Regional trading has always had a reputation as the most lucrative way to make ISK in New Eden. I can't really argue with that, most of the trillionaires I see got there moving goods between hubs, not building them. So a few weeks ago, I decided to become a trader.
I did what any reasonably paranoid industrialist does before committing ISK: I over-prepared. Many YouTube videos on regional trading fundamentals. I went back through some of the longest running blogs in the space, Croda's blog among them, looking for the patterns. I subscribed to EVE Trade Guru, the 1B ISK subscription, and started digging through Discord servers dedicated entirely to arbitrage and hauling routes, trying to absorb whatever tips and tricks I could find.
Armed with all of that, I ran the numbers through EVE Trade Guru and picked two routes to start: Jita to Amarr, and Jita to Dodixie. Classic hub to hub arbitrage. I checked prices, checked volumes, checked transport costs and travel times, checked competition on both ends. On paper, it looked solid.
And then... nothing happened. Just a slow, grinding routine of updating sell orders, watching margins shrink every single day, and telling myself it would pick up.
That's when it clicked for me: regional trading is a game of quantity. Whoever holds the most sell orders wins, wins the visibility, wins the volume. My single account with a modest stack of orders just doesn't move the needle when competing against traders running many characters. There was no room to maneuver, and worse, no real way to correct a bad position once you were in it. You just sat there, watching it bleeds out slowly, or cancel it and swallow your pride.
The deeper issue was capital allocation, and this is the part that was unpleasant for me on the whole venture. To trade seriously, you need to be comfortable locking up 90 to 95% of your net worth in buy and sell orders at any given time. That's fine if you're a trader, your capital is your inventory. But it's a completely different mentality from industry.
As an industrialist, I never want to sit below roughly 30% liquid ISK, low Isk for an industrialist triggers emergency, I need that buffer to launch the next production batch, to react when a material spikes or a market I depend on shifts overnight, or to snap up cheap minerals and components when a good deal. Cash is king in manufacturing in a way it just isn't in trading. Locking 95% of my wallet into standing orders would mean my actual production, the reactions, the T2 lines, the capital parts, grinds to a halt the moment I need liquidity and don't have it.
I know, in the end, every industrialist is also a trader of sorts, we all must sell what we make somewhere. But engaging with the market as your core loop is a fundamentally different discipline than engaging with it to offload finished goods.
From my admittedly short and bruising experience, I think that (I stand corrected) a trader needs to think like a manager: zoomed out, tracking macro trends across regions, comfortable with thin margins at massive scale, and unbothered by capital sitting still and working slowly. An industrialist needs to be more technical, closer to the numbers, closer to the production chain, thinking in terms of input costs, reaction yields, and build efficiency rather than regional arbitrage spreads.
I'm not saying regional trading is a bad business, clearly it isn't, given how many people have built empires on it. But it's just not my business.
In the end I want to thank Ray Zolo from Eve Guru, who helped me in cancelling and refunding my 1 billion subscription despite consuming about 10 days of the month, he was very generous.
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