Jita PITA

About a week ago I took my first furtive step into stationtrading.
A few minutes on google gave me several guides that cover the basics of stationtrading,covering how to interpret and read the market interface, how to determine what items to buy and how to make things easy on yourself (Market quickbar, I'm looking at you here.)
I started off with my industry character, parking her in Amarr and giving her 100 mil to play with and basically wrote off the money as a learning experience. I had the skills to place 45 orders in total and none of the cost reducing skills, so it was hardly the best start.

Imagine my surprise when a week later I have around 400 to 500 mil between my liquid isk, escrow and active sell orders. Apparently reading guides before jumping in works out!
What I started as a simple experiment turned out to not only be hugely profitable for very little input, it was actually the most fun I've had in EVE in ages.
Many of you will most likely call me crazy, as 0.01 ISKing, babysitting orders and staring at graphs and tables is not generally considered to be fun. That's okay, I realise it's a very niche kind of fun. Perhaps I am a little weird too.

Emboldened by my success in Amarr, I've done 2 things:
I've made a new account and started training that as a dedicated stationtrader (my industry character will soon be redirected back to industry) and I moved my current trading operation to Jita.
Let's face it, if you say trading hub you say Jita. Like it or hate it, it's where the big boys play, and where the big trading takes place. So, I packed up my operations in Amarr, put my last tradables into my Viator and flew out to Jita.
I figured that, worst comes to worst, I would find Jita to not be to my liking and return to Amarr. All I'd risk is a bit of ISK, and perhaps more importantly, moving out of my comfort zone. That's an integral part of EVE though; moving out of your comfort zone and trying something new.

Flash forward to today. Slightly hesitant I open the Market in Jita, and start going through the items, one by one. First impression is that the profit margins per item are lower than in Amarr. This is only to be expected obviously, as there are alot more competitors, but many items I see have such small margins that with my current skills I'd end up losing money per transaction. Oh dear.
Not to be dissuaded I keep plowing through the itemlists, marking interesting items in my quickbar, putting up small test orders here and there.
Before I know it I've burnt through my order total (53 at time of writing). My liquid ISK was also running low at this point, so a good stopping point for now I felt.
Apparently I underestimated the Jita market, because in the time it took me to log on another account several of my test orders had been filled, and alot of my stock I brought from Amarr had sold.

At this point, if I had been a cartoon character you would see dollar signs in my eyes. Items move fast in Jita. Where in Amarr I had to resign myself to orders no larger than 20 or so for most modules (I do not feel confident tying up my limited liquid ISK in large/long-term options at this point, hence me keeping my orders small and spread) in Jita I can move the same modules in hugely increased quantities. And that is where Jita trumps Amarr, even if the profit margin is bigger in Amarr: Moving 10000 items for a 100 million profit per day is better than moving 1000 for 75 million.

At the time of posting it is 1:20 local time. My day is soon at an end, so now would be an ideal time to look back at my first day in Jita. I came into system at about 15:00 local time with about 300 million isk liquid and a small assortment of items.
Currently my balance is as follows:
62 million liquid
In escrow: 326.310.645
Sell orders: 85.157.581

Add in the 20-odd million in modules sitting in my hangar and I'd call today a succes. My first day stationtrading in Jita and I've managed to not lose any money (yet) and even managed to increase my total worth by a fair margin.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring?