September Update - Industry

 A month of two halves this one, much improved second half of the month. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 33.4Bn ISK. That's an increase of 4.7Bn ISK, or 156mil/day.

That's not a record, but it is an improvement on the last few months. So what changed? 

Primarily, salvage prices have levelled out now that the new null exploration anomalies have hit the happy medium of what people are willing to run them for. Expect some ups and downs but I am no longer chasing rig prices down properly, which is great! You can see this change hit around the middle of the month as my profits suddenly spike.

Tied with that, one of my high sec alts has reached the point where he can invent and build medium and large T2 rigs, so I've just switched him over to that. At the moment it's primarily Medium Capacitor Control Circuit IIs. Why those? Well, they're consistently and healthily profitable, I currently build them for about 4mil each and sell them for about 7 mil. They also have the crucial revenue property that Mobile Depots have, that being I can put up as many as I can build in a day and be reasonably confident that by the time I log in again they'll all be sold. This applies to both high and null sec. 

This means I've moved that char away from depots, so some of the BPOs I have are getting some extra research. Pretty soon I'll be operating entirely from 10/16 BPOs for them, which will be nice. I've also just started up a couple of factory planets creating Guidance Systems feeding into Depots, bringing my input costs down further. It's pretty click intensive to set up but restocking is pretty easy and the new(ish) templates are a godsend, I can duplicate it to other planets really easily. I might just keep this up, it seems just on the right side of worth it for now.

I'm hoping over the next couple of months I can fill out my last 2 character slots on my second and third account, to bring me to 9 industry chars total. Initial thoughts would be to slot them into my highsec operation or use 1 as a test run for a lowsec freeport to check that side of things out...TBD on that one.

Hoping I can get further up the profitability this month, and all being well I should be able to have a record breaker. Fingers crossed!

September Update - Trading

 A steady and relatively uneventful month this one, my current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.134Tn ISK. That's an increase of 11Bn ISK, or 366mil/ISK/day. On the face of it that's pretty poor but during the month I spent 19.1Bn on a years PLEX for my first industry account so my operating profit for the month was a much healthier 30Bn.

Still nothing spectacular but a steady increase that I hope to build on in October. Though I have had a return to office order that may impact order updating and my playtime more generally, as I expect to get back from London late a few evenings a week which has knock on effects.

On the plus side my expansion of selling in Horde staging has been going well, with sometimes around 70Bn in sell orders and revenue comparable to dodixie, this is definitely worth keeping up with. Also I've managed to increase my sell orders to over 900Bn. The screenshots have been taken before trade runs so I have a lot of ISK in my wallet, but I am creeping towards the trillion in sell order target.

Plan for October is to increase my revenues, particularly in null, and push my sell orders higher towards the 1Tn mark. Probably still a few months away but steadily heading in the right direction.

Dipping my toe into PI

 On the OZ discord this week there has been some...lively debate around easy newbro income. One thing that sparked the most debate was a planetary interaction setup that yields about 2Bn a month in highsec across 3 characters on an account. The biggest controversy around this was the word "easy" that kept being inserted, as it requires max skills to pull off, along with ISK and significant in game knowledge. There was also discussion about using Pochven and a Deluge (t2 PI hauler) to haul the outputs to Jita to sell, which puts it way beyond the realm of new player. 

However, all this got me thinking. The claim is you bring in inputs once every 2 weeks, reset your factories and haul the outputs. I briefly tried PI when it first came out but I didn't particularly enjoy it so I dropped it and never came back. But if I can get a setup requiring such a small amount of interaction for a significant amount of income that's worth considering. Additionally, for Mobile Depots (my most produced item) 4 of the 7 input materials are PI. 3 of them I buy from buy orders but Guidance Systems the margins are so small in Jita I just buy from sell orders to make my depots. If I can use PI to bring the cost of those down then it will make my whole process more profitable.

So I am now researching what I need to know about PI, essentially from scratch. I think for a factory setup, i.e. one that does not extract materials from the planet but takes inputs and spits out outputs, I only need:

- Command Centre Upgrades - For increasing the amount of power the command centre generates, i.e. so I can place more factories

- Interplanetary Consolidation - each level gives and extra planet setup to play with

- Custom Code Expertise - to lower the tax paid on POCOs.

I think the most important one is command centre upgrades, which is unfortunately the longest train. It'll take me about 20 days to get this to V so I'm starting now. 

If I can make this work I will roll it out across my high sec characters. If not it'll be sent back to the "do not touch" pile. I'll update with my experiences once I understand it all better. 

UPDATE - I set up a single planet and the materials cost me 62 million, let's see what the outputs I'll end up with. Adam4EVE is saying it's basically not worth me doing this but if the setup seems good I'll buy from buy orders to bring down input costs and scale this up.

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!