The EVE market is based more on the simple and antiquated market than in real life. That doesn't make it any less useful. While some of the tools are quite antiquated, they do a fair job at showing you what the market is doing. It's not always 100% accurate, but its pretty good.
I have labeled the screen shot below with numbers and they will correspond to the info on this post. You might find it useful to view the image in a separate window if you have two screens.
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| marketpace graph interface (click to enlarge) |
#1: This button toggles between the graph and the table. The table is a simplified text representation of the information. I find it more effective to use the graph form.
#2: This button allows you to select a time span that you want to see for a particular item. Some may argue that it is better to use a 3-month or 1-year time span. I think that if all you do is trade, you can use this to see trends and make assumptions and educated guesses on what you should buy and sell. I tend to go with less time. I can see what is moving in the most recent time span. This is myopic, I admit it. I don't trade full time and I don't want to be tied to long buy/sell cycles. An item that has moved a lot in the past 3 days might have a terrible long-term average and I could be buying and selling at the end of the golden period and could lose ISK when the bubble pops. This can happen when new ships are released. You might see that the 3 day shows a lot of high priced sales, but if you wait a few days, you will see the bottom drop out and you might have overpriced items and a fickle market due to high supply and low demand. BE CAREFUL.
#3 & 4: The red and green lines on the graph represent the simple moving average (SMA). The green line is is the 20dy average and the red line is the 5dy average. This represents the average price over a span of days. So the 5dy average uses 5 days. This is a very simple data point. It is also called a "lagging average" because it is based on past market data. It lags behind the current market price information. This is an older system and it is based on a simple average. In a RL economy, more weight is placed on the last few days of the the average. This gets a little more relevant accuracy.
#5: The Donchian channel isn't something I pay too much attention to, but it can help you see if an item is moving up or down. It takes the highest and lowest price of a specific time span. The area between the high and the low is considered the Donchian channel. It is useful for pointing out volatility.
#6: Median Day Price: This shows the median price per day of the item. It picks the middle of the high and low. It is not an average. This is represented by the yellow squares. I don't pay attention to these. I'm not really sure how I would use them. I'm sure someone knows.
#7: This is the representation off all the items above. It shows the moving averages and median prices placed over the Donchian channel.
#8: This is the price scale for the item. It will adjust with the market data. I don't find this extremely useful. But it is a quick reference to what the item price is.
#9; This is the volume representation. This shows how many items have been bough/sold over the time span and it shows current volume as well. One of the best tips I can give about station trading is that items with a low volume might appear good (high price/high margin) but they might take forever to sell and the opportunity to be outbid by .01 ISK and miss your chance is high. I'm not saying it is a dead end. I am saying that it may take a while to pan out (and it might take a while to find out you made a mistake).
Hopefully this helps and that I detailed it correctly. If I did something wrong, let me know in the comments. As always, fly sage-ish.
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