One of the tough things about trading is trying to avoid emotions. Humans are highly emotional, it's just how we are. And emotions play a fairly large role in trading and investing in the real world. Anyone who's spent any time reading about trading or investing will know about all the research that went into the emotional side of money. After all that's what marketing and behavioural finance is all about.
It's no different in EVE. In fact, I'd argue it's a little harder, because of the PVP aspect of the trading game.
Here's an example. A few days ago, I set a goal of making 1.5B ISK a month, in order to pay for two accounts using ISK, and have a bit of cash left over to buy modules for my casual PVP alt. To make 1.5B ISK a month, I need to make 50M a day. With the skills I have, I can maintain 53 orders on the market. That means I need to have at least 1M worth of goods in each of those orders, and I need to turn over all 53 orders each day. But I also need to buy good to sell, so some of those 53 orders need to be buy orders, meaning my sell orders should be at 2M each.
This kind of dawned on me this morning when I was setting up my sell orders. I had items for sale that were selling for 1,200 ISK. When I realized the amount of time I was wasting, I decided to start selling items retail, so that I could keep my market orders for more valuable items. But then I ran into one item with a buy price of 2,500 ISK and a sell price of 9,000 ISK. I have items in my inventory worth millions of ISK, but I was struggling to sell my item at 2,500 ISK, not because I would be losing out on 6,500 ISK, but because I would be giving up an item to a seller who could then resell it at 9,000. He'd effectively be getting MY 6,500 that I would get for selling it myself.
But is my slot worth 6,500 ISK? Absolutely not. I can very easily make far more than 6,500 on a single trade. In fact, yesterday, I made well over 450,000 on a trade I just happened to run into. I couldn't have made that trade without an open slot. (If you'll indulge me in a short side note, this is where the concept of opportunity costs comes in play).
But just to help me get over the emotions of giving 6,500 ISK to a competitor, I did a bit of analysis on his order. The buyer had 52 items left on his buy order, at 2,500. The item was currently selling at 9,000, and I don't think it would go much above that, given the price history and the amount of items already on the market. Assuming he fulfills that order and manages to quickly turn around those 52 units at 6,500 ISK profit, his total profit will be 338,000 ISK. As I've already stated, I made more than that on a single opportunity buy. I'd gladly give up 6,500 to a competitor if it means me being ahead of him by 162,000 in the long run.
Emotional discipline is one of the fundamental traits of all investors. Traders are competitive by nature, so it's especially important for us to keep emotions in check so that we can make the most profitable use of our time and resources.
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