Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

I am still up at my parents for a break over Christmas, so I am away from my main PC, and I forgot to send myself things like trade spreadsheets and market quickbars, which are stored in the client locally...Oh well! A proper update will have to wait until I return home.

For now though, I will talk about cyclical price spikes, or to put it another way, speculating.

Specifically, speculating on snowballs.

For the past year now, I have had a buy order up in Jita for snowballs that couldn't realistically be filled, in the region of hundred of thousands of them, for between 150 and 300 ISK each, depending on what the other orders are at the moment. This was with a  view to selling my collection over Christmas when demand, and therefore the price, spikes dramatically.

By the start of this week, I had accumulated approximately 650,000 snowballs. Assuming a worst case scenario of 300ISK each we get a total investment of 195 million ISK. Over the last few days I  put sell orders up for 1-2 hundred thousand of them at a time, priced between 1000 and 2000ISK each. All of these have now sold, and taking an average price of 1500ISK per unit (the price most of them sold for) and that leads to a total sell of 975 million ISK. Meaning a profit of 780 million, minus fees.

If you look at the price graphs for snowballs, you can pretty much guarantee that they will spike in both price and demand over the Christmas period (for obvious reasons) so this was a pretty "safe bet" as far as speculating goes. This is not an item that is particularly at the mercy of patch notes or changing metas, as people always want snowball fights.

You might be thinking "a whole YEAR for 780 million!?! there is plenty more I can do with the money in that time!" and you'd be right. But if you have a spare 100 million lying around not doing anything, it might be worth thinking about putting up an order and leaving it. I only updated this once every 2 weeks, and was probably the lowest effort money I've ever made, even if extremely long term.

When looking at ways to make money in EVE it is always worth looking for a niche to exploit. I'm sure there are plenty more than this, but I thought I would share one that worked for me.

Expanding to Dodixie

Yesterday I finally did what I've been saying I'm going to do for a month, in sorting out my character and setting up in Dodixie.

This character was previously a station trader in Jita, and has almost perfect trade skills, with access to 305 orders. I had made some bad buys not long before starting my regional trading (cough *Geckos* cough) which have dropped in value during my time of not touching this character. This meant that when I came to "cash out" yesterday I had to sell for a loss, meaning I got a bit less than I had hoped to start with. I have been building up a stockpile of snowballs which I am hoping to sell for a large mark up over Christmas, but everything else I sold to buy orders just to get access to cash.

I was therefore left with starting funds of 2,130,006,148 ISK.

I then spent a while looking for items to trade with a buy price of 100 million or less, giving me 46 items to trade to begin with. These are my usual types of items, i.e. deadspace mods, implants, and a few rigs and skillbooks. I also learned that you can create folders in your market quickbar, and the same item can exist in multiple folder. This is a huge help as the dodixie trader is on the same account as the Rens trader, and so they have a shared quickbar. Having quickbar folders makes it much easier to sift through the items I'm interested in to avoid mistakes. Speaking of mistakes...

I made my first blunder this morning.

I was watching a YouTube video on the other monitor whilst setting my sell orders in Amarr and I set up a sell order for 3 million instead of 30 million. This meant it sold straight to a buy order, and lead to an immediate loss of around 19 million ISK. Not a massive blow, but still expensive. I knew this would happen eventually, and I'm sure it will happen again! Still I will be much more careful entering orders in the future!

My current position (including the Dodixie trader) is outlined below:

Now I can finally compare effectively against my starting amount, which for reference was:

As ever, I factor in a 20% provision on sell orders to allow for having to reduce my prices due to competition. This doesn't happen too much, but is well worth factoring in. I only leveraged a small part of this initial wealth, but it demonstrates an increase in wealth of approximately 2.6 billion in my first month. I would expect a much higher return next month, with 3 traders and a lot more money to play with, and more free time!

Here's hoping the Christmas period is a profitable one!

Month 1 review

I started my regional trading on the 17th November, so now seems a good time to step back and evaluate my position.

When I started I decided to start with 2 characters, buying items in Jita and hauling them for sale in Rens and Amarr, with a plan to bring a 3rd character in to sell in Dodixie. Due to time commitments I was not able to play as much as I had hoped, so I never got around to getting the third character going.

As such, my starting positions were 119million ISK on my Rens character and 209 million on my Amarr character. I decided not to transfer ISK between characters, at least for now, to keep things easier to track. As of this morning, by current position is:

A current wealth of 2.85 billion, meaning an average profit of 84.6mil a day. A bit disappointing, but this should keep increasing as I have more ISK to invest.

The method I have been using hasn't changed much since day 1. I log in, update my sell orders, and scan eve-central to re-invest any profit in new items. I do not want to buy more than 1 or 2 of each item so as not to affect the market too much. I want people to basically ignore my orders (as I'm only selling 1 at a time) rather than bother chasing and 0.01ISKing me. I look for items with a low daily volume, and therefore hopefully low competition, but a profit margin of at least 20%. If the price does drop on these items, I will drop my sell prices until they sell. ISK velocity is more important than raw profit after a long time, and I can always find a new item to trade.

I now have 3 weeks off work, so I should be able to dedicate more time to this, and today I will finally be bringing my trader in Dodixie online. Hoping for a profitable few weeks!

A belated update

I had intended to post an update this weekend, but in the run up to Christmas I'm really busy and have barely had any chance to play. As such I have gone 2 or 3 days between updating orders, and only made a few runs to/from Jita. Despite this, I have made some progress that I'm pretty happy with.

My current position is as follows:

Another doubling of my wealth in slightly over a week. I'm fairly happy with that, though I am hoping in late December I should have more time to play, and as such make more runs and speed things up.

My method has been unchanged, running a blockade runner to Jita to pick up items replacing those that have sold. I am sticking to high margin, low volume items to hopefully have little competition. To make sure I am not disrupting the markets I'm entering I am only buying 1 of each item and replacing it once it is sold. Any profit goes into research for new items to trade. I take into account a 20% provision on sell order value to allow for dropping my sell orders to match competition, but so far I have not had to drop my prices by on any item.

My biggest time sink continues to be researching new items for sale, and I feel it will continue to be. I am not sure I can streamline this, but I will be streamlining my hauling at some point.

As things stand I would heartily recommend this method of trading for someone who is time poor (such as myself), and I am very keen to see how this scales.

First Weekend

I had intended to write an update Sunday night, but real life intervened, and then EVE was down last night when I tried to log on.

I want to evaluate my first weekend with regional trading. I had a bit more time to update orders and do research, with weekend traffic providing some notable volume I was able to increase my wealth by a pretty good margin.

I started last week with approximately 330million ISK across 2 characters, one trader selling in Rens and another selling in Amarr. My current positions with these characters are as follows:

Slightly more than doubling my "wealth" in less than a week, I'm pretty happy with that. As you can tell, once again I have spare ISK that I need to do more research for, currently 155,019,163 ISK sitting in wallets not helping me. 

Research is currently (and I foresee will often be) my most time consuming activity, but finding and keeping a current list of slow moving, low competition, but high margin items is vital.

Currently I have been doing all my hauling myself, as my Rens trader can fly a blockade runner. This saves me money, but is time consuming, and it is only a matter of time before I get ganked. Therefore, I will spend some time this week analysing different hauling options to free up my time for research.

Notice that once again I have not included my "station trading" character in Jita. I did find time to update his orders a few times over the weekend, but the profits I make on that character (with current assets of around 2.5bil) are pretty on par with my 2 regional traders. This is obviously not great, so I am considering "cashing out" with him and moving him to start selling in Dodixie instead. It'll take a lot of research to get him up to speed however due to the amount of ISK involved.

Day 2

The first "real" day, as far as I'm concerned.

A minor work emergency prevented me from logging on yesterday, but tonight I had a decent amount of time to get myself sorted.

I logged on to find only one of my items had sold, irritating, but 8mil profit is better than nothing (based on an initial set of 40ish million in items bought). I updated my orders and found another 11 items to buy on my Rens traders, then went to Jita and brought them across.

I took a look at my Amarr character, on starting off he had 209 million ISK, and after doing to some digging I decided on 12 starting items to trade, for a maximum buy of 20mil for a single item (slightly more than my Rens trader). By the time I had shipped things around and updated my orders, a couple of items had sold in Rens, so I have some cash to re-invest tomorrow.

I have not updated my Jita station trader, as I haven't really had chance, so i'm not taking him into account in this entry.

As things stand my current positions are:

Rens on the left, Amarr on the right.

I take into account a 20% provision in my sell orders to allow for lowering my sell orders in response to other people. I try to not disrupt markets I enter by only buying 1 of each item, and entering my prices 1ISK below the current lowest, but I will always have some orders that are outbid and that I will have to reduce.

I need to find more items to invest in, as any ISK in wallets is currently not doing anything to help me earn money. I should have more time over the weekend to do more research.

Day 0

After creating the blog and outlining my assets last night I didn't really have chance to do much more than a cursory browse of items on eve-central; tonight was my real start to my trading.

I decided to focus first on my character in Rens. Browsing eve-central it quickly became apparent that it does not have price information on blueprints, so I improvised with my character in Rens browsing the market, whilst I had a tab of eve-marketdata open viewing the Jita prices.

The items I am looking for are low volume, high margin, with an upper limit of a 10mil buy price. In an hour or so's browsing I identified 12 items, and headed off to Jita to buy them, hauling myself and posting them for sale in Rens.

I only used 42 million to buy these items, and posted them for sale for a total of 108 million, leaving me with 76 million in my wallet. I will have to browse for other items that fit the bill tomorrow, as my time is limited to about an hour/hour and a half most weeknights.

It begins...

It all begins here.

In this blog I will be documenting my experiences with trading in EVE Online. I will mostly be attempting to emulate the methods outlined by croda in his excellent blog:

marketsforisk

In his blog he outlines his experience and methods of trading, primarily regional trading, that it, buying in one region and selling in another. I will be taking a very similar approach, buying in Jita and shipping out to Rens and Amarr to sell, whilst doing some station trading in Jita. The difference is that whilst he starting from a fresh account with only the small amount of ISK from the beginning missions, I will be starting with some experience and assets in the game.

A full outline of my starting characters:

- My old "main" character, with  accounting/broker relations V, 65 orders to use and good standings with Caldari Navy/Brutor Tribe. will be primarily selling out of Rens.

- An Amarr character created with the 20 free dual training days gifted by CCP last Christmas, has middling trade skills and no standings of note, will be primarily selling in Amarr.

- A character in Jita, who has recently been dabbling in station trading, Has almost perfect trading skills and good Caldari faction standing, will continue to station trade/buy items from Jita for other characters to ship.

My starting assets are as follows:

Most of this is on my station trader, so I will be starting small on my regional trading. I want to learn the ropes with a small amount of money, rather than throw too much at it and make simple mistakes.

With that, it's time to look at EVE-Central for items to trade...