|Rx|Hubris
Veteran X
So, this is just my experience in a few weeks sitting on a huge chunk of change with next to nothing in skills. I welcome some of the veterans correcting some of the stuff I got wrong in this, but it's a pretty solid guide to get you well into the high 40 or 50 million range in a week or two.
So, brand spanking new player to EVE, have 100k in skill points, practically nothing and I'm sitting on 40 million ISK which is chump change to the big ballas, but for a new player that's pretty fucking good, almost all of this was made via trading. If you're a new player this might help you get your cruiser money with very little skill investment required I can't even fly a cruiser yet and I can buy and outfit a good five of them. In fact, you can be training up a completely different skill tree for PVP or mining and not even sweat it.
Basic Trading:
So if you open the market and go all the way to the bottom you'll see something called trade goods. These are random buy and sell orders that exist solely for players to move goods around and to sell as they get them from rewards for missions.
By moving these goods around you can turn a tidy profit, in fact several times what a miner or an NPC ratter would make in the same amount of time. In order to move these items, however, you are going to need two things:
A) You need a bankroll to buy them en masse
B) You need a ship that can move them en masse.
Building a bankroll:
If you already have a few million ISK To work with, move to the end.
While training up your frigate skill (You'll need a 3, don't worry, you need that to fly just about any ship beyond a frig anyway.) keep doing the storyline missions, eventually you will hit a point where you get one or two very nice rewards; implants. Implants are nice little stat bonuses (The kind you get will provide 1 point to a given attribute.) Until you learn more mechanics of EVE, wearing implants should be expendable, meaning you can afford to lose them because they die if you get podded and can't be insured. Little do you know, those nice little implants are worth anywhere from half a million isk to 1.5 million isk a piece so they sure as fuck aren't expendable at this stage of the game. If you only got a million from two of these, then do a few more
missions until you're sitting at a million and a half bankroll. Ideally you need a million and a half or two, (I started with 1.5m)
Getting a ship
Now, you've got capital, now you need a ship to move freight in. Buy yourself the industrial skill and start scoping around for an industrial ship. You really can't go wrong here, my personal favorite is the amarr bestower due to its high amount of low slots (4), decent speed and good cargo capacity, thats at the level 1 indy rank. Long term, the best are caldari, because they can easily shield tank and have a higher survival rate without wasting low slots on regenerators. When you first start out, it doesn't especially matter, and you can always train over to a different races freighter line if you feel your race's high end freighters are junky. If you're making the character from scratch just to do trading, go amarr if you're looking short term, go caldari if you are going long term.
Upgrading your ship:
In order to get your ship tricked out you'll need a couple of skills, these are all skills you'll need later in the game anyway, so its not a big deal, they'll
also train for less than an hour.
Mechanic level 1
Hull upgrades level 1
Once you've got these trained up go out and buy as many "expanded cargohold 1" as you have low slots and fit them up. There's a basic expanded cargohold that sells real cheap, if the price on the expanded cargohold 1 is too high by checking the recent market details then hit up the basics, but the "expanded cargohold" one will provide you with a 9%-12% gain in profit over the basics, so its worth the extra ISK now.
Another option would be
Afterburner level 1 to put an afterburner on your ship. This is completely optional, but again, afterburner and later on, the microwarpdrive (Which requries afterburner) are going to be standard issue on your ships, so its not a waste to train this and it'll get you through a warpgate a little faster. (Making you money a little faster.)
So you've got your ship, you've got some starting money, lets a find a route!
Finding a starting route
With your bankroll small right now (Don't worry, it'll change soon) you're very limited in what you can haul. If you have a decent bankroll to work with,
then scroll down. Open up the market and start looking at some trade goods. Organize the drop downs so sell organizes from lowest first and buys organize from highest first. Here you can see some of the drastic differences in sell and buy prices. For your first few runs you may need to fly to the ideal pickup spot, once your bankroll hits about eight million you'll be able to turn a profit in nine out of ten stations you land at.
The lower the price on the item and the higher it goes for, the better, keep in mind you're going to be "Risking" (more on the risk below) your whole bankroll here. So the more you can fill up your hold, the better. (This is with exception, for example, if you find an item at 25 gain per unit that fills
up your hold of 8k, vs. a 60 gain per unit that fills up your hold to half then use your head and go with the bigger one.)
The other things to look at are quantity, this is the amount that the station is looking to buy or sell for at that price. They'll still likely be looking
to buy or sell for it after you trade with them, but the price may or may not have gone up or down. The price doesn't always move, and sometimes it'll move the opposite way that you expect a little bit before it spikes the other way, but it'll remain the same price as long as no one buys or sells that item from that station.
One of the most important things to look for, is number of jumps. How far away is your pickup and dropoff? The less the number of jumps, the better.
Industrials move slower than frigates, so your time per jump is going to be longer (If you got an afterburner it'll be a wee bit shorter.) so number of
jumps is a very big deal.
Item inspection, so you've found a hot route, it's close and it's going to fill up your hold. Now, lets check the information on the item. Right click, go to show info, there's two things you're looking at. One is the volume of the item, this is how many inventory slots it takes up. Most are ranked at 1.0
cubed meters (M3) but some are as high as 4.0 or as little as 0.1. Just do the math real quick and make sure you know how many units to buy. The other factor is "legality" very few items have this, but if it does have it, that means its illegal somewhere. If you click on legality you can see which empire space its outlawed in. If you fly into any 1.0 of that space it'll get confiscated and you'll get fined a huge amount. (Don't do this.) Like I said, very few items have this and the ones that do are obvious, IE antibiotics, electronic parts and tobacco are all legal but the drugs and slaves are not. Straight forward.
So you're ready to rock, the last thing to look at is the security of the space. Open the map with the market still open, set "use safest route" in the map viewer now right click on the item in the market and choose location > set destination. You'll now see the route pop up and what security space it flies through.
Risk
Very rarely people will gate camp in high sec space, in low value craft and randomly suicide people. I've never experienced it, but it can happen.
Likewise is someone coming up to you and randomly attacking you in high security space, it can happen. Bumping into a random freighter in space a suicide group fit to jack indys can scan your cargo, when they see you don't have shit they won't bother, because it'll cost them an hour to refit their ships and get back in action while making virtually nothing from you. If you see the suicide group has an industrial parked nearby... its an organized group, they're going to check the market for the value on your goods and will likely only take a ransom worth more than your ship and cargo... IE you are fucked.
Several dozen runs I've never been hit in high security space in my indy. Low sec, however, is a different story. The first time you enter low sec (0.4 and below.) do not have your bankroll at risk in your cargohold, your insurance does not cover it, you also want to check your map and check "ships killed in the last hour" to see how "frisky" the system is at the moment, if its hot, don't bother, take a slight loss and move the goods to another system.
There's more below on dealing with pirates when you start moving goods into low sec.
Advanced
Agile runs
So now that your bankroll is 5-8 million you have a LOT of options now. You can fill up your cargohold just about any stop you make, and you're gonna be looking to make a profit 9 of 10 stops you make. At this point you can start making what I call "agile" runs. Agile runs mean you do not plot out an A>B>C>D necessarily, you just wing it as you fly and every time you enter space, check the market by the dropdown "Solarsystem" instead of region, this will show you only the things available to you in that system, if you see a good deal, keep that in the back of your mind, or possibly jot it down in the "notes" really the only information you need in the notes is the profit per M3 (See above, but figure out how much you make per m3 hauled), the number of jumps and the system it was in. When your reach your destination, dump your cargo and start looking for a new haul.
The Formula; Ain't nothing going on but the rent
So you hit up a new system, its got several profitable items and decide to take the one with the higest m3 value. Because thats the best thing, right?
Wrong. Remember, time is money. Now that your bankroll is large enough, you don't have to be as discriminating as you once were. Think of your business now as renting your cargo. You want the M3 value that you make per cargo spot you have available, but more importantly you want to know how long the "lease" is on this renting of your cargo. The shorter the jumps to dump your cargo, the higher your return, faster.
Here's how your rent works. You spot XXX at 50 gain per m3 with a delivery ten jumps away. You spot YYY, however, at 20 gain per m3 with a delivery of 3 jumps away.
If you divide fifty, the per m3 value of XXX, by its ten jumps you get a value of 5. If you divide the 20 of YYY by 3, you get almost 7.
Therefore, that makes YYY a better move, because its a smaller payoff, but you spend less than a third as much time in hyperspace. If you were to make that run three times, with the same prices (See below about flattening) you would have an almost 40 percent higher gain! It may seem like less, but in reality, it's a better move. Though you may not make that run 3 times, as long as you keep taking the higher per m3 per jump value, you're always making more money than what seems like the obvious choice just because the price per m3 is higher.
Now, just as you're about to buy, you remember your notes. A jump ago you checked the market and remembered a pretty good deal. There was a 30 per m3 run, and checking further into your notes, it was only 2 jumps to deliver the product. That means your rent price was 15! However, we have to add on the amount of "dead jumps" we have to make to get to that route, so that raises our jump count to 3. That's still a value of ten. This is a much better route.
Setting ourself a destination, we are just about to leave the station, but before we go... check the market and see if they need anything. If you can turn a 1 m3 per unit profit, thats fantastic, because its the best run available to you now only one jump away, so you should head that way, so anything else that you can move to that system is extra money on top of it. Occasionally you'll be able to turn some extra money this way, though not always.
With these short runs in mind, you may also come across inter system ( station to station in the same system) runs worth 50 or more m3 per dock.
FYI the best m3 per value per jump I've come across is just shy of 200 and a casual or thorough glance of the market viewer would have never spotted it from a distant system. Runs like that do get added to your notes for future reference
Using this formula and with a proper bankroll and a shitty ship you can pull in anywhere from 1 million to 4 million an hour. I average about two.
Keep your wallet open with "transactions" and you'll be able to easily track how much you are pulling in per hour and what your best runs were (Put in your notes for future reference.) Eventually you'll be spotting some great starting areas for agile runs.
Rent = ((price item will be bought for when delivered)-(price item sells for to you)) /volume of item/jumps
Ex:
We want to move construction blocks five jumps, buying them at 400 and selling them at 500.
Construction blocks =((500)-(400)/4 = 25 <--- value per m3
25 per m3 divided by 5 jumps = 5 <---- rent mothafucka
If we multiply the value per m3 by our cargohold we can see how much we would make. If at 25, we have 10,000, we'd make 250,000 (minus the 1% or so we pay for taxation, which skills can lower, see the end of the guide.)
If we multiply the rent by our cargo hold we can see how much we make every jump. 5 x 10,000 = 50,000 every 6 or so minutes we enter a new system on that route.
Market Flattening and why I "Agile"
Some traders use tools to find the best per m3 value and what they could possibly make across all regions. The reason why I'm not a big fan of this is
1) Its a shit ton of work, I mean, if you thought the formulas sucked, try parsing data yourself across all regions.
2) market flattening.
The market flattens when two things happen, a buy and a sell. The first few times an item is bought or sold it may reduce (in the case of a buy) or increase (in the case of a sell) its price, this is great, this is market distancing. However, if you keep doing that run again, it will stop doing that and in the case of purchasing the item the price will raise (because there is consistent demand) and in the case of selling the item it will decrease (because the market is flooded.) Thus the buy and sell prices will come together, or invert (So a profit is not possible) All player buy and sells of that good in that system affect this number, so if you plan out a huge 25 jump run to another region... usually it will be have changed by the time you get there, in which case it was not the most efficient run you could have made. Rarely, the price may have been lowered to below what you bought the goods for, IE, you just spent 25 runs to get a goddamn loss.
The market can spike back the other way through random chance in the EvE system, it also gets reset to its default values every night when the servers go down for maintenance.
Industrials moving cargo around will naturally cause market flattening over time, it can also be caused by freighters....
Late game, there are ships called freighters, freighters are mega industrials which when properly fitted can haul anywhere from 700,000 to 2 million units of m3 in their cargohold. Since most stations won't sell or buy that many units, when a freighter fills up his hold he is buying several times, and when he sells he's usually selling several times. This instantly flattens that market, and usually inverts it, instantly. Think of the freighter as a strip miner.
He just destroyed that run for massive amounts of ISK. These ships are not common, but if one moves into your system, it is an issue, you'll either need to move on, live on his scraps or figure something out.
(Note, that figure something out really SHOULDn't include hiring a noobie mercenary or assassin corp to suicide him a couple of times in tech 1 frigs to drive him into another section of space away from this "Crazy" region. I also have no idea where you would find such corps. )
Note if you do want to do long runs, look at http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=266623 its also just a good way to spot a few choice runs in close proximity to park yourself around and start your day at. I'm just not as much a fan of using it for long runs, you can do market research for an hour, crunch numbers for an hour, spend two hours on a run and make less than just doing agile runs.
Also there's http://eve-central.com/home/ which imo sucks, its too out of date and since its shared information you can't verify that its still there unless you check the market on both end regions.
Advanced Upgrades
Eventually you hit a point where your bankroll is able to buy everything, so you either need to upgrade or be happy with what you are making. The first option is giant cargo containers, these you can drop in your ship and start acting as free M3. You can also get secure containers that when you are about to be destroyed you can jettison (With the anchoring skill) and it'll stop them from being scooped or tampered with, effectively saving your cargo.
You can also look at getting more volume out of your cargo expanders. Lets say buying 3 "uber kickass expanders" is going to increase your cargo by 20% and is going to run you 6 million. If you make 3 million an hour, they'll pay for themselves in ten hours.
Likewise, adding onto your industrial skill may only cost you a couple of hours to get to three, and that will increase your cargo by 10% (Indies get 5% more cargo per skill point.)
Dealing with a pirate
If you do get hit by a pirate and you're fucked, immediately send them a message saying you're willing to pay a ransom for your ship, its of no use to you destroyed and that you will not pay a ransom in a pod, sending them a small random amount of money to light up their wallet is never a bad policy. Stopmoving, come to a dead stop, and stop shooting if you have started shooting at them (I don't even bother.) More often than not a pirate will take a ransom over blowing you up. Since you're new, you're not gonna have a lot of cash (Ransoms can go for 10 million plus+) so if the pirate gets frisky explain you're new (He'll see this on your profile, so he'll know you're not lying.) and offer to jettison however much cargo room he has in goods in addition to the funds you are offering. (Most cruisers and frigates have 200-500 in cargo space, not much at all.) Whatever amount he is demanding may exceed your whole bankroll, explain this and also explain that you have no major upgrades of value (List them off if need be.) and that'll he make far more money by taking your offer than blowing you up.
He'll likely concede because you are offering him more money than he would make (Truthfully, and he has some evidence to support this), as soon as you pay him, say thanks and get out of there. If he blows you up afterwards, find out his corporate head and let them know. Even an all pirate "YARR MOTHERFUCKER YARR" corp look down on blowing up a target after a ransom is paid because it costs them future business, that's how pirates make the most money, so they'll be fucking angry. There's a story on the eve forums of a trader that did this and he got the full amount of his ship + cargo back x2 from the corp head and the guy got booted from the corp, pirates get fucking angry over that. The corp head might be a shit head, but just be cordial, say you are supporting their business and see what happens. I wouldn't expect to get your money back, but at least expect the shit head to get yelled at.
So, thats trading for beginners, you can find more information on trading here, there's advanced information there like what skills to train to reduce taxation and such:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=135178
The nice thing about trading is that its a good way to make money real quick, fund a few "fuckup" cruisers for you to blow up while you learn the game, then you can go down a whole different path without feeling like you wasted anything more than five hours of skill training. When newbie miners are pulling in 100k an hour in high sec space under optimal conditions, you'll pull in two or three hundred k in the same time span when you make your first jump and when the miners are in low sec space constantly fighting off npcs, occasionally fighting off players, risking a cruiser and making 500k an hour, you'll be pulling in a few million an hour.
Also, dont link to this guide from the eve forums this is for Teedub eyes only, more traders = more market flattening.
So, brand spanking new player to EVE, have 100k in skill points, practically nothing and I'm sitting on 40 million ISK which is chump change to the big ballas, but for a new player that's pretty fucking good, almost all of this was made via trading. If you're a new player this might help you get your cruiser money with very little skill investment required I can't even fly a cruiser yet and I can buy and outfit a good five of them. In fact, you can be training up a completely different skill tree for PVP or mining and not even sweat it.
Basic Trading:
So if you open the market and go all the way to the bottom you'll see something called trade goods. These are random buy and sell orders that exist solely for players to move goods around and to sell as they get them from rewards for missions.
By moving these goods around you can turn a tidy profit, in fact several times what a miner or an NPC ratter would make in the same amount of time. In order to move these items, however, you are going to need two things:
A) You need a bankroll to buy them en masse
B) You need a ship that can move them en masse.
Building a bankroll:
If you already have a few million ISK To work with, move to the end.
While training up your frigate skill (You'll need a 3, don't worry, you need that to fly just about any ship beyond a frig anyway.) keep doing the storyline missions, eventually you will hit a point where you get one or two very nice rewards; implants. Implants are nice little stat bonuses (The kind you get will provide 1 point to a given attribute.) Until you learn more mechanics of EVE, wearing implants should be expendable, meaning you can afford to lose them because they die if you get podded and can't be insured. Little do you know, those nice little implants are worth anywhere from half a million isk to 1.5 million isk a piece so they sure as fuck aren't expendable at this stage of the game. If you only got a million from two of these, then do a few more
missions until you're sitting at a million and a half bankroll. Ideally you need a million and a half or two, (I started with 1.5m)
Getting a ship
Now, you've got capital, now you need a ship to move freight in. Buy yourself the industrial skill and start scoping around for an industrial ship. You really can't go wrong here, my personal favorite is the amarr bestower due to its high amount of low slots (4), decent speed and good cargo capacity, thats at the level 1 indy rank. Long term, the best are caldari, because they can easily shield tank and have a higher survival rate without wasting low slots on regenerators. When you first start out, it doesn't especially matter, and you can always train over to a different races freighter line if you feel your race's high end freighters are junky. If you're making the character from scratch just to do trading, go amarr if you're looking short term, go caldari if you are going long term.
Upgrading your ship:
In order to get your ship tricked out you'll need a couple of skills, these are all skills you'll need later in the game anyway, so its not a big deal, they'll
also train for less than an hour.
Mechanic level 1
Hull upgrades level 1
Once you've got these trained up go out and buy as many "expanded cargohold 1" as you have low slots and fit them up. There's a basic expanded cargohold that sells real cheap, if the price on the expanded cargohold 1 is too high by checking the recent market details then hit up the basics, but the "expanded cargohold" one will provide you with a 9%-12% gain in profit over the basics, so its worth the extra ISK now.
Another option would be
Afterburner level 1 to put an afterburner on your ship. This is completely optional, but again, afterburner and later on, the microwarpdrive (Which requries afterburner) are going to be standard issue on your ships, so its not a waste to train this and it'll get you through a warpgate a little faster. (Making you money a little faster.)
So you've got your ship, you've got some starting money, lets a find a route!
Finding a starting route
With your bankroll small right now (Don't worry, it'll change soon) you're very limited in what you can haul. If you have a decent bankroll to work with,
then scroll down. Open up the market and start looking at some trade goods. Organize the drop downs so sell organizes from lowest first and buys organize from highest first. Here you can see some of the drastic differences in sell and buy prices. For your first few runs you may need to fly to the ideal pickup spot, once your bankroll hits about eight million you'll be able to turn a profit in nine out of ten stations you land at.
The lower the price on the item and the higher it goes for, the better, keep in mind you're going to be "Risking" (more on the risk below) your whole bankroll here. So the more you can fill up your hold, the better. (This is with exception, for example, if you find an item at 25 gain per unit that fills
up your hold of 8k, vs. a 60 gain per unit that fills up your hold to half then use your head and go with the bigger one.)
The other things to look at are quantity, this is the amount that the station is looking to buy or sell for at that price. They'll still likely be looking
to buy or sell for it after you trade with them, but the price may or may not have gone up or down. The price doesn't always move, and sometimes it'll move the opposite way that you expect a little bit before it spikes the other way, but it'll remain the same price as long as no one buys or sells that item from that station.
One of the most important things to look for, is number of jumps. How far away is your pickup and dropoff? The less the number of jumps, the better.
Industrials move slower than frigates, so your time per jump is going to be longer (If you got an afterburner it'll be a wee bit shorter.) so number of
jumps is a very big deal.
Item inspection, so you've found a hot route, it's close and it's going to fill up your hold. Now, lets check the information on the item. Right click, go to show info, there's two things you're looking at. One is the volume of the item, this is how many inventory slots it takes up. Most are ranked at 1.0
cubed meters (M3) but some are as high as 4.0 or as little as 0.1. Just do the math real quick and make sure you know how many units to buy. The other factor is "legality" very few items have this, but if it does have it, that means its illegal somewhere. If you click on legality you can see which empire space its outlawed in. If you fly into any 1.0 of that space it'll get confiscated and you'll get fined a huge amount. (Don't do this.) Like I said, very few items have this and the ones that do are obvious, IE antibiotics, electronic parts and tobacco are all legal but the drugs and slaves are not. Straight forward.
So you're ready to rock, the last thing to look at is the security of the space. Open the map with the market still open, set "use safest route" in the map viewer now right click on the item in the market and choose location > set destination. You'll now see the route pop up and what security space it flies through.
Risk
Very rarely people will gate camp in high sec space, in low value craft and randomly suicide people. I've never experienced it, but it can happen.
Likewise is someone coming up to you and randomly attacking you in high security space, it can happen. Bumping into a random freighter in space a suicide group fit to jack indys can scan your cargo, when they see you don't have shit they won't bother, because it'll cost them an hour to refit their ships and get back in action while making virtually nothing from you. If you see the suicide group has an industrial parked nearby... its an organized group, they're going to check the market for the value on your goods and will likely only take a ransom worth more than your ship and cargo... IE you are fucked.
Several dozen runs I've never been hit in high security space in my indy. Low sec, however, is a different story. The first time you enter low sec (0.4 and below.) do not have your bankroll at risk in your cargohold, your insurance does not cover it, you also want to check your map and check "ships killed in the last hour" to see how "frisky" the system is at the moment, if its hot, don't bother, take a slight loss and move the goods to another system.
There's more below on dealing with pirates when you start moving goods into low sec.
Advanced
Agile runs
So now that your bankroll is 5-8 million you have a LOT of options now. You can fill up your cargohold just about any stop you make, and you're gonna be looking to make a profit 9 of 10 stops you make. At this point you can start making what I call "agile" runs. Agile runs mean you do not plot out an A>B>C>D necessarily, you just wing it as you fly and every time you enter space, check the market by the dropdown "Solarsystem" instead of region, this will show you only the things available to you in that system, if you see a good deal, keep that in the back of your mind, or possibly jot it down in the "notes" really the only information you need in the notes is the profit per M3 (See above, but figure out how much you make per m3 hauled), the number of jumps and the system it was in. When your reach your destination, dump your cargo and start looking for a new haul.
The Formula; Ain't nothing going on but the rent
So you hit up a new system, its got several profitable items and decide to take the one with the higest m3 value. Because thats the best thing, right?
Wrong. Remember, time is money. Now that your bankroll is large enough, you don't have to be as discriminating as you once were. Think of your business now as renting your cargo. You want the M3 value that you make per cargo spot you have available, but more importantly you want to know how long the "lease" is on this renting of your cargo. The shorter the jumps to dump your cargo, the higher your return, faster.
Here's how your rent works. You spot XXX at 50 gain per m3 with a delivery ten jumps away. You spot YYY, however, at 20 gain per m3 with a delivery of 3 jumps away.
If you divide fifty, the per m3 value of XXX, by its ten jumps you get a value of 5. If you divide the 20 of YYY by 3, you get almost 7.
Therefore, that makes YYY a better move, because its a smaller payoff, but you spend less than a third as much time in hyperspace. If you were to make that run three times, with the same prices (See below about flattening) you would have an almost 40 percent higher gain! It may seem like less, but in reality, it's a better move. Though you may not make that run 3 times, as long as you keep taking the higher per m3 per jump value, you're always making more money than what seems like the obvious choice just because the price per m3 is higher.
Now, just as you're about to buy, you remember your notes. A jump ago you checked the market and remembered a pretty good deal. There was a 30 per m3 run, and checking further into your notes, it was only 2 jumps to deliver the product. That means your rent price was 15! However, we have to add on the amount of "dead jumps" we have to make to get to that route, so that raises our jump count to 3. That's still a value of ten. This is a much better route.
Setting ourself a destination, we are just about to leave the station, but before we go... check the market and see if they need anything. If you can turn a 1 m3 per unit profit, thats fantastic, because its the best run available to you now only one jump away, so you should head that way, so anything else that you can move to that system is extra money on top of it. Occasionally you'll be able to turn some extra money this way, though not always.
With these short runs in mind, you may also come across inter system ( station to station in the same system) runs worth 50 or more m3 per dock.
FYI the best m3 per value per jump I've come across is just shy of 200 and a casual or thorough glance of the market viewer would have never spotted it from a distant system. Runs like that do get added to your notes for future reference
Using this formula and with a proper bankroll and a shitty ship you can pull in anywhere from 1 million to 4 million an hour. I average about two.
Keep your wallet open with "transactions" and you'll be able to easily track how much you are pulling in per hour and what your best runs were (Put in your notes for future reference.) Eventually you'll be spotting some great starting areas for agile runs.
Rent = ((price item will be bought for when delivered)-(price item sells for to you)) /volume of item/jumps
Ex:
We want to move construction blocks five jumps, buying them at 400 and selling them at 500.
Construction blocks =((500)-(400)/4 = 25 <--- value per m3
25 per m3 divided by 5 jumps = 5 <---- rent mothafucka
If we multiply the value per m3 by our cargohold we can see how much we would make. If at 25, we have 10,000, we'd make 250,000 (minus the 1% or so we pay for taxation, which skills can lower, see the end of the guide.)
If we multiply the rent by our cargo hold we can see how much we make every jump. 5 x 10,000 = 50,000 every 6 or so minutes we enter a new system on that route.
Market Flattening and why I "Agile"
Some traders use tools to find the best per m3 value and what they could possibly make across all regions. The reason why I'm not a big fan of this is
1) Its a shit ton of work, I mean, if you thought the formulas sucked, try parsing data yourself across all regions.
2) market flattening.
The market flattens when two things happen, a buy and a sell. The first few times an item is bought or sold it may reduce (in the case of a buy) or increase (in the case of a sell) its price, this is great, this is market distancing. However, if you keep doing that run again, it will stop doing that and in the case of purchasing the item the price will raise (because there is consistent demand) and in the case of selling the item it will decrease (because the market is flooded.) Thus the buy and sell prices will come together, or invert (So a profit is not possible) All player buy and sells of that good in that system affect this number, so if you plan out a huge 25 jump run to another region... usually it will be have changed by the time you get there, in which case it was not the most efficient run you could have made. Rarely, the price may have been lowered to below what you bought the goods for, IE, you just spent 25 runs to get a goddamn loss.
The market can spike back the other way through random chance in the EvE system, it also gets reset to its default values every night when the servers go down for maintenance.
Industrials moving cargo around will naturally cause market flattening over time, it can also be caused by freighters....
Late game, there are ships called freighters, freighters are mega industrials which when properly fitted can haul anywhere from 700,000 to 2 million units of m3 in their cargohold. Since most stations won't sell or buy that many units, when a freighter fills up his hold he is buying several times, and when he sells he's usually selling several times. This instantly flattens that market, and usually inverts it, instantly. Think of the freighter as a strip miner.
He just destroyed that run for massive amounts of ISK. These ships are not common, but if one moves into your system, it is an issue, you'll either need to move on, live on his scraps or figure something out.
(Note, that figure something out really SHOULDn't include hiring a noobie mercenary or assassin corp to suicide him a couple of times in tech 1 frigs to drive him into another section of space away from this "Crazy" region. I also have no idea where you would find such corps. )
Note if you do want to do long runs, look at http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=266623 its also just a good way to spot a few choice runs in close proximity to park yourself around and start your day at. I'm just not as much a fan of using it for long runs, you can do market research for an hour, crunch numbers for an hour, spend two hours on a run and make less than just doing agile runs.
Also there's http://eve-central.com/home/ which imo sucks, its too out of date and since its shared information you can't verify that its still there unless you check the market on both end regions.
Advanced Upgrades
Eventually you hit a point where your bankroll is able to buy everything, so you either need to upgrade or be happy with what you are making. The first option is giant cargo containers, these you can drop in your ship and start acting as free M3. You can also get secure containers that when you are about to be destroyed you can jettison (With the anchoring skill) and it'll stop them from being scooped or tampered with, effectively saving your cargo.
You can also look at getting more volume out of your cargo expanders. Lets say buying 3 "uber kickass expanders" is going to increase your cargo by 20% and is going to run you 6 million. If you make 3 million an hour, they'll pay for themselves in ten hours.
Likewise, adding onto your industrial skill may only cost you a couple of hours to get to three, and that will increase your cargo by 10% (Indies get 5% more cargo per skill point.)
Dealing with a pirate
If you do get hit by a pirate and you're fucked, immediately send them a message saying you're willing to pay a ransom for your ship, its of no use to you destroyed and that you will not pay a ransom in a pod, sending them a small random amount of money to light up their wallet is never a bad policy. Stopmoving, come to a dead stop, and stop shooting if you have started shooting at them (I don't even bother.) More often than not a pirate will take a ransom over blowing you up. Since you're new, you're not gonna have a lot of cash (Ransoms can go for 10 million plus+) so if the pirate gets frisky explain you're new (He'll see this on your profile, so he'll know you're not lying.) and offer to jettison however much cargo room he has in goods in addition to the funds you are offering. (Most cruisers and frigates have 200-500 in cargo space, not much at all.) Whatever amount he is demanding may exceed your whole bankroll, explain this and also explain that you have no major upgrades of value (List them off if need be.) and that'll he make far more money by taking your offer than blowing you up.
He'll likely concede because you are offering him more money than he would make (Truthfully, and he has some evidence to support this), as soon as you pay him, say thanks and get out of there. If he blows you up afterwards, find out his corporate head and let them know. Even an all pirate "YARR MOTHERFUCKER YARR" corp look down on blowing up a target after a ransom is paid because it costs them future business, that's how pirates make the most money, so they'll be fucking angry. There's a story on the eve forums of a trader that did this and he got the full amount of his ship + cargo back x2 from the corp head and the guy got booted from the corp, pirates get fucking angry over that. The corp head might be a shit head, but just be cordial, say you are supporting their business and see what happens. I wouldn't expect to get your money back, but at least expect the shit head to get yelled at.
So, thats trading for beginners, you can find more information on trading here, there's advanced information there like what skills to train to reduce taxation and such:
http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=135178
The nice thing about trading is that its a good way to make money real quick, fund a few "fuckup" cruisers for you to blow up while you learn the game, then you can go down a whole different path without feeling like you wasted anything more than five hours of skill training. When newbie miners are pulling in 100k an hour in high sec space under optimal conditions, you'll pull in two or three hundred k in the same time span when you make your first jump and when the miners are in low sec space constantly fighting off npcs, occasionally fighting off players, risking a cruiser and making 500k an hour, you'll be pulling in a few million an hour.
Also, dont link to this guide from the eve forums this is for Teedub eyes only, more traders = more market flattening.