Trade Skills: The Short Version
Isk Related
Accounting Level 5 - Saves money from fees when selling things.Broker Relations Level 5 - Saves money from fees when buying and selling things.
Margin Trading Level 3-4 - Each level takes ~25% off the amount you put in escrow when you put up a buy order.
Trade Slots
Trade - 4 per level
Retail - 8 per level
Wholesale - 16 per level (Requires Retail 5)
Tycoon - 32 per level (Requires Wholesale 5)
Region Trading
Day Trading level 4 - Lets you modify sell orders you already have up within 20 jumps. (level 5 for region-wide)Marketing Level 4 - Lets you place things within 20 jumps up for sale. (level 5 for region-wide)
Other
Procurement Level ? - I don't use this skill, but it lets you place remote buy orders.
Visibility Level ? - I don't use this skill but lets you extend the range of your REMOTE (Procurement) buy orders.
Trade Skills: The Long Version
This can be the biggest bottleneck when it comes to trading. Trade slots are the amount of buy and sell orders a character can have active at any one time. These are the skills that give you more slots:
Trade - 4 per level
Retail - 8 per level
Wholesale - 16 per level (Requires Retail 5)
Tycoon - 32 per level (Requires Wholesale 5)
Trade Fees
A isk saved is an isk earned. There are a lot of skills that affect how much money a player is going to pay in fees, and it is a pretty good idea to max these skills asap.
Accounting Level 5 - Saves .10% off of the sales taxes for each level. Level 5 will bring your sales tax down to a maximum of .50%.
Broker Relations Level 5 - Saves .05% off of the broker fee for each level. Level 5 will bring your broker fee down by ~.25%. It is about .25% because it is applied AFTER standing bonuses are applied. So a character with 0 standing with everyone and level 5 broker relations will have a broker fee of .75%, but if you had enough standings to drop your broker fee down to .5% then your broker relations skill will drop the .5% by .25% or a final broker fee of ~.425%
Margin Trading
The concept of escrow might be a hard concept for newer traders to get, but it is basically a way to save a bit of money UNTIL the item is purchased. Depending on the "Margin Trading" skill level, it is only necessary to put down a down payment for a buy order, until the order gets filled. This lets traders with limited amounts of isk cover more of the market, if the trader is using rolling buy and sell orders.
The key is to make sure there is enough liquid isk on hand to cover any purchases until whatever was bought can be turned over (sold) in order to cover more purchases.
This is best explained by an example, items 1,2,3, and 4 both have relatively slow turn over. They all cost 1,000 isk, but the trader only has 2,000 isk on hand. The trader has level 4 Margin Trading, and they can put up 4 buy orders one for each of the 4 items. They would need to put down a down payment, but they still should have 800 isk left over to cover the rest of the purchase (200 isk down payment + 800 from the wallet).
No one knows which one of those 4 will be the next one sold to a buy order, and this way the trader has all 4 covered. Once the trader buys one they immediately try and turn it over(sell) it. They then can use that isk to put up another buy order, and just wait for another one of the four to be sold.
Region Trading Skills
There are a few skills that depend on what tactic is being used to make isk. A trader doing region trading will want to have:
Day Trading - Lets you modify sell orders you already have up within 20 jumps. (level 5 for region-wide)
Marketing - Lets you place things within 20 jumps up for sale. (level 5 for region-wide)
Other Trade Related Skills
These skills are really dependent, but most people just ignore these two:
Procurement Level - Lets you place remote buy orders.
Visibility Level - Lets you extend the range of your REMOTE (Procurement) buy orders.
