How to Use EVE Online Buy Recommendations

Buy recommendations answer one question: what is worth buying today. Every busy item in the hub is checked against five technical signals, and the ones that have dropped below their usual price and look ready to bounce get a score. This guide explains what the score means, how to check an item before buying and how to plan the exit.

What the table shows

• Score from −100 to +100: how many signals agree and how strongly. Buy starts at +15, Strong Buy at +50. Only items from +15 up are shown.
• Signals — five chips: green means the signal is for buying, red means against, grey means neutral. RSI, MACD, BB (Bollinger Bands), S/R (support and resistance) and DoS (days of supply).
• RSI — the indicator value itself; under 30 means the price fell faster than usual.
• Volatility — how much the price swings: up to 15% is calm, from 35% it is a storm, and the signal counts for less.
• Volume per day — how many units change hands on an average day. It tells you how much you can buy and later sell without moving the price yourself.

The five signals in plain words

• RSI — the price fell faster than usual. When an item is sold off in a hurry, it often overshoots its fair price and comes back.
• MACD — the fall is running out of steam. The price may still be going down, but slower and slower: sellers are getting tired.
• Bollinger Bands — the price is at the lower edge of its usual corridor. Most of the time an item trades inside a channel; at its bottom edge it is cheap compared with itself.
• Support and resistance — the price is at a past floor. A level the item has already bounced from: buyers have stepped in there before.
• Days of supply — little stock is left on sale. How long the sell orders last at the usual daily volume. A day or less is the strongest signal; more than a week counts as plenty, but even then it is not a reason to expect a fall.

On top of that, confidence: a jump in trading volume makes the signal stronger, a stormy market or an empty side of the order book makes it weaker. Cheap items under 1,000 ISK, items that barely trade and items with less than 20 days of history are not scored at all.

Step by step

1. Open Recommendations and pick your hub. Jita has the most items and the deepest market.
2. Start with Strong Buy and look at the chips: four or five green ones are better than one huge signal.
3. Open the item card. On the chart, check where the price stands against the last months; in the order book, check that there really are sellers at this price and how much stock they have.
4. Count the fees: the broker fee and sales tax come off the bounce. Your real rates are in Settings; the station trading guide explains how they are calculated.
5. Buy from the cheapest sell order or place your own buy order a little below — and write down the exit plan right away (see below).

An example

A module cost about 12M for a month and slid to 9M in a week. RSI is at 24 (green), the fall has slowed (MACD green), the price is at the lower edge of the channel (BB green) and at a level it has bounced from twice (S/R green), and the stock on sale lasts less than a day of trading (DoS green). Score +62, Strong Buy. You check the order book — there are sellers at 9M, about a day's volume. You buy and set the plan: sell around 11M, the middle of the usual channel; if the price breaks below 8.5M and the item drops off the list, exit without waiting.

How to sell: the exit plan

The tool only says what to buy — there is no short selling in EVE, so a sell signal without a position gives you nothing to do. The exit is your plan, and it is better made before buying:

• Target. A return to the usual price is a reasonable goal: the middle of the Bollinger channel or the monthly average on the item card. Do not wait for the old peak.
• Stop. If the price breaks below the floor it was supposed to bounce from, the idea did not work. Exit, and do not average down.
• Time. A bounce usually comes within days. If nothing has happened in one or two weeks, free the ISK for the next signal.

Fees and position size

• A bounce of 3% can be eaten by fees entirely: look for room to the target of at least twice your broker fee plus sales tax.
• Do not put the whole wallet into one item. Several signals in different categories are steadier than one.
• Do not buy more than about a day of the item's volume: otherwise you will be the market yourself, and selling it later will take weeks.

Common mistakes

• Buying after the bounce. If the price has already gone up since the list was calculated, most of the move is gone.
• Skipping the order book. One cheap order on top of an empty book is not a market.
• Forgetting about patches and events. Signals know only prices. When CCP changes an item or an event ends, the price can keep falling for a long time — event items often do exactly that.

Questions

How often does the list update? It is recalculated every 15 minutes: the order book changes all the time, while daily prices update once a day after CCP publishes the market history.

Why is an item I like not on the list? Either its signals do not add up to +15, or it is filtered out: too cheap, too little trading or too short a history.

Is it free? Recommendations come with the ISK Basic subscription, together with technical analysis on item cards. How the indicators themselves work is in the technical analysis guide.