EVE Online Trading Skills Guide: All 12 Skills & the Order to Train Them

In the previous guide on market fees we did the math showing the same trade is a loss for a new player and a profit for a skilled one. Trading skills are what create that gap. In EVE, skills are capital — and trade skills have some of the fastest payback in the game, since a skillbook that costs less than a frigate permanently halves your taxes and fees.

The catch is that there are twelve trade skills with prerequisites tangled together, so it's not obvious what to train first. This guide covers exactly what each skill does, its prerequisites and training cost, and — the part that matters — what order to train them in for your playstyle.

Skills only do two things

Every trade skill falls into one of two buckets:

1. Cut costs — sales tax (Accounting), broker fee (Broker Relations), relist fees (Advanced Broker Relations)
2. Extend scale and reach — concurrent orders (Trade, Retail, Wholesale, Tycoon) and remote trading (Marketing, Procurement, Daytrading, Visibility)

That gives you the priority rule: cost-cutting always comes first. Being able to run 100 orders means nothing if each one loses money. Cut taxes and fees to get into the black, then scale up volume and convenience.

Here's the whole map first.

Skill	Rank	Prerequisites	Alpha max	What it does
Trade	1	None	III	Order slots +4/level
Retail	2	Trade II	No	Order slots +8/level
Wholesale	4	Retail V · Marketing II	No	Order slots +16/level
Tycoon	6	Wholesale V · Marketing IV	No	Order slots +32/level
Accounting	3	Trade IV	No	Sales tax −11%/level
Broker Relations	2	Trade II	II	Broker fee −0.3 pts/level
Advanced Broker Relations	3	Broker Relations IV · Accounting IV	No	Relist discount +6 pts/level
Marketing	3	Trade II	II	Remote sell orders
Procurement	3	Marketing II	No	Remote buy orders
Daytrading	1	Trade IV	No	Modify orders remotely
Visibility	3	Procurement IV	No	Remote buy-order range
Contracting	1	Social I	No	Concurrent contract count

Rank is the training-time multiplier. If training Trade (rank 1) to V takes "1 unit" of time, then Tycoon at rank 6 takes six times as long to reach the same level. Read rank as "how expensive is this skill to train."

The three cost-cutting skills

Accounting — train it first, always

Sales tax hits every sale you make and there's no avoiding it. Accounting cuts it by 11% per level.

Level	Sales tax
0	7.5%
I	6.68%
II	5.85%
III	5.03%
IV	4.20%
V	3.375%

The reason Accounting is a trader's first skill is simple. Other skills only help when you place an order, but sales tax applies to every sale — instant sells and filled sell orders alike — so Accounting benefits literally every way you trade. It also has the fastest payback of the lot.

One judgment call: the last level, IV → V, is a big chunk of rank-3 training time for a drop of only 4.20% → 3.375%, or 0.8 points. When your bankroll is small it's perfectly reasonable to park Accounting at IV, move on to other skills, and finish V later.

Broker Relations — essential if you place orders

The broker fee only applies when you place an order (taking someone else's order is free of it). Broker Relations cuts it by 0.3 points per level.

Level	Broker fee (NPC, zero standing)
0	3.0%
I	2.7%
II	2.4%
III	2.1%
IV	1.8%
V	1.5%

Station trading places two orders (buy and sell), so you feel this skill twice over. If instead you buy via instant purchase (taking sell orders) and only place orders to sell — hauling and hub arbitrage — the broker fee lands just once, so Broker Relations is less urgent. That style is fine parking it at IV.

Advanced Broker Relations — for the undercutters

This is the reworked Margin Trading skill (see the 2020 shift to 100% escrow). It now raises the relist fee discount — from a 50% base up 6 points per level, reaching 80% at V.

It only matters if you're fighting the 0.01 ISK war. Edit an order's price dozens of times a day and relist fees pile up; this skill cuts them by more than half. If your style is to place orders and leave them for days, skip it. The prerequisites — Broker Relations IV + Accounting IV — naturally push it to the back half of your plan anyway.

Standings: the last 0.5% off your broker fee

The broker fee formula also has a standings term:

Broker fee % = 3% − 0.3%×Broker Relations − 0.03%×faction − 0.02%×corp standing

Each point of faction standing takes off 0.03 points, each point of corp standing 0.02 points. Max both to 10 and that's 0.5 points off, which combined with Broker Relations V (1.5%) lands you at the 1% NPC-station floor.

You raise standings by running missions (storyline, epic arcs, and so on), and the Connections social skill boosts the effective value of positive standings. But be honest about the payoff: standings give at most 0.5 points, versus Broker Relations' 1.5. This is the last-mile optimization for high-volume traders, not something a new player should rush. The time you'd spend grinding standings is usually better spent training other skills.

The order-slot ladder

Your concurrent order limit starts at 5 and grows through four skills.

Investment	Total slots
Base	5
+ Trade V	25
+ Retail V	65
+ Wholesale V	145
+ Tycoon V	305

Two things to note.

First, Marketing gates the ladder. Wholesale requires Retail V + Marketing II, and Tycoon requires Wholesale V + Marketing IV. So you have to invest in the remote-selling skill to unlock the top slot skills. Marketing is useful anyway, so it's no loss.

Second, only train as many slots as you'll actually use. Tycoon is rank 6 — the longest train of any trade skill. Unless you're a heavy station trader genuinely running 200 orders at once, there's no reason to go there. For most people Trade V + Retail V (65 slots) is more than enough, and even multi-item flipping is fine at Wholesale (145). Idle slots are just wasted training time.

Remote trading skills

These let you manage orders without physically flying to the station.

• Marketing — place sell orders remotely in other stations; region-wide at V. Handy for sellers seeding multiple hubs, and it gates Wholesale/Tycoon as noted above.
• Procurement — place buy orders remotely. Requires Marketing II.
• Daytrading — modify the price of existing orders remotely. Effectively a must-have quality-of-life skill for station traders: you can answer undercuts without docking. Rank 1, so it's cheap to train.
• Visibility — extends the range of your remotely-placed buy orders. Requires Procurement IV, so it's a later pick.

The short version: Daytrading is cheap and you feel it immediately (repricing gets painless); the other three are convenience skills that switch on when you trade across multiple stations. If you only operate out of one station, Marketing II (for Wholesale) is about all you need.

What free (Alpha) accounts can do

Alpha clones have most trade skills locked. You can train only Trade III, Broker Relations II, and Marketing II. The result:

• Order slots: base 5 + Trade III (12) = 17
• Broker fee: Broker Relations II takes 3% → 2.4%
• Sales tax: you can't train Accounting at all, so it stays at a flat 7.5% — this is the one that hurts

Since Alpha can't cut sales tax, it's poorly suited to low-margin station trading where tax dominates. Instead, Alpha plays best around hauling and hub arbitrage using instant buy/sell (where the broker fee applies once or not at all), or high-margin items where the tax is a small slice of the profit.

Training order by playstyle

The universal first pick, whatever your style, is Accounting. After that it diverges.

Station trader (the 0.01 ISK war)

You need low fees, plenty of slots, and remote repricing.

Accounting IV → Broker Relations IV → Trade V → Daytrading III → Retail IV–V → Advanced Broker Relations IV–V → (as volume grows) Marketing II → Wholesale

Hub hauler / arbitrage

You take orders to buy and only place orders to sell. Low broker-fee exposure, few slots needed.

Accounting IV–V → Broker Relations III–IV → Trade III–IV (a few slots). Remote skills barely needed.

Casual seller (loot, manufactured goods)

"Just don't lose money when I sell."

Accounting IV → Broker Relations III → Trade II. You can stop right there.

Alpha

Trade III → Broker Relations II → Marketing II. Give up on tax; focus on high-margin, instant-trade plays.

ROI ranking and odds & ends

Sorted by return on training time:

1. Accounting — applies to every sale, halves sales tax. Unanimous first pick
2. Broker Relations — cheap at rank 2, halves the broker fee
3. Trade → Retail — slots (cheap at rank 1–2)
4. Daytrading — rank 1, huge quality-of-life bump for station traders
5. Advanced Broker Relations — only if you undercut often
6. Marketing / Procurement / Visibility — multi-station convenience plus the upper-slot gate
7. Wholesale / Tycoon — genuine heavy traders only; Tycoon (rank 6) is easy to overkill

A few closing tips:

• Don't neural-remap for trade skills. They're low total SP, so a remap saves negligible time. Save remaps for big skill groups like combat or industry.
• Most skills deliver 80%+ of their value at IV. On a small bankroll, spread several skills to IV rather than chasing V on one, then finish the key ones (Accounting, Broker Relations) at V once you've got the time.
• Contracting (rank 1, needs Social I) raises how many contracts you can have open at once. Worth it if you run courier contracts.

Train just two or three of the cost-cutting skills and the break-even spread from the last guide drops from 13.5% to around 5%. Skills are the surest investment in trading — train them once and they compound across every trade you'll ever make.

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Sources: EVE University Wiki (Skills:Trade, Standings). Skill ranks, prerequisites, and effects are current as of July 2026 and can change with CCP patches.