want to keep selling, you must transport items from Jita.

This is quite interesting, as most areas are closer to some other hub than Jita. Yet the people haul on the long way everything there, just to sell them for the lowest possible prices. In some cases it's defendable: as sellers are often buyers too, they rather sell for cheaper than buy their supplies for more. It's especially true for nullsec people who buy much more than they sell, since their main product is liquid ISK from anoms. The JF comes for supplies to the hub, dumps that few deadspace items into buy orders and stack up with new stuff.

For other residents, I'd rather blame stupidity. Dodixie is a mission hub, most of the NPC kills in the region are within 4 jumps range. The missioners buy implants for their LP, haul them to Jita, dump them to my buy orders, I haul them back to Dodixie and sell them with 5-10% profit. Same thing with Amarr. I have no idea why don't they set sell orders in Dodixie or Amarr instead. But I also have no clue why they farm Gallente/Amarr LP when they could farm Thukker or Sisters LP instead for twice as much profit.

Anyway, you can make billions from buying all kind of stuff in Jita and hauling them to smaller hubs. Despite they rarely fill, I still suggest to set buy orders in the selling hub (no higher than Jita buy though) just to catch a rare local seller. Just don't be stupid and haul them in freighters. Transport Tengu for the small ones, Occator+double-wrap for the bigger ones.

This also means that if you aren't a trader, just farm something, consider selling it in a nearby hub. You can move your supplies from Jita to that hub via a hauler corp.

8 comments:

Easy Esky said...

Why not the Sisters or Thukker?

Because you need to be in specific places for those. As noted by you, the Thukker L4 mining agent is on HS island. I have done it myself, running the low sec with a DST of necessity. Nomad implants were formally prized by freighter pilots - but that was prior to the warp speed changes.

And as for the Sisters? More profitable, but the risk and reward very steep. Even on the L3 security agent of the Sisters, it is a haunt of pirates scanning for the unwary. Consider that a frigate can swoop in steal the Damsel and the mission is a write-off. For some players, the intrusion is a detractor. Better to be able to run a mission and relax. For others, it is leaving a system or constellation which is considered "home". It not always about min-max.

Anonymous said...

@Easy Esky: I have been doing SOE missions for a year while in Uni and studying for exams. I have not met a single pirate who would steal mission items, and if I did, so what? Decline and do next.

Arrendis said...

Actually, the thukker island's not a problem at all for safety, it just takes a slight detour. Just because you're earning your LP there doesn't mean you have to spend your LP there. You can spend your LP at thukker stations deeper into highsec, no problem.

Anonymous said...

A lot of it is volume. Why would I want to make 10% extra by setting a sell order that might take months to sell when I could instead sell to you for that 10% less at Jita, then flip decent items in Jita and make 20-30% from the same isk in that same month in Jita? The best prices are good on paper, but they often can be beaten out by quicker liquidity if you know how to work your money.

Anonymous said...

People keep talking about a highsec island for running missions for the thukker. I have been running missions for them in Molden Heath for over a month now. There are 2 LVL 4 combat agents next to each other there. The only downfall is that you get a lot of missions in highsec. Either decline them or run them with the cloaky tengu. And only run the missions you can blitz. I havn't had any problems so far.

nightgerbil said...

Anon 31 July, 2015 10:02: they are talking about mining missions when they discuss thukker tribe. Its the least effort/hr/risk for isk you can do without using an afktar in nullsec.

Anonymous said...

That last sentence is actually the reaqson for the whole "Everyone goes to Jita"-conundrum.

it comes down to one truth: People are lazy.
Also, people want to buy cheaply.

To do it your "better way" you need two things:
1) A Jita alt to buy stuff
2) The time and effort to locate and use a hauling corp.
3) the tijme and effort to ride herd on your sell orders in your local hub.

All three require extra effort and some people do not have the slot for that trader alt in the first place.

It is much easier to just go to Jita, buy whatever you need at the cheapest price and quickly sell off all your loot to the highest buy orders (which are the highest anywhere) when you are there with your hauler anyway.

Frankly, if you figure in opportunity cost for managing teh trader alt and the hauling contracts and the babysitting of sell orders you might even still come out ahead even with 60 to 100 mill/hour income of running hisec missions

Provi Miner said...

Lazy isn't the point you know. Take something like oooooohhhh I don't know how about Mercoxite.

Tell you mine that for a month and go try and sell it. Supposedly its the most valuable (it isn't but thats another issue) but you can only Sell it in dribs and drabs, Selling merc is painful anywhere but jita, and the time you lose going from armarr to Rens to Dixi to that other hub is such a waste that you are losing money by NOT going to jita.

Time, efficiency are nearly as important as price. I sell 90% of my ships in amarr and Rens cause thats the best price but at the end of the month I am still forced to make the run to jita to sell the "snowflakes" cause while the price is slightly lower the fact that I will sell when I want to sell is worth the trade off.

While I am at it when I get really lazy I settle for Amarr prices cause its closer and the difference in price is not worth going to jita.

However SOE LP is best sold in jita as again its a volume thing and you don't have cut throats that require daily watching there like in rens. Say you got 1K SOE Probes, yeah you can go to rens and spend 6 days playing tag with the local marketeers and do better than you can jita, but what are you doing while you playing games with the locals? nothing but playing games with the locals. So Jita has a purpose, and fills a niche, but lazy isn't one of them.