End of Year 2018

I will be going away to spend time with family early tomorrow morning, and I'm not going to have access to a computer for the next 2 weeks, so I might as well do my end of year update now.

My current status:

As things stand, I have 270.4 Billion ISK. That is 12bn more than on the 2nd of December. That works out to 631.5mil a day. Not bad but definitely down on last month. If I was to continue at that rate I would earn another 7.5bn by the 2nd of January, which would put me at 19.5bn so this is still a decent month of earnings. I've had, if anything, even less time to play EVE than usual. I was away the last couple of weekends and I've only have 1 proper "trade run" session a week, whereas I can usually fit 2 or 3 in. As a result I've been seriously limited to 5 or 10 mins in the morning to update a couple of characters orders, and that's it.

Looking at my spreadsheet for the 30th December 2017 for comparison:

As you can see, a  year ago I was utilising just 4 characters for trading, and had 94.8bn. Over the last year I've earned 175.7bn ISK, nearly tripling my worth. With the newer characters and methods of trading brought online I expect my monthly profits to only increase on average, and I'm into serious money now. It's amazing how it snowballs when you've got some real money to play with.

Even though I haven't been blogging this whole time, I have been keeping spreadsheets of my trading at various points. At some point in the new year I'll make a post with graphs and analysis of my profit over time, to chart my journey so far. Unfortunately I don't have time for that today, but I think it'll be cool to take a step back and see how far I've come. I may be only 25% of the way towards the Trillion in ISK terms, but it feels closer than that time wise. Indeed if I could triple my worth again next year (unlikely) then I'll be at 810bn this time next year! I can dream I guess?

I have 3 accounts, with 8 characters dedicated to trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I've managed to cash a few investments out for 20%ish profit this month. I'm not doing a good job of accounting when it comes to these profits, but it's definitely earned me a couple of billion for very little work.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~123.8 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. I've hit a wall on this character, it only has 129 orders and I'm using all of them. I'm training Wholesale V then Tycoon on this character to increase this, and I'm finding I have a few items just sat in my inventory unable to utilise orders to sell. I'm not sure how much I can increase the sells on this character, but it doesn't seem like I've hit my limit in terms of ISK yet. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 58.1 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 63.1 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 4.8 Billion. Again, I barely touched this character. When I do have the time and motivation to station trade I almost exclusively use my Jita trader, as he makes more raw profit. I keep mulling this over, but I may end up cashing this character out and either setting him up as a seller in Hek (the only high sec trade hub I don't currently operate in) or setting him up to region trade in the same way as my Tash-Murkon trader. Either way this character is cripplingly under-utilised, so I need to find a way to get him making more money without adding much if any time to my existing trading activities.

Jita station trader

My latest, and more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Fortizar, with 0.3% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump. This covers Jita. Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 27.5 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. I've not had time to do much station trading on this character in the last few weeks, but he's still turned 2bn in profit. Not bad for the effort involved.

Horde Seller

A new addition to the trading roster. In a very similar way to the other selling characters, he takes items bought by the Jita Buyer, then contracts the items to "Valhalla Deliveries" (a delivery service for Pandemic Horde) to transport the items to the Horde Keepstar in O-V. He then sells them there for a profit. He trades primarily T2 modules, drones and scan probes. I set him up with 1bn and he's currently at 1.47 Bil in sell orders with 370mil of items en route. I'm really happy with the progress of this character, as I don't do the hauling myself he takes very little work and is making good money. I can log in one morning, update his sell orders, buy some new items and set up a courier contract, and by the next morning my items are there and there is money in the wallet to buy another shipment. I should have started this character trading a lot sooner!

Tash-Murkon Region trader

Another new character, and a different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 335 million. Training to fly a Crane to collect items more safely. I'm really happy with the turnover and profit margins this character is making. The running around the region to pick up items is annoying, but I can leave my orders up for a week and a lot of them won't be contested, which is really nice. The margins are amazing as well. Will definitely keep this up.

December Update

I managed to play a bit more this month, and have had a few ideas on how to expand and mix up my trading activity in order to increase profits. I also have hit 25% of the trillion ISK! Now I just need to quadruple my money...

My current status:

As things stand, I have 258.4 Billion ISK. That's 23.5 Billion more than last month. This is a record breaking month, caused by a few different factors. For one thing, I have had a bit more chance to play, which always helps. I have cashed out my PLEX holding after an Omega status sale pushed the price up to 3.5 million each, and put the ISK into other investments, much more diversified this time. I have also expanded to a null sec trader, and a regional trader based out of a region without a major trade hub. Both of these ventures offer opportunities to increase my profits with very little extra hauling, and therefore little extra time. Time is my biggest limiting factor, so anything I can do to use my time efficiently is good. I tend to spend about 5-10 mins every morning before work updating orders (largely my Jita station trader). I have barely touched my Amarr station trader, something I'm looking to correct going forwards.

I have 3 accounts, with 8 characters dedicated to trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~106 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. I'm not sure how much more I can continue to increase the sells on this character, I assume I'll hit a peak at some point fairly soon. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 55.3 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 54.6 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 4.5 Billion.

Jita station trader

My latest, and more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Fortizar, with 0.3% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump. This covers Jita. Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 25.5 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. I've had a great month on this character, thanks in large part to a lot of fluctuation with the price of Large Skill Injectors due to sales around Thanksgiving/Black Friday.

Horde Seller

A new addition to the trading roster. In a very similar way to the other selling characters, he takes items bought by the Jita Buyer, then contracts the items to "Valhalla Deliveries" (a delivery service for Pandemic Horde) to transport the items to the Horde Keepstar in O-V. He then sells them there for a profit. He trades primarily T2 modules, drones and scan probes. Currently at 1.15 Bil in sell orders.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

Another new character, and a different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I'm pretty happy with the volume and margins this character is managing, and I can happily leave my orders for days at a time without being overcut, which is nice. Currently at 206 million. Training to fly a Crane to collect items more safely.

Cashing out PLEX

So, for Cyber Monday CCP is offering Omega status for 425 PLEX a month, rather than the usual 500. This represents a 15% discount when buying with PLEX. There is no corresponding sale with cash.

This has pushed the price of PLEX up, as people rush to buy PLEX with ISK to PLEX their accounts. In fact this has pushed PLEX to 3,500,000 per unit. I decided this is enough for me to cash out my holdings, and try and use the funds for other investments. As such I've set up a sell order in Jita:

I calculated that I have spent 25,729,205,120.00 ISK on 10,000 PLEX over the years, so this would represent a profit of 8,148,661,365.00 

Not too bad. Hopefully any future investments will return a profit a bit faster than PLEX though.

I got ganked

Well, this is a first.

It was my own fault really. On my Jita station trader, I sit in a Keepstar in Perimeter and set up buy orders with a range of 1 jump in order to cover Jita. Most of the time, my buy orders are filled in Jita, but occasionally they are filled in Perimeter. Most of the orders filled in Perimeter are Large Skill Injectors.

What I normally do in this situation is load the injectors into my Tayra (I know...) and make the lone jump to Jita to sell them. I used a Tayra due to my lack of skills on this character. This has never been an issue before, despite me knowing the stupidity of it.

Well, yesterday I was finally punished. Laden with a Large Skill Injector (thankfully just 1) and a few other modules, my cargo hold came to about 800 mil. I jumped into Jita, warped to station, but as I didn't use an insta-dock bookmark, I landed 2500m away from the station, unable to instantly dock. As I slowboated a tornado locked me and one-shot me. Ouch.

The silver lining is the skill injector didn't drop, so the gankers made a loss as well, but it still set me back most of the station trading profit for the week.

I had a lot of free time yesterday so I actually had my best day ever station trading, making 971 million profit according to eve mogul, but the gank means I'm only slightly better off than where I was at the start of yesterday.

Oh well, lesson learned, I now use an insta-warping frigate with an insta-dock bookmark, so I should be:
A) a less obvious target as I'm not flying a hauler, but a combat frigate
B) less likely to get ganked as I'm using an insta-dock bookmark and can't be caught on gate

Here's hoping it doesn't happen again.

November Update

I managed to play slightly more this month, and have had a few ideas on how to expand and mix up my trading activity in order to increase profits. My current status:

As things stand, I have 234.9 Billion ISK. That's 16.8 Billion more than last month. This is a slight increase on last month, but still not a record breaker. I tend to spend about 5-10 mins every morning before work updating orders (largely my Jita station trader). I have barely touched my Amarr station trader, something I'm looking to correct going forwards.

I have 3 accounts, with 6 characters dedicated to trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has no training, and simply buys from buy orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~101 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Finally, 100 Billion ISK in sell orders on a single character! I'm not sure how much more I can continue to increase the sells on this character, I assume I'll hit a peak at some point fairly soon. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 56.5 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 59.4 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my good from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. This is mostly implants, so high value, small volume items. This means I can fit everything for all 3 characters in a single Blockade runner, which with its current fit has about 50k EHP, and can warp cloaked. For highsec this is basically invincible, so I'm happy hauling like this, for now.

Amarr station trader

I've branched out slightly into station trading. I have a character in Amarr that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 4.5 Billion.

Jita station trader

My latest, and more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Fortizar, with 0.3% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump. This covers Jita. Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 17.2 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. It's going fairly well, making about 1 Billion a week on this character, but it is heavily dependant on playtime, unlike my inter-hub trading.

Another Alt

So, I have 3 accounts, divided thusly:

Account 1
Main - member of Pandemic Horde, all rounder, has the most combat skills
Amarr Seller - sits in Amarr, sells implants and modules brought by Rens trader. My most profitable seller
Jita buyer - Character with minimal skills that sits in Jita, buys from sell orders and contracts to other alts

Account 2
Nullsec dogsbody - Also in Pandemic Horde, can use cynos, fly dreads, etc. General support character to my "main"
Rens trader - Sells in Rens, does all my trasnporting in a Crane, my old highsec "main"
Dodixie seller - Sells in Dodixie, like Amarr seller but not as profitable

Account 3
Jita station trader - a newish but profitable character, sits in a citadel in Perimeter and trades, most business done out of Jita 4-4
Amarr station trader - sits in Amarr, buys and sells without undocking
spare character - the subject of this post

As you can see, 8 out of 9 characters are utilised and have a purpose. Even though some hardly do much (nullsec dogsbody hasn't had much love recently). I've been reading a lot of blogs recently and trying to think of a way of getting the 9th character to do something useful for me money making wise.

I've been reading merchant monarchy, who made well over 800 Billion ISK in about 3 years by doing "regional trading". By that I mean setting up region wide buy orders, then collecting the items and selling them, either there or in another region. This is something I haven't tried before, so I thought it might be worth giving a go.

Therefore I gave that alt 100 million ISK, bought some trade skills, and have started training up everything I need to manage trading across an entire region. At the moment I can only utilise 13 orders (this alt really had no training), so I've put up a bunch of buy orders up in Tash-Murkon, the region next to Amarr. I've based myself out of a trade fort in the system of Tash-Murkon prime.

I'm primarily looking at low priced stuff, skillbooks, a few modules, drones, and I'll use this as an experiment for a few days/a week. I'm hoping that this is something I can not log into for several days, and not have any of my orders overcut. I'm keen to see how this goes.

If I'm not getting the turnover I would like then I have a backup plan, of applying to Pandemic Horde on this character, and trading in their staging. The margins can be pretty good versus Jita and the shipping corp is extremely cheap.

Moving next door

So, this happened about a week or two ago, but I'm just getting around to posting.

TEST declared war on Pandemic Horde and decided to take their high sec monopoly on trade hubs. Goons joined in support, and against the sheer numbers of both alliances Horde decided not to challenge. As things stand all of Horde (and IChooseYou)'s market Fortizars are in their final timer or destroyed.

TEST also decided to deploy the first high sec Keepstar in Perimiter - because they could.

All this means that my station traders old home is not an option, so I had to tear down my buy orders and up sticks. Though the Keepstar is on the same grid as the old Fort, so I didn't have to move far.

The good news is that the CEO of TEST has declared that the trade hub will have a broker fee of 0.3%, which will never change. Horde had a broker fee of 0.5%, so this is good for me. It was claimed on Reddit that Horde earned 200 Billion a month from broker fees from the Perimeter Fortizar, so at 0.3% TEST can expect the Keepstar to pay for itself in under 2 months. Not a bad investment really.

I have noticed since the change though that the margins on skill injectors have entered unprofitable territory, so I've pulled out of them for now. Advantage of station trading is you can be very fast moving.

October Update

I've had even less time to play this month than usual. My play time has been limited to 5-10 mins before work mostly, with the occasional hour or two at the weekend. That said, my current position:

I haven't played between the 2nd and today, so this is the closest update I can give. As things stand, I have 218.1 Billion ISK. This is 13.1 Billion ISK up on last month. That is a decrease on the last couple of months. Considering I set myself a target of making 25 billion a month to hit 300 bil by 1st January, this is a very bad thing. I blame mostly my lack of playtime, and what playtime I have had has been mostly given over to station trading on my Jita alt rather than inter-hub trading.

I have 3 active accounts, with 5 characters currently dedicated to my trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has no training, and simply buys from buy orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~95 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Very close to the magic 100 Billion on a single character. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 55.4 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 56.2 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my good from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. This is mostly implants, so high value, small volume items. This means I can fit everything for all 3 characters in a single Blockade runner, which with its current fit has about 50k EHP, and can warp cloaked. For highsec this is basically invincible, so I'm happy hauling like this, for now.

Amarr station trader

I've branched out slightly into station trading. I have a character in Amarr that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 4.45 Billion.

Jita station trader

My latest, and more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Fortizar, with 0.5% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump. This covers Jita. Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 12.7 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. It's going fairly well, making almost 1 Billion a week on this character, but it is heavily dependant on playtime, unlike my inter-hub trading.

PLEX Holding

For a while, I was finding that I was having a lot of ISK lying around, not really doing anything. ISK in wallets can't make you money, so it's a bit of a waste of time having. In order to try and make some money with it I made several purchases of PLEX, most recently last August. The price has recently pushed back up to over 3.1 million each. Most of my PLEX was bought for 2.75 million each so when it reaches 3.2 million I'll probably cash most of it out and put the money towards other speculation.

Other investments

I'm increasingly finding that I can't re-invest all of my money after every trade run. Therefore I've started looking into mid term investments to make some money on price swings. My first foray into this was buying a bunch of Leopards just after the price inexplicably tanked. This hasn't produced much in the way of value yet, but I'm holding them for the near term. I think I need to do more careful research into my speculations in future, maybe look at the faction warfare swings.

Further musings

I have a bit of time to play this weekend, quite unusually, and was completely ready to liquidate some of my PLEX stock to get the money to buy, ship and set up a Fortizar in Frarn. However, I realised by the time I'd got my freighter to Jita, bought the fort, and shipped it back (with a webbing alt to make sure I don't get ganked) I wouldn't be able to guarantee I'll be online at the same time tomorrow in order to online a service and take it to full power mode, and make it public. A low power fort left next to a trade hub really is begging to be wardecced/killed.

So I've done some more scouting/studying dotlan, and come up with a couple of alternatives to Frarn. In Heimatar, there is a level 4 mission hub in the system of Lustrevik. I used to do all my level 4 missions out of there myself, and judging by the sheer number of NPC kills there and in surrounding systems a lot of people still do. There isn't a huge market near there for things mission runners need, drones, ammo etc. which surprised me. I wonder if sticking a Fort in there I could seed it myself and create said market, whilst paying only 1% sales tax myself. It would also be much less likely to be destroyed, as people are unlikely to care and there is no competition.

The system next door to that is potentially more interesting though. Eystur sits on the border between Heimatar, and Hek. This therefore puts it 1 jump from a trade hub, whilst being 1 jump from Lustrevik. Potential for an overlapping market of PLEX and mission supplies. Now, being in a different region from Hek, you actually can't see any orders in there from Eystur, but being on the main route between Rens and Hek you'll get a decent amount of traffic. If the IChooseYou trade hubs can't see the orders in Eystur, they might not notice a market fort sitting just next door. I view this as being a lower risk alternative to a trade hub in Frarn, as it's not really competing with Hek orders (directly), so I'm less likely to get wardecced. To be honest I'm really liking this idea, even though I will likely get less in the way of PLEX/skill injector orders. I think sticking it in Eystur on the Lustrevik gate would be the optimal position to be noticed by traffic on its way to Rens, and mission runners in Lustrevik who are sent into Eystur to do missions.

I still need to think about this and plan the putting up of the Fort to minimize the risk of an instant wardec, but I am liking the idea, if nothing else it'll be something I've never done in EVE, and that's always nice.

Market Fortizar

I've been thinking recently about other ways of making ISK, specifically having my own market Fortizar.

Normally this would be a terrible idea to suggest, as IChooseYou and their backers/protection Pandemic Horde have a basic monopoly on Fortizars near high sec trade hubs. Interestingly Eve-Mogul has the one by Dodixie.

I was doing a bit of scouting around however, and I noticed that in Frarn next door to Rens, there is the IChooseYou Fort, and a market Fort run by a 5 man corp seemingly unaffiliated with IChooseYou. Maybe they are not that diligent about removing competition these days.

I've been playing around with the mechanics on Singularity, anchoring my own Fort in Frarn and setting it up for market access for everyone, whilst accessing it and setting up orders on my main character who is in Pandemic Horde. A Fortizar and Market service on Tranquility costs about 10.25 Billion ISK. All the other market forts in high sec have 0.5% broker fee. In order to pay off the cost of the fort people would have to set up orders to the amount of 2 Trillion ISK. When someone places an order the broker fee instantly appears in the corp master wallet, which is nice.

By way of example, lets assume I have a Fort in Frarn with 0.4% broker fee, in order to try and take customers from the other forts. At that level I would need people to set up 2.5 Trillion ISK worth of orders in my fort in order to get 10.25 Billion in broker fees. A commonly traded item in Fortizars is Large Skill injectors. In Rens/Frarn about 75 of these are traded a day, for an average of 720 Million ISK. 2.5 Trillion divided by 720 mil is 3559 Injectors. I would need about 47 days worth of orders to be set up in order for it to pay for itself. Now, if I could also grab PLEX, small skill injectors etc. it would pay for itself much faster. Anything after that point would be pure profit.

Now, the fly in the ointment, and my dilemma. Inevitably, at some point I would get wardecced. It will happen. I have never seen a ping for Pandemic Horde to come after any markets other than Rens, but I'm sure IChooseYou would engage the services of SOMEONE to kill my fort eventually. Probably sooner than later. The question is, do I set one up in Frarn and hope for the best (noting that the other fort appears to be unmolested) or do I go the other way and anchor it in Odatrik? Anchoring in Odatrik would probably lead to less orders, but it's probably less likely to be noticed.

I'm leaning towards gambling and anchoring it in Frarn, but it is a 10 bil gamble, and I have no realistic way of defending the fort if attacked, as I simply don't play enough. This is probably a silly idea, but it's something I have never done, and has the potential, if it stays up for a couple of months, of earning me a lot of ISK. I'll have to mull this over.

Expanding Station trading

So on the quiet in the last few months I've been training up and gaining standings on a station trading character for Jita. Gaining standings is a long and very very tedious process. From a brand new character I did all the career agents for Caldari and Amarr (allied), 6 sets in all, then traded in tags for further standings, and lastly trained into a badger for running level 3 distribution missions for Caldari Navy. I spent several weeks idly running distribution missions as long as my sanity could manage whilst doing other things on a second monitor.

I eventually called the character done at 6.51 Caldari State standings and 6.58 Caldari Navy. With Broker Relations V and Accounting V this give me a broker fee of 2.21% in Jita and a sales tax of 1%. I then set up my character in a player owned trade hub in Perimeter, namely "Perimeter - Safe Trade Hub - Panfam Secured" owned by a member corp of Pandemic Horde. This trade hub (and indeed all of them in Perimeter) has a broker fee of 0.5%, which brings the total cost of buying and selling an item in Jita to 3.71% of the items value. I chose this trade hub in particular is I am a member of Pandemic Horde on my main, so if I have to give broker fee money to anyone, I might as well give it to the alliance.

Once set up , I transferred money from my other seller characters, 5 bil from Amarr, and 2.5 bil from Rens and Dodixie, to this new character and began station trading. I haven't had huge amounts of time to play, but I've been having a little more success in Jita than I have in Amarr and I'm currently sat at a little over 11 billion ISK after a week of trading. Not fantastic, but I'm still getting to know the market and I really haven't had much time to trade, a quick 5-10 mins to update orders before work most mornings and that's about it. However I think this is a good extra source of income, so I'm going to keep at it and see if I can play more intelligently and improve my profits.

I'm still training on this character, need Margin Trading V and some more order slots, but once I'm done I'm going to give my Amarr station trader Day Trading II in order to be able to update orders from a trade hub in Ashab, and reduce the fees I pay on that character by about 2%. That should lead to an appreciable increase in profit.

I've started using eve-mogul https://beta.mogulfinancial.space to track my profits on my station traders, as a way to work out which items are making me money, and which I need to cycle out for something else. It provides profit figures on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, so it should make weeding out my worst items a lot easier. You probably won't be seeing me on the leaderboards anytime soon though!

On a separate note, the PLEX sales have ended and the value of PLEX has risen above 3.1 million. 70% of my PLEX was bought for 2.75 mil or less, so this is really heading into profitable territory. If it breaks 3.2 million I will probably cash out most of it and look for other mid-length investments with the cash.

September Update

I've been away a lot this month (major life events) so I haven't really played much. Indeed, I didn't play at all for almost 3 weeks. Still, I've made some progress, so here's a quick update.

I've provided the 2nd of September sheet, as a nice round month since the last update. As things stand, I have 205 Billion ISK. This represents a monthly increase of 16.2 Billion, or 522.2 Million ISK a day. This is slightly less than last month, which considering my play time is frankly astonishing.

I've also finally breached the magic 200 billion barrier. 20% of the way to being a Trillionaire! OK, that goal is still a LONG way off, so if I'm going to make it before they turn the servers off I'm going to have to branch out into other things, and experiment with new ways of making money. with that in mind I've set myself a target of 300 Billion ISK by 1st January 2019. That's ambitious, but if I'm creative, clever, and a bit lucky I can do it. More on what I'm going to try next update.

I have 3 active accounts, with 5 characters currently dedicated to my trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has no training, and simply buys from buy orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~97.2 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Very close to the magic 100 Billion on a single character. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 55.3 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 55.2 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my good from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. This is mostly implants, so high value, small volume items. This means I can fit everything for all 3 characters in a single Blockade runner, which with its current fit has about 50k EHP, and can warp cloaked. For highsec this is basically invincible, so I'm happy hauling like this, for now.

Amarr station trader

I've branched out slightly into station trading. I have a character in Amarr that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 3.14 Billion.

PLEX Holding

For a while, I was finding that I was having a lot of ISK lying around, not really doing anything. ISK in wallets can't make you money, so it's a bit of a waste of time having. In order to try and make some money with it I made several purchases of PLEX, most recently last August. For a while this was a nice little earner, consistently increasing, but it's been plateaued for a while now. It might be time to look at better long term investments.

Other investments

I'm increasingly finding that I can't re-invest all of my money after every trade run. Therefore I've started looking into mid term investments to make some money on price swings. My first foray into this was buying a bunch of Leopards just after the price inexplicably tanked. This hasn't produced much in the way of value yet, but I'm holding them for the near term. I think I need to do more careful research into my speculations in future, maybe look at the faction warfare swings.

Transporting in High Sec

As I've mentioned before, I do my own hauling in high security space.

This is largely due to the hauling corp I used to use folding, and the value of my trade shipments being above and beyond what player corps are willing to haul. I'm often carrying 30 Billion in a single Blockade Runner, and player corps don't want that level of risk or don't keep that much ISK on hand for collateral.

Ordinarily people would tell you that transporting that value in ISK is stupid, and basically begging to be ganked, and in a T1 hauler or freighter they'd be right, but I don't use those ships to transport my stuff. As I trade mostly in implants, with a few faction/deadspace modules thrown in, the volume of my shipments is actually pretty small. I have instant undock and docking bookmarks at the main trade hubs to reduce the risk of anyone attempting to gank me.

Until a few months ago, I solely traded in implants, which are 1m3 each. So I could fit an entire trade runs worth of implants in an interceptor. I used the following fit for that:

[Ares, LorRes]
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Damage Control II
Inertial Stabilizers II
Inertial Stabilizers II

Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Medium Shield Extender II
Medium Shield Extender II


Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer II
Small Polycarbon Engine Housing II

This Ares aligns in 1.9 seconds, has 11k EHP and an 8.8 AU per second warp speed. In high, a sub 2 second align means that even instalocking thrashers cannot catch me warping gate to gate. The EHP means I could survive a casual smartbomb trap if someone were to attempt that in highsec, which is highly unlikely. The 96m3 cargo hold meant I could carry 96 implants, which given the price ranges I was trading in was a lot, so for a time this was my hauling ship of choice.

Since moving into modules though, I require a slightly larger transport. That's where the Crane comes in:

[Crane, Lornor's Crane]
Damage Control II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

EM Ward Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Large Shield Extender II

Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

Medium Cargohold Optimization II
Medium Cargohold Optimization II

This Crane aligns in 4.42 seconds, has 41.1k EHP and a 7.92 AU per second warp speed. It is slower than the Ares, no insta-warping gate to gate, but it can warp cloaked. Warping cloaked makes it pretty much immune to any gank attempts in highsec, and when I can't cloak due to traffic the 41.1k EHP is enough to tank 3, maybe 4 perfect Tornado hits. I have only ever had 1 person try to gank this, and it was a rather futile attempt with a catalyst that didn't even bring me down to 80% shield. Another advantage of a blockade runner is you cannot be cargo scanned. So you could be empty, you could be carrying 50 Bil, no-one can know without killing you. I have heard tales of people playing "blockade runner roulette", ganking BRs to gamble that they're carrying enough to make it profitable, but most gankers would rather go after T1 industrials or freighters where they can see in advance if the attempt it likely to be profitable for them.

Really my main risk with hauling myself is if I go AFK carrying a load of stuff, or if I get wardecced. Even with a wardec though I'm unlikely to be caught, and no-one has decced me yet. If they do I'd probably just dock up for a week and let them be bored, better than potentially feeding them a huge killmail and making my way on to reddit.

So the summary here I guess is that you CAN do your own hauling, but it takes time, and it is really worth investing in a properly fit T2 ship to do it.

August Update

So I've played a little bit this month. Not a huge amount, but enough to do a run about once a week, and update my orders here and there. It's been a pretty good month all things considered, with my current standing as follows:

As you can see, I currently stand at 188.8 Billion ISK. This represents a monthly increase of 17 Billion ISK, or 548.4 Million per day. This is pretty good, possibly one of my best ever months, which is all the more surprising given that my PLEX holding has gone down in value (the old days where PLEX was ever increasing in value are well and truly dead).

I have 3 active accounts, with 5 characters currently dedicated to my trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has no training, and simply buys from buy orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~76.4 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 49.5 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 51.3 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my good from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. This is mostly implants, so high value, small volume items. This means I can fit everything for all 3 characters in a single Blockade runner, which with its current fit has about 50k EHP, and can warp cloaked. For highsec this is basically invincible, so I'm happy hauling like this, for now.

Amarr station trader

I've branched out slightly into station trading. I have a character in Amarr that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 2.7 Billion. honestly I'm not totally convinced about this, but I think I just haven't approached it properly yet. I need to do more experimenting and research on this character.

PLEX Holding

For a while, I was finding that I was having a lot of ISK lying around, not really doing anything. ISK in wallets can't make you money, so it's a bit of a waste of time having. In order to try and make some money with it I made several purchases of PLEX, most recently last August. For a while this was a nice little earner, consistently increasing, but it's been plateaued for a while now. It might be time to look at better long term investments.

Other investments

I'm increasingly finding that I can't re-invest all of my money after every trade run. Currently I have 24 Billion ISK just sitting in wallets not doing anything for me. That's over 10% of my total net worth! In an attempt to try and use this money, I've been looking at items to buy and hold, then sell when they gain value.

My first foray into this I noticed that the Leopard, a faction shuttle, has dropped in value by over half, overnight:

I don't know why the value has tanked, as far as I know you can't get any more Leopards, no more are being added to the game (unless I missed something). I suspect due to the increased trade volume that this may be a case of someone who was holding a ton of them dumping stock to get some ISK. Either way, I bought a bunch of them, 41 in fact, mostly for about 80 Million, though one or two were up to the 120 Million mark, so that is what I've put down on my spreadsheet as a reference point. As you can see, they've yet to climb above 120 mil consistently (sell orders currently at 94 mil in Jita) but the value is climbing. I'm hoping to get a bit of profit if the value does creep back up towards its old value of 200 mil.

A very, very belated update

So....it's been a while.

I'm not going to make excuses or promises I can't keep about regular updates or getting back into blogging, but I was reading another trading blog and it sparked my memory of this old thing. Turns out my last post was about 2 years ago!

Despite my absence from blogging, I have still been playing EVE these last 2 years. I've had breaks, peaks and troughs of playing, and done different things in the game, but one constant is that I've kept up my trading operations, to some degree.

I've kept a record of my activities as and when I've done trade runs, so I have the spreadsheets on hand, but for this post I'll just provide a point in time update for where I am now.

Without further adieu, my current operations:

This is a bit of a change from my previous spreadsheet. The cliff notes are that I currently have assets, ISK and sell orders amounting to 171.8 Billion ISK. This is, by most measures, a lot of ISK. I've not worked out how much I earned on average per month (if I do a full trade run a week I seem to make 3-5 bil per week, ish), but I have a decent amount of ISK now and regional high sec trading has certainly been successful. As ever, I take a 20% provision against my sell orders to account for having to reduce my sell orders due to competition.

You may notice that there are a few new sections to this spreadsheet. This is due to an expansion of my activities, and the number of characters I have. I now have 3 active accounts, with 5 characters currently dedicated to my trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has no training, and simply buys from buy orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~74 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 54.8 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 46.5 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my good from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. I used to get all my hauling done by a player hauling company, "New Evolution Express". This corporation closed its doors and folded into one of the other corporations, I forget which. When this happened I looked at the various companies to take up my hauling, but decided ultimately to return to hauling myself. The reasons could be a blog post all its own (and may well be) but basically it came down to the fact that I was hauling more than the maximum value a lot of corps would haul. This is mostly implants, so high value, small volume items. This means I can fit everything for all 3 characters in a single Blockade runner, which with its current fit has about 50k EHP, and can warp cloaked. For highsec this is basically invincible, so I'm happy hauling like this, for now.

Amarr station trader

I've branched out slightly into station trading. I have a character in Amarr that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on a little over 2 Billion. honestly I'm not totally convinced about this, but I think I just haven't approached it properly yet. I need to do more experimenting and research on this character.

PLEX Holding

For a while, I was finding that I was having a lot of ISK lying around, not really doing anything. ISK in wallets can't make you money, so it's a bit of a waste of time having. In order to try and make some money with it I made several puchases of PLEX, most recently last August. For a while this was a nice little earner, consistently increasing, but it's been plateued for a while now. It might be time to look at better long term investments.

Overall, my time playing per week has dropped, realistically I'm doing a full trade run about once per week, sometimes not even that. A lot of things are going on in real life, and it's not going to get quieter in the next couple of months! Most importantly though I'm still enjoying EVE, still enjoying trading, and I think there are a lot of avenues that I can explore to push myself to making more money. At this rate it will be well into the 2020s before I'm a Trillionare, but that just means I need to work smarter!