Capital and the order queue

How much ISK to keep working, how to stay first in queue, what re-listing an order costs and how to avoid 0.01-isk wars against yourself.

How much capital to deploy

Don’t freeze all your capital in orders. Keep part of it liquid — for buying in at a good price, covering drawdowns and grabbing new opportunities. Spread across several items rather than betting everything on one: liquidity beats maximum margin, and diversification saves you when a single line jams.

The queue and 0.01 wars

Orders fill at the best price — to stay first you must re-price. Hence the classic 0.01-isk wars: traders undercut each other by a hundredth until the margin burns out for both sides. The “Competition” and “Churn” metrics on the card show in advance where such a war is already raging.

What does re-listing an order cost?

Every order re-price costs a broker fee — it isn’t a free action. So endless 0.01-isk undercutting not only burns the spread but drips a fee on each re-list. On cheap items that fee easily eats the whole point of fighting for the top spot.

But re-listing is a special case: modifying an order is charged not the full fee but one cut by a “relist discount”. The base is 50%, and the Advanced Broker Relations skill (it replaced the old Margin Trading) adds another 6 pp per level — up to 80% at V. So for a trained trader a re-price costs only a fifth of a fresh fee, and 0.01-isk wars come far cheaper. The catch: lowering a sell price is nearly free, but raising a buy order’s price above the old one pays full broker fee on the increase.

The practical takeaway: pick which items are worth fighting for. Where the margin is fat and turnover fast — hold the top spot. Where the spread is thin and competitors swarm — better to sit a little deeper in the queue and wait than feed the broker with re-lists.

Discipline

Set entry and exit rules up front from the metrics — margin, turnover, volatility, vs-fair — and stick to them instead of chasing price. The Market columns and the item-card signals are exactly the inputs for those rules. A rule-based decision always beats an emotional one on a falling chart.

Do you scale by margin or by number of lines?

As capital grows, profit scales not by margin but by the number of working lines and hubs. Ten liquid lines at 8% give both more absolute ISK and less risk than one at 30%. The hub switcher and “What to buy” help widen your coverage without losing grip on the portfolio.

Watch that growth doesn’t hit market depth: on a thin line, doubling capital doesn’t double profit — you just exit slower. Expensive liquid assets (PLEX, injectors) and inter-hub arbitrage are the natural directions when Jita’s station depth is no longer enough.