Regardless, I have had a bit more chance to trade this month, and my trade numbers look better for it. My current position is as follows:
If you add my total assets plus sell orders this would put me at the milestone of 20 Billion, however I like to allow a 20% provision on my sell orders to allow for reducing sell order values to match the competition (which happens on a relatively regular basis). As such I consider my total "wealth" to be just over 18 Billion ISK. This still represents an increase of 4 billion in the last month, not bad, but definitely not close to my profit over Christmas.
One thing that does eat into my profits is that I continue to contract all of my hauling out to "New Evolution Express". I always use priority contracts, which are always completed within 1 day rather than the regular 3. This comes at an additional cost of 15 million per contract (and I have to make 3 per run, as I have 3 selling locations), but I believe this is worth it to get my good ready for sale next time I log on. I choose to contract my hauling rather than shipping it myself as a) I don't have to take the time to haul myself, which I increasingly do not have time for regardless and b) it outsources the risk of gank to someone else. As my contracts are over collateralized if the hauler was to be ganked then I would get approximately 110% of the value of my goods in ISK, rather than losing the whole shipment if it was me hauling. New Evolution Express have not failed a single contract for me though, and I consider my ISK well spent.
I also had a one off payment to make this month. My Amarr trader is on the same account as my "main" pvp character, that I keep separate from this endeavor. That character takes the priority for skill training on that account. However, this month I was finding my Amarr traders' 57 maximum orders to be a real bottleneck, so I spent 637 million ISK on one of the new Skill Injector items to gain 500,000 skill points for that character. I used this SP to learn Retail V and get to Wholesale IV increasing his available orders to 129. It should be a while before this becomes a problem again.
Over the next few days I will need to re-evaluate my items for sale properly, as I have about 7 billion sitting around in cash, which isn't earning me anything. My Rens trader is also skilled at manufacturing, and has some researched BPOs, so I may take a look at starting up some manufacturing. Some investigation required.
Taking stock of everything though, I am happy with 15 Billion ISK profit in 4 months of regional trading, it seems to scale well and I can sort all my characters out in about 45 mins per time logged on (which is often once every 2-3 days). I doubt I could make more money another way in this timescale.
