Trading - Tools of trade

During a long time, I did not used any 3rd party tool, mostly because I did not knew any.

As already previously stated in my blog I use “EVE Profit” that can be found at http://192.40.57.168/war/EVE-Profit/. It’s completely free and it can manage all your buy and sell orders, in order to know the profit you are making using the “First in/First out” method. You also get track of all your items history. I always check it at the end of the day to see how well I’m doing. Once profits start going down, it’s time to replenish the market again.

Alternatively you can use the most developed “EVE-mogul” found at http://www.eve-mogul.com. It applies the same method but has more features. You need to pay with Isk a monthly subscription, but is real cheap. The only reason I don’t use it is because I already have my long database in “Eve-Profit” and it still suits my needs.

The 2nd tool I use a lot is “Evernus” found at http://evernus.com/. It’s currently supported by it’s developer, with regular updates. It’s a very powerful tool, but I really only have need for 1 feature. It will fetch your market orders and using the new CREST thingie, it will calculate how much you need to undercut your competition to get your orders on top again. Then you can simply copy/paste the value calculated by Evernus into your EVE client. Long story short, instead of melting your brain cells manually updating your orders value, you can jut copy/paste the proper value. It’s almost like cheating… In the EVE forum there have been posts questioning about how legal that is, and since Evernus does not changes EVE client in any way, it’s a legal move. Evernus also allows you to keep track of profits and much more, but I don’t use it that way. I simply use it to update orders real fast, being a great time saver to lazy people like me.

There is, of course, a downside. Sometimes I’m updating orders so fast, that I mess up, and drop the price of a 150mil item down to 40mil or so, making it being instantly sold in buy orders… Sure EVE asks me if I wanna really change my price X% from the regional value, but during the order update race I just press enter, only to realize later on I made a mistake… It’s not rare for me to have more Isk losses in the market this way than in PVP! Ironically, the one thing I DON’T wanna see while updating orders with Evernus is my wallet flashing. If it flashes it’s prolly because I made a big mistake and I just sold something underpriced. Anyway, even being careless, is a great time saver.

The last tool I use is BY FAR the most important one. It’s a Google Docs spreadsheet with  Steve Ronuken Script (https://github.com/fuzzysteve/eve-googledocs-script/blob/master/EveCentralPrices.gs) script to pull data from EVE Central. This way I can instantly see what Items will provide me a potential profit, at any given time. Not only that I also import my market orders into the spreadsheet, in order to know if I already have that item for sale. Last thing I want is to buy an Item I’ve not sold just yet. Without this tool I would not know as fast if “Item A” would provide a decent profit or if I even have it for sale, and not sure if my strategy would survive.

In fact, I had a previous spreadsheet that did the same, but was based in the ImportXML function. Google Docs internal changes made it impossible to pull data from EVE Central and broke that tool, not only for me but for many other people in the forums complaining about it. Fortunately I stumbled upon Steve Ronuken script, had to read tutorials about how to use Google scripts, and it been working flawlessly ever since! My biggest appreciations to Steve.

Pretty sure that there are more tools, but these are the ones that keep me going and save me the most time, while providing instantly the information I care about.