Thin Markets in action

At the end of last week I posted about a trading opportunity I called 'Thin Markets'. In this post, I want to illustrate it with a example from my own market activities.

The item I manipulated was the Capital Shield Transporter. This is a prime example of a good item for this sort of market play as supply is controlled solely by manufacturers (and doesn't drop in missions etc). Therefore, as supply has a slow response to demand, the market is very flexible to manipulation hits.

As discussed in the last blog post, I discovered a thin market for this item:

I hope you agree that the above distribution of sales looks a lot like this graph with the sales highlighted in the blue box above representing an 'island' of under priced orders.

But before buying up the stock, I had a quick check of the market trends:

Looking at the graph, it looked like the transporters had bottomed out of this sales cycle and would be rising over the weekend. Additionally, buying up 18 units for resale only represented 30-40% of day's sale volume, so I should be able to shift the stock relatively quickly. Prices normally rise over the weekend too as the weekend warriors log on and get shopping. Following the eve trading motto of 'red below green, buy. green below red, sell', I thought this was a perfect example of a thin market waiting to be pounced on.

And so I bought the stock and relisted:

The items did sell over the weekend, and overall a small but easy profit of 80-90mill was made.