Salvage levelling out?

 In the last few months I have moved my industry operations to focus on rig production, particularly T2 rigs. On EVEGuru these things have consistently been high up on IKS per hour profitability whilst also having the advantage of being value dense and small in terms of volume, making for easy logistics particularly in highsec. 

However, CCP then released extra exploration upgrades for sov null to allow alliances to spawn more exploration sites, the main source of salvage. As such prices have been consistently falling and I've been chasing down the prices of my rigs to try and not get stuck with a bunch of overpriced stock. I've also started diversifying a bit more, dipping my toe into things like industrial cores etc.

This week though I have noticed that a lot of salvage has started levelling out, or even bouncing up a bit. A good example of this is armor plates:

Some of this uptick will be speculators deciding that now is a good time to buy (and it may be). It could also be SirSmashAlot messing with the market for funsies, which I can't account for. Or it could be an adjustment where below this explorers no longer believe it is worth their time to go and run relic/data sites and so the price levels out. If the latter then we will see rig markets adjust to a new normal, and my profits should start to improve again hopefully. 

Some rigs are still loss making, and this will likely bounce around a little over a few weeks if this is indeed to be new normal salvage prices, but we should hopefully get back to historic profitability, or at least consistent for now. But the last couple of days I've noticed some rigs with consistent profitability, not moving price much, which is great.

Separately I have also bought a Bustard, a deep space transport. This allows me to buy and transport 27 lines worth of mobile depot materials, or significant chunk of industrial core mats faster than numerous trips in a Crane. A nice quality of life improvement for 200mil. I haven't yet worked out a scalable approach to null industry yet though, despite furious googling, people keep their setups close to their chests. If I work something out I'll put out a "how to" to see if anyone can suggest improvements there. TBD.

August Update - Industry

 A bit late this one, though I took my screenshots at the same time as my trade ones so the data is good, here's my summary:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 28.7Bn ISK. that's a increase of 2Bn ISK or 68.9Mil ISK/day.

That's another challenging month, so what happened? Well it can partly be summed up by this image:

Large Trimark Armor Pump II fell from 120mil to 86mil during august, a drop in price of ~29%. This played out across my rigs, so I was chasing down my sell orders while trying to push profits in a very challenging way. This is demonstrated in the graph how it bounces up and down. I've essentially been sprinting on a treadmill to stand still. 

The prices of salvage have to bottom out somewhere but while they do my business model struggles. I have been inventing slightly different things to try and counter this, as well as building some more T1 stuff and pushing the mobile depots hard. Diversification is key. I've also started training one of my characters to invent T2 haulers. I can fly them and they get lost on a regular basis so I think this could be a potentially lucrative option, if a bit of a pain logistically until I get myself a freighter. 

Plan for this month is to get myself a DST for moving mobile depots and materials around. They are quite bulky so I'm regularly making 3-4 trips to and from Jita every day. I'd also like to build some industrial cores which are very bulky.

I also really need to work on my process in null to better utilise things there. The war seems to have stabilised so I should be able to work out a good system that scales. A problem I must solve if I ever want to get into capital production.

August Update - Trading

 I've been ever so slightly more active this month, despite the summer slump. Having said that work has still been insane and on top of that we've welcomed a new puppy into the house, which has meant I've not really been able to have my late evening gaming in the same way. With that preamble out of the way, my current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.123Tn ISK, that's an increase of 24.5Bn ISK or 742Mil ISK/day.

A good increase on last month, though still a long way short of where I'd like to be. Hoping in September most people will be back from holidays an activity will pick up, and I can get a bit more on in and continue my reforms to my setup.

In addition to my normal buying in Jita, paying someone to ship items to Rens/Hek/Amarr/Dodixie, I've also switched my null character to be a seller. Previously what I did with him was sit in Horde staging and trade PLEX. The margins were usually profitable, even if the volume was nowhere near what it was in Jita. This made steady money for not much input which I like. However the introduction of the global (should be galactic or cluster-wide really, but I digress) PLEX market killed this revenue stream dead. What I have started doing in the last week or so though is using a third party tool someone created to track items that need seeding and pick items from there to pay an alliance logistics service to import for me to null. The price of hauling is very cheap, usually coming out to about 1% of collateral, which is what I pay in high sec. I'm still building my quickbar here and only have imported about 25Bn so far, but I think this will be a good extra revenue stream for me. I also will be trading slightly different things here, more T2 modules and things like that. Though I don't think I'll be importing ships as they are simply too big to be economical to shift in that way.

I have also been slowly expanding the amount I sell in my highsec hubs. The above sheet is a snapshot when I logged in after a long weekend so I have a lot more in the wallets than usual, but I am well north of 800Bn in sell orders now, heading for my target of 1Tn in regular sells.

My "investments" continue to perform poorly, slightly dropping in value to depress my results by a few billion. Never take investment advice from me in any capacity, not that I'd be keen to give any out.

PLEX value continues to fall, with buys sitting at 5.35 million ISK at the time of writing. This justifies me selling my stockpile, and I'll buy more when I need it. I will need to buy a years worth of PLEX this month to PLEX my industry account, so expect a ~20Bn ISK hit next month.

Plans for this month are to continue with what I'm doing, keep expanding my day to day business and push for 1Tn in sells, and try and get more runs this month to get more revenue. I've been too lazy with this branch of the business for too long and it shows, time to change that!

Selling my PLEX and organising my accounts

 So, CCP a while ago said that they were trying to move away from a model of people hoarding PLEX as an investment towards one where people spend it as currency (somewhat ignoring he fact that people save real currency for various reasons). I didn't immediately see anything changing in that department, particularly as it would probably involve them changing their sales model which has proven successful for getting PLEX used and off their balance sheet, an important accounting step.

however, recently CCP has been adding bonus PLEX to their real money store packs, injecting more into the economy. This has caused persistent PLEX price falls in the market:

Normally this would simply present an opportunity, a temporary price to drop where you could pick up cheap PLEX and use them in the next NES sale. But there have been a few real money packs with bonus PLEX and no major NES sales since that announcement of a change of course, so I feel this approach may be what their plan is, at least in the mid term. I had been holding 24,000 PLEX for use in the next big NES sale or for game time, but with the value of that falling and no immediate end in sight I decided to simply sell it all for 5.75mil each. This represented an on paper loss of about 6Bn from where I bought it but it does give me a bit of stability, and when I need to PLEX my industry accounts I can just buy PLEX on the spot. I now have nearly 200Bn ISK sat in wallets (need to make trade runs) so I can use that money to try and refocus on the core fundamentals of my trading business.

Organising my characters

On the Industry side of things, the falling price of salvage due to the new exploration sites has meant I am basically undergoing a sisyphean task of trying to make money faster than the price of my goods falls. Salvage prices will hit an equilibrium at some point, but until then the prices of rigs falls, so my sell orders fall and I lose money. I am still able to produce on paper profits and my Mobile depots are still reliably producing 120-150mil banked profit per day though, so it's not all bad.

I've decided to write down what I'm using each character for, and what I'm aiming for as well. I'm pretty bad at fully utilising all my slots and I'm hoping having a reference sheet will aid me in getting a more focussed operation rather than starting to set something up and then forgetting what I was doing when I next log in.

Early days and very rough, but at least gives an idea of how I'm organising things at the moment. It also clearly flags gaps, i.e. that I need to address the training of my first account as it's a bit directionless at the moment and that I'm doing absolutely no reactions right now, missing out on a potential revenue stream.

Speaking of null, the new exploration sites have pushed the prices down but they have lead to an abundance of supply of salvage in null. Whereas previously I'd have to ship in extra from Jita if I wanted to use more than 3 slots for rigs, costing money and more importantly time, now I can go after rig production really easily right out of staging, which is nice.

change always offers opportunities, you just need to roll with the punches!

July Update - Industry

My industry was a worse month than my trading, if you can believe it. A lot worse. My current ISK values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 26.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 700Mil ISK or 22Mil/ISK/day.

That's essentially zero. So what happened?

Well similar to my trading I didn't play that much. Also the move of null staging led to me resetting my null setup completely, and I haven't really got it started back up again. 

Worse though is that I decided to focus on T2 rig production and started setting up my setup around that. Then CCP introduced exploration upgrades for null systems to increase the number and quality of exploration sites, where most salvage comes from. That lead to this:

Which has lead to the rig market looking like this:

So I've been chasing the prices down, which you can see in my net worth graph. I don't know where the floor will end up being with salvage and if CCP will tweak it again. They have been trying to push prices for ships down in order to encourage greater usage so I can't see this being changed any time soon, and we haven't hit the floor yet. As such I think I need to switch to producing other things until this all levels out. I really do have the worst timing.

I will therefore look to switch to either module or ship production, probably modules realistically for the coming month (well and mobile depots). The main plus this month is I've added 2 more characters to my high sec setup who have slotted in easily. I think my high sec setup is fairly easily scalable without much extra work which is really nice. Soon I'll be up to 50 production slots in high sec which should really allow me to push scale if I'm clever about it.

Oh one thing I almost forgot, I also got ganked for the first time with something in the cargo hold in high sec. I had about 100 mobile depots in a blockade runner and was docking at jita when a tornado killed me. I normally go to an insta dock when I have things in the cargo but I got complacent. Cost me about 400mil in ship+cargo, but it would have been a lot worse with rigs in the cargo. A good reminder to be careful in future.

July Update - Trading

 This month hasn't been anywhere near as active as I hoped. Real life was a lot busier than I thought it would be and I've played a lot less. Regardless, here's my current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.099Tn ISK. That's an increase of 17Bn ISK or 548Mil/ISK/day. 

That's not a great month, all things considered. I've not played a lot and the summer slump is real, but worst is I've not managed to increase my amount in sell orders at all. Something to remedy.

My profits have been depressed this month by a couple of things. One, there was a summer event where you get given Quafe zero for logging in. I've thrown a few billion  at this on the hope that they jump back up in value in a month or two. Typical for my investments though this hasn't happened yet.

More significantly though CCP seem to be taking action to address PLEX hoarding and have been offering 1500 PLEX with existing real money packs. This leads to a increase in PLEX being sold on the market and the price being lowered. As you will know, I recently bought 24,000 PLEX. So this has hit my net worth. My plan is to use this to PLEX my industry accounts and hold on to it on the off chance of a good offer. Because I'm doing this you can pretty much guarantee that there won't be any more good NES sales forthcoming, so you're welcome.

Next month is to stop new investments and focus solely on the day to day. I want to get back up to 50Bn/month, which should be doable given my resources.

Stress, illness, real life and EVE

 When I returned after my holiday I was full of confidence that this was going to be a real "knuckle down and get on" kind of month, where I would play near daily and really push how far I could take my industry. Then real life got in the way.

We are in the process of trying to sell our house, and after a few months of very little happening we received an offer while we were away which we accepted. This kickstarted a whole bunch of admin, selecting and instructing solicitors, filling in forms, trying to find things worth viewing and squeezing in said viewings. My evenings were suddenly full of admin, exciting as the prospect of a move is.

At the same time, I am dealing with a HR situation at work, one that I thought I would wrap up my first day back. Stressful but over and done with was the idea. Then HR caught up with Legal and it became a whole big drawn our process. There has been a lot of uncertainty, and even though it is clarified for me now it means I'm staring down the barrel of several more months of dealing with this. Not ideal.

On top of that I was ill most of last week. In classic fashion the kids had it for about a day and bounced back but it hit me and my wife for about a week. I struggled through work but it really took its toll. Also I'm 80% sure I broke my big toe playing football as well.

How this affects EVE

Why the big real life dump? I hear you ask. Well partly it's cathartic for me to put down what I've been dealing with, manageable though it all is, and partly it's to explain that I've actually played very little EVE since getting back. Indeed when I have had time and the inclination to play games I've mostly been playing a retro football manager save. Less cerebral than trying to work out how to expand my EVE business and come up with better processes.

Tonight though I have a clear run, so I've filled up my slots and taken stock of where I'm at. The high sec business continues to chug along, the process is easy and the profits are good. Null is a bit more complex though. Though I realised through Ansiblex gates I was actually only a few jumps from my old operating ground the Sotiyo I operated out of has been taken down. I have seen on the discord that there is a plan to add more industry structures near E8- but for the moment I think I need to be content to operate out of raitarus. Not a dream situation but one I'll put up with for now.

Also, those characters have kind of trained everything I need them too for now, and they're sort of aimlessly training skills further and getting mining skills up. So I've decided to utilise those accounts better and create new characters to put in my high sec venture. I will initially train them for slots and then beeline for rigs, though initially they'll probably be mobile depot factories. I would like to add more characters for Null but I don't feel like I have a good handle on material acquisition or even a semi permanent operating base, so they'll be better utilised in high for now.

Trading, or how to make the most of the login bonuses

The Solar Fest event is going on right now, so you get rewards on login. Mostly this is SKINR detritus but there are also crates containing quafe zero classic and green apple. These are boosters that give minor bonuses and are reasonably cheap most of the time. This is especially true at the moment:

As you can see the volume is up and the price is at a 52 week low. Green apple usually goes for 15-20mil and is currently sat around 13mil in Jita, and classic usually goes for 40-50mil and is currently 30.

CCP can and will reintroduce these, and the volume isn't enough to sink hundreds of billions into but I'm putting a few billion in buy orders up to snap some up in all 5 high sec trade hubs. If I hold onto these for a month or 2 I should make 30-40%, which would be nice.

Other big industry news is the SCC charge for researching blueprints has been halved. I haven't researched any high level blueprints but I gather the charges are excessive, and bringing these down should only be a good thing for newer industrialists (like me!)