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!
