Having a lot of BPOs to choose from is one the best most profitable ways of diversifying. Another way of diversifying would be to sell one, or a set of items in multiple trade hubs. Jita and Amarr are the two big ones and people pick up courier contracts between the two all the time if they are properly priced. ALWAYS make sure to collateralize correctly if utilizing courier contracts and keep them reasonable in price, say 500  million per contract. By using courier contracts a lower SP sales alt can be kept at a trade hub and used to market items without having to worry about transporting them.

Having a set of items that might be low profit but are a low isk investment is a great way to keep manufacturing lines near full. Ideally something with very high volume in trade. Some example items can be had by utilizing EVE ISK per Hour.

1.  Import the latest prices for T1 items
2.  Sort by SVR (Sales Volume Ratio)
3. Click calculate
4. Look intelligently at the list
5. ...
6. Profit!

None of the ME / PE is in , but this gives a margin of error in favor of profit. If the item can be made at ME 0 for profit any ME after 0 is icing on the cake.

Prototype cloaking Device I is an example and scrolling down the list I see one of my favorites the Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I. I have a set of 10 or so of the small and large bubble BPOs with decent ME / PE.

Example of 10 BPOs on a toon with 10 slots open, raw materials invested is under 80 million , production time is under 3 days.

For 80 million isk and 3 days 33 million profit on a toon that could have been sitting idle. Having items such as these takes the pressure off of having high isk cost items in at all times. Great for weekends and weekdays if Eve playtime is at a minimum.

I was asked the question ‘what about setting up buy orders’ and it can be a great source of extra profit… or a huge sink of time and undoing the passive isk per hour paradigm. Also of note are the additional skills such as Margin Trading “Starting with an escrow percentage of 100% at Level 0 (untrained skill), each skill level cumulatively reduces the percentage by 25%. This will bring your total escrow down to approximately 24% at level 5.”, so the 100 million isk in tritanium orders does not cost 100 million isk up front but rather costs a % and then the isk when someone sells to the buy order. Daytrading could come in handy for remote order update and some levels of trade / retail / wholesale/ tycoon for more outstanding orders.

 Buy orders in Jita are a great way to make volume but a headache for update times, people .01 isk in Jita all day long. Vying for a commodity like tritanium in a trade hub which is in practically everything is hard to do, there are too many players.  Setting up blanket buy orders for way underpriced minerals in or around where you manufacture is a great way of doing the buy order profit game, but horrible on volume.

 For example, sell orders in Jita for tritanium is around 4.75 at time of writing, buy orders are at 4.74 razor thin margins… One can just buy from the sell orders for volume and not worry.   If prices were different or if looking at a different item, say Broadcast Nodes 1,382,000 sell order and 1,150,000 buy order at time of writing. The difference of 232,000 isk a unit is much greater reward but if a buy order is put in for 1,150,000.01 chances are in 10 minutes someone will have .02, and then .03 so on. Someone could dump 100 units at onto the buy order if the timing is right, but it is in my opinion tedious work.

The second example would be to set up a buy around the manufacture location a little above the going buy order, system wide and just wait for it to pile up and fly to collect it when the volume is sufficient.  It may take longer to fill in any significant volume but it will add to overall profit and should not be too crazy of a time sink unless someone gets into the bidding war mood.