So, I am a station trader, yes, that is me, sitting in Jita 0.01’ing you (well, other stuff too, but, we will stick with the 0.01ing for now).

Trading is boring, right? All that 0.01’ing, constantly being outbid by someone, small profits unless you are super rich?

That’s what a lot of people think, and, like anything in Eve, it can be very routine, but, it also has moments that can get your heart going (not talking about when you accidentally list something at buy price on sell orders and have to wait out the timer), and this is about one of those times.



A while back, there was a challenge on r/eve: take a brand new char, and using only the 5k isk you begin with, see how long it takes to make 1b. The rules were simple, it had to be a new character, and you had to use only the market to trade, and all player donations had to be returned. Link to /r/eve thread is here.

Because I often help newbies, and, of course, because everyone is a bit competitive, I decided to give it a go, and, along with one of my in-game friends, we made a slight modification to the rules. You could not undock to get any items, everything had to be station traded. I also decided to try it outside of Jita, so after analyzing the volumes in different hubs, I decided on Amarr, because we thought it could be achieved in a reasonable time there.

So, off I went to find a spare slot on an account, and create a character. Logged in, set destination to Amarr VIII – Emperor Family Academy in my Impairor, 5k isk to burn in my pocket!

Docking up, I opened the market and started to look for items which I could buy. Now, the problem with starting with 5k isk is, adjusting an order costs 100 isk, and, you have broker fees to worry about which are 1.0% with no skills or standing.

Fortunately, it is quite easy to find things which double your isk very fast at that level, so, off I went, placing buy orders for some meta items and a few small hybrid charges.

I continued with this the next day, finding very cheap items with very big margins, small freight containers for 6k buy, 229k sell, small shield booster Is at 4k buy, 40k sell. Slow items, but it adds up over time. I also wasn’t putting a lot of effort into it, as I was feeling fairly meh about it.

I wake up on the 10th January, with around 1mil in my wallet, and feeling uninspired, start looking through T2 items. Entering II into the market search bar, I started at the bottom of the list, and see Warp Disruptor IIs.

I usually try and trade items with minimum 200 units/day in Amarr, and minimum 10% volume, so, this was very good! Off I went, buying 1 at a time, and selling it as soon as I got it. I was feeling crap, this was going to take ages, and, my friend was already at 500mil having done nonstop trading for a few days.

Then, the price moved up to 5mil per unit, even better! I joked with some people “How many of these do I need to flip at this price to make 1bil?”

I sold a few at this price, was at 20mil isk, started thinking I could make 1mil-100mil in one day, which would be fairly nice.

I opened the market to see if I had been outbid, and saw this!

Wait…What? Someone had just bought out the ALL of the item…but, surely no one would pay just under 50mil for a Warp Disruptor? That would be crazy!

I decided to try my luck listing at 25mil….it sold almost instantly..this was weird, but, sure, if they want it at 25mil, lets see if someone wants it at 40mil?

Wont happen, right? No one would be crazy enough to do that?

At this point, I had 130mil in my wallet, so I was past where I expected to be. I told people about this, but, they said it would not last, no one would buy from the orders, it would get restocked very fast, being only 9 jumps from Jita….

At just before 3am eve time, I was having problems getting my buy order for 1 filled….then, something happened, a guy sold me one, but, he had 38 of them….so, the other 37 went up as a sell order, at buy price…so, for 42m, I got all of those..

It didn’t matter if I didn’t sell all of them, I would make my profit with only a few of them sold, but, I started getting nervous, what happens if the market crashes, and I have this stock I cannot move?

I also worried that I would not have enough to keep selling, so I yelled in a channel for someone to bring down 50 from Jita, and I would buy them from a buy order at 1.8m, which was above Jita and Amarr price. They couriered them down, so, it was a nervous 45 minutes waiting for the arrival, then they had to log in, then I had to set my buy order up at just the right time so I got the items from them.

Unfortunately, the market started dropping, as I wasn’t the only person to notice it…I panicked a bit, and tried to offload as many as I could at 2.2m, so still profit, but not much.

This is me fire-selling everything so I could shift my stock before I went to bed (it was REALLY late by now and I needed sleep).

Now, a thing you do when taking advantage of market price changes is, you put a stack of items up at a MUCH higher price, so you get a warning when the market moves. So, I put 20 of these up at 5mil, just in case, you know, it might happen….and, started getting ready for bed.

Then, happening status changed…..

So, its now just before 6am eve time, I am almost out of items again, but, this is still going….what do I do?

Of course, I call on one of my friends to ship down another 50, as fast as they can…to another buy order.

As you can see, I paid just under 90mil for 50, and then almost immediately sold 10 of them for 95mil, so, I have already nearly made all of the isk back for that purchase

Around this time, I was at about 800mil in my wallet in liquid isk, so I started thinking “OMG I can actually do this in one day”, I started messaging my friend who was streaming, he wasn’t online yet, but, I wanted to let him know I was about to beat him.

The market slowed down eventually, I had 934mil liquid isk, and was desperately trying to find items to get me the last 60mil profit, as I was fairly tired by now, but was determined to do it before I went to bed…..Then I looked at my wallet, and saw I had 300mil in sell orders, so, that meant I had gone past the 1bil!!!

So, that 1 item, how much did I make on it?

Yep, that is 970.9mil on 1 item, in 1 day…..

This is not an everyday occurrence but, there are often items which have been bought out that you can take advantage of, the day after this, I was hanging in Jita, taking the day off and browsing the market, and someone had cleared out Acolyte IIs, more recently, I have found T2 small guns being bought out.

There are many reasons why this happens, everything from builders just not building them, through alliances buying out an item for a new doctrine, to, in this case, someone trying to corner the market in an item and control the price.

While I am not promising you can go from 1mil-1bil in 1 day, you can definitely find some nice profits just by looking through the market!