As an (erstwhile) Eve player, most of your assessments ring true. I, too, was thinking "I'd love to see what this author would accomplish in Eve's sandbox!" :)

As an (erstwhile) Eve player, most of your assessments ring true. I, too, was thinking "I'd love to see what this author would accomplish in Eve's sandbox!" :) You sound like you've done quite a bit of reading, but in case you haven't seen it and for anyone else who is interested, this a great write-up of an economic scheme the Goons (players from the SomethingAwful forums) pulled off to the tune of ~4 trillion ISK (between $80k-$120k US at 2012 prices): https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/1512212/ https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/1512212/ A couple of thoughts I had on your comment: >As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight... I'm not sure I understand what you mean by pure arbitrage, but certainly it's impossible to buy something from a sell order and immediately turn around and sell it to a buy order in the same station for a profit (if someone tried to post a sell order with a price lower than the price of the highest buy order, the sale would immediately take place, filling the topmost buy order(s) automatically) Transport risk wasn't very large for the regional trading I was doing. The player-run freighting groups have excellent coverage and reliability in high-sec, and because freight contracts use a collateral system, they were the ones shouldering the transport risk, not me. All I had to do was find goods selling in one trade hub for less than people were buying them for in another trade hub, buy up some, have them shipped, and put them up for sale. Of course, I was shouldering the inventory risk you mentioned, but my strategy was to invest as widely as I could and only keep a couple items of any given commodity in my hands at one time. This worked for the items I was selling (i.e. relatively small numbers of high-value and low-mass manufactured goods) but you'd definitely need a different approach for selling, say, minerals (huge amounts of low-value and high-mass raw materials). Also, there are definitely ways to make transporting goods (even in dangerous space) nearly foolproof - if one is willing to put in the legwork. A lot of the loss of goods that occurs is due to player ignorance of game mechanics and/or laziness "well, I know I should [scout this gate|use an instadock bookmark|switch to my armor implants] but what are the odds of [bad thing] happening this one time and besides, it's almost downtime, I'll be fine." Of course I'm not complaining! This sort of thing keeps the prices high for the rest of us. :)