Month 2 Review

This month was an eventful one.

I fully brought online a third seller in Dodixie, which has consistently been my biggest market in terms of profits and money dedicated to it. Dodixie seems to have more volume than Rens but less competition than Amarr, so I am liking it at the moment.

I have also changed the way I trade. Until 2 weeks ago I was flying each of my characters to Jita, buying the items, and then giving them to my Rens trader to haul in a blockade runner. In the last 2 weeks I have created a new fresh character, i.e. has no skills, and sent him to Jita.

Thus my current daily routine looks something like:

• Log on to seller, update orders.
• Buy replacement items with my Jita character.
• Create and accept item exchange contract to my seller
• Create a courier contract from Jita to the selling system, to New Evolution Express, a hauling corp.

This cuts down the time I need to sort out all my orders dramatically, as I'm not wasting an hour or so flying around. On this point, the corp I have been using "New Evolution Express" have been fantastic. Fairly cheap rates, and my priority contracts have all been completed in 3 hours or less. I use "priority" contracts because I want to guarantee that my items are there to be sold the next time I log on, if I had to wait 3 days my profits would be reduced.

All this means that my current trade position is as follows:

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.

On the 17th of December my "wealth" sat at 5,725,520,800 ISK. This means that this month I have increased my wealth by 7,323,425,121.60, which works out at an average of 236 Million ISK per day. 

This is a dramatic increase in last month, but there were a few special conditions (a lot of time, snowballs) that contributed to this. Regardless, I am very happy with this amount of profit and especially my new way of working.

A reflection and a slight change of plan.

So the Christmas Holiday has been productive, EVE-wise anyway!

I had almost 3 weeks off work, and though I was away from my PC, I had access to EVE on another machine. A lot of access. I was able to spend a good 2 hours a day updating orders, researching new items to trade, and hauling the items around myself in a blockade runner. As things stand my current position is:

On the 17th of December I had 5,7 Billion, so that means an increase of 5.5 Billion ISK in 3 weeks! This is above and beyond what I expected for this time, and I'm very happy with how it went. However, my daily routine took a whopping 2 hours to complete, which I simply don't have time for on most weeknights. Which brings me to my change of plan.

I am going to stop doing my own hauling, completely. It is too time consuming, plus I'm running the risk someone will play "blockade runner roulette" and gank my BR on the off chance the loot is worth it. As such I will be trying out New Evolution Express for my hauling needs. They seem reasonably priced, and are vouched for by croda in his blog. If they work for him they will work for me. As such I will no longer be running my characters to Jita to do their own buying.

Up until now I had been keeping each characters money separate to keep track of who was making profit where, but as I will be contracting out my hauling I don't want to run around. Therefore I am creating a character with no skills who will sit in Jita, buy the items, then contract them to my other characters. Those characters will then create hauling contracts to New Eden Express to deliver them to my trade hubs.

All of this means I should drastically reduce the time spent flying around, to keep my daily routine to sub 1 hour, and allow more time for researching new items for sale. It will likely take a few days to get this up and running, so I'm expecting a dip in profits until I do. Long term though this should be much more efficient than my current "do everything myself approach".

Only time will tell.