Free Market release

I don't normally do posts on individual releases to the game, but this was one I had high hopes for, that came up a bit short.

By that I don't mean I'm disappointed with the release, I have my gripes, but more that I thought this would represent an opportunity I could throw money at and get a lot richer fast. I planned to exploit the PLEX to Hypercore conversion rate to buy PLEX, convert it to hypercores, and sell them for a huge markup on release, hoping that people wouldn't bother to do the maths on what they are actually worth, and keep doing it until it was no longer profitable.

For this I used the formula:

PLEX price x PLEX per core x 1.06 (broker fee + taxes at Jita)

which come out to (currently)

3,360,800 * 0.1 * 1.06 = 356,244.80 per hypercore. 

Hypercores currently sell in Jita for 354,000. Disappointing.

I did get in on release day, for about 25 mins, when the margin after everything was about 10%, and I made about 2 billion in that time, which is pretty good for half an hours work! Unfortunately real life intervened and that was all I managed. Maybe next time.

I'm thinking of trying out hosting my own raffles, to see what the margins are like, but I'm not doing that now, and I'm certainly not playing any.

The other part of the release that relate to the market are splitting out the "Market Orders" into a separate window. Not a fan, but you can snap it to the same window as the market so the effect is basically the same as previous. The only downside is you have to click the "market orders" button every time you log in. More clicks for the same functionality. I guess you could argue there's more flexibility if you have the screen real estate. Which I now do! I've finally upgraded my monitors to 24" 1080p ones, so the EVE UI scales a lot better than it did previously! You'll see from my next update that I can actually fit almost my entire spreadsheet in a single screenshot, which is a great improvement.

The other major change is to the wallet. Big, colour coded buttons for ISK, PLEX and loyalty points respectively. This seems like it's scaled to tablets, which is an odd choice. The functionality of the wallet is broken down on the left now, with much bigger clickable areas for a more modern feel. A small improvement I feel.

Lastly, the overview. This has changed to include a circle chart of your income or expenses over the month, and is colour coded, with a breakdown on the right, ISK amounts if you hover. I like this, it's nice looking, and covers a little bit of the functionality you get in your overview on EVE Mogul. It doesn't provide a huge amount of use, but if this is the start of some useful reporting I'm all for it.

In other news, the month is going pretty well earnings wise, and I continue to grind standings on my new character. I should be quite ahead of my end of year target, which is great! Watch this space.

December Update

This month has been a real return to form, with a much higher turnover and profit, things are feeling back on track. My current position:

I have 537.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 29.9Bn over last month. I don't really know what lead to the large jump in turnover this month, I've had a bit more time to play, and I've tried a few different things, but it seems that market activity is back to normal after the end of the Chaos Era fundamentally. The introduction of the Korean client probably helps boost activity a bit as well.

I was aiming for 540Bn by the end of the year, so I've basically got a whole month to get ahead on next year which is great! I've got blueprints in research for the components required for a Raitaru, which I'm looking forward to starting producing soon. I've also started another character to dedicate entirely for Large Skill Injectors, but more on that in a future post.

I last did a trade run on Saturday, which is why I have, er 75Bn ISK lying around. Most of this will be thrown back into my usual trading when I next get chance, but I'm also going to throw my weight behind hosting some raffles when the HyperNet Relay releases on the 10th of September. Again, more on that in another post, but I reckon there'll be some serious money to be made there.

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Skill Point Trader

My newest character! I've started a brand new character, who I'm going to get a very high reputation with all the main empires and the corporations who own the trade hubs, for the purpose of trading skill injectors and other high value high turnover items. I've trained Social V, and started the rep grind, but it'll take a while, doing career and then distribution missions. A slow burn character.

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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 74.7Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~140 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 80 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  108.3 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 68.3Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

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 11.2 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 60.5 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. He also farms SP and sells injectors on the market.

Horde Seller

I've changed this character this month. Rather than shipping items from Jita I've switched to station trading in the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. I've found it much easier to keep this character updated as a result, a good change. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 4.7Bn.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 5.5Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Finished research on 5 structure rig blueprints and has done 2 runs on each of them, with the produce up for sale in Rens and Hek. I haven't accounted for this very well, but I bought materials for the run for about 2.1Bn and put them up for sale in the region of 3.4Bn. Pretty good return if they sell. Also has 9 structure component BPs in research. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in. I'm planning to put more time and work into this character this month to work out a process.

Manufacturing next steps

So I've not abandoned manufacturing, but there hasn't been too much to report.

I've done 2 runs of the citadel rigs, and put them up for sale in Hek and Rens. These are selling slowly, but I should end up with about 2Bn profit from it if they all sell. Pretty good really! I've not done proper accounting, just ballpark figures for input mats purchased and the sell prices I put them up for.

More importantly, I've bought a set of structure component blueprints, specifically the 9 components required to build a Raitaru, and put them in to research ME:

I had been hoping to get the BPOs to ME 10, but to do that with these would take about 500 days! Obviously not practical. The most I can put them in for from fresh is ME6, which takes about 15 days. I'll probably aim for a final ME of 7 or 8, and go from there. It'll take a while to get going, but it's nice to have something to work towards, and building up a BPO library is always going to be useful.

Skill Point Farming

So, I have an account containing my Jita station traders, my Amarr station trader, and my Tash-Murkon region trader. All of these characters have all of their trade skills at V, so I consider them "finished" from a skills point of view.

As such, any skill points I train are wasted from a trading point of view. CCP decided to allow skill point trading a while ago though, so I'm going to take advantage of it on my Jita station trader for a little supplementary income. Some people optimise this so that accounts pay for their own PLEX plus turn a profit, but I pay for this account in cash, so the money will simply go towards the Trillion.

On my Jita trader, I have the following skill mapping:

This is the default that every character starts with. I also have a set of +3 training implants plugged in. Currently my skill queue looks like this:

Advanced mass production has 6 days 19 hours left to train to 5. It has a primary attribute of Memory, and a secondary attribute of Intelligence. I'm going to remap to focus on those two, and buy +5 implants for those 2 attributes:

Down to 5 days 9 hours. A huge increase in training speed. I'm going to keep extracting skill points from this skill and advanced industry, and sell the injectors on the market as a supplementary income. I should be able to sell 3 or 4 injectors a month for around 440mil profit each at current prices. Decent bit of income for next to no work.

November Update

A very sow start to the month, but picked up towards the end. Still not quite at the velocity I saw in June/July, but getting bacon track. My current position:

I have 507.8Bn ISK, an increase of 16.9Bn. This is, all things considered, a pretty poor month, I suspect partly cause by upheaval in my life (moved house) and partly by the tail end of the "Chaos Era" changes that saw a dip in nullsec activity. My life should start looking a bit more settled now for the foreseeable future, s I'm hoping to start getting a bit more playtime in going forwards.

I've been keeping to 1sh trade run a week, and even managed the odd evening to update orders. I was very pleased when I logged in yesterday to find over 50Bn ISK across my main characters to buy more stuff. In the end I carried ~34Bn of items out of Jita for sale elsewhere. I have an issue with one of the numbers on my spreadsheet, and that is "ISK in wallet: 36.9Bn". That is way too much ISK lying around doing nothing for me. I have plans for that though, I'm going to buy some structure blueprints and put some money into manufacturing, and I'm going to plow the rest into my trading/investments.

I have 4 accounts, with 10 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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 74.7Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~155.8 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 86.9 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  108.4 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. There's a jump in sell orders here, as he's listed 5 structure rigs build by my manufacturing characters, and some skill injectors bought in Jita.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 55.8Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

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 12.3 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 57 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'm also going to start SP farming/extracting on this character, as the characters on this account are "finished" from a trading point of view. This could cover the cost of PLEXing account 4 potentially. More on this in another post.

Horde Seller

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 R10-GN. 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 3.4 Bn in sell orders.

I've done very little with this character this month again.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 5Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Finished research on 5 structure rig blueprints and has done 1 run on each of them, with the produce up for sale in Rens. I haven't accounted for this very well, but I bought materials for the run for about 2.1Bn and put them up for sale in the region of 3.4Bn. Pretty good return if they sell. New plan is to buy structure component blueprints to research, and do more runs on the BPs I have. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in. I'm planning to put more time and work into this character this month to work out a process.

Whoa, we're half way there!

WHOOOAAA, HALF A TRILLIONAIRE!

Bonus Bon Jovi To listen to whilst reading this blog entry.

So, It's taken longer than I'd hoped, but when I updated my spreadsheet today the total ticked over to a little over 500Bn ISK!!

I started out on 17/11/2015, so just under 4 years to go from 3Bn to 500. An average of 10.57Bn a month, obviously increasing as we go.

I started out buying items in Jita, and selling in Amarr. I then expanded to Dodixie and then Rens. Along the way I've added new characters and trading techniques, including station trading, hauling to null, and buying and running around a region without a "big 5" trade hub. The bread and butter however has remained the same, buy high price, low volume items (implants, faction/deadspace mods, rigs) from sell orders in Jita, transport them to another hub and then sell.

This will likely continue as I head towards the big T, though I'm going to further supplement my earnings with manufacturing (in the works, not far off starting), and a little SP farming. More on that in another post, but I basically have 1 account where all 3 characters are considered "finished", so I might as well cash in on their skill point accumulation as I can't use it for trading.

So, how long is it going to take me to get to 1 Trillion ISK? I'm going to make some assumptions and try and work it out.

On 01/01/2016 I had 11Bn
On 04/02/2017 I had 29Bn (The earliest I have for that year, I took a bit of a break from the game)
On 04/01/2018 I had 100Bn
On 01/01/2019 I had 270Bn

I predicted at the start of the year that I would double my wealth this year, leading to a wealth on 01/01/20 of 540Bn. That's looking like being about right with slightly over 2 months to go. Here is where I take some assumptions going forwards. Let's start with the pessimistic prediction:

100/29 is a 3.44x increase year on year
270/100 is a 2.7x increase year on year
540/270 is a 2x increase year on year

Assuming my yearly increases continue to decrease as a percentage, the next few increases should be:

2.7/3.44 = 0.78
2-2.7 = 0.74

So to extrapolate, I'm going to use 0.7 for the next few years:

2*0.7=1.4
1.4*0.7=0.98 (I doubt I'll lose money year on year).

so, 540*1.4= 756Bn by 01/01/2021.

Now let's look at it a different way:

in 2017 I increased my wealth by 71Bn
in 2018 I increased by 170Bn
in 2019 I increased by 270Bn

So for 202 I should increase by ~370Bn, which would put me on 910Bn on 01/01/2021, then an increase of 470Bn would result in 1380Bn on 01/01/2022.

The reality would probably be somewhere between the two, so let's say I'll aim for 825Bn on 01/01/2021, hitting the T some time in the middle of the year.

Either way, I'm hoping for more going forwards. I really like having a definitive target to aim for, I feel having somethign to drive for really drives engagement in the game, whether that's a certain wealth, a certain number of pvp kills, or building your own orca. All playstyles are valid, you just have to find the one that's right for you.

October Update

Well this was inextricably a poor month. Let's get right to it.

My current position:

I have 490.9Bn ISK. That is a measly increase of 7.6Bn. Not 27.6, 7.6. My worst month for probably 2 years. What I struggled to work out is why?

I've managed to keep to 1 proper trade run (as described in a previous blog) a week, which isn't unusually low. I've barely updated orders in between then, which will definitely have contributed to less profit, but doesn't explain such a small increase. Even more strangely, this last week has been decent, almost all of my profits coming this last week. The preceding 3 weeks, despite some turnover, I wasn't making any money at all.

I looked and looked to see if I had made an accounting error somewhere (wouldn't be the first time) and couldn't find one. The price of PLEX tanked which I reckon accounted for a 2-3Bn lowering of value, I spent ~1.85Bn on PLEX for my 4th account, same as last month and I had to put up some orders which had expired again, which accounted for about 1Bn in broker fees. All that still comes to a pessimistic 6Bn ISK in costs, which would still be quite a low increase of 13Bn. I know it's summer, and the Chaos era may have hit activity, but I'm still surprised that this month my worth isn't starting with a 5. I guess I'll just have to keep trying and see if next month improves.

On the plus side, it looks like there's money to be made manufacturing, which I'm keen to get started with.

I have 4 accounts, with 10 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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 76Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~154 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 84 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  89.5 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 53.9Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

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 12.2 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 54.8 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.

Horde Seller

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 R10-GN. 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 3.4 Bn in sell orders.

I've done very little with this character this month again.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 4.6Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Not doing a huge amount at the moment other than training skills. Currently has 1 building slot and 5 lab slots. Research ME on 5 structure rig blueprints ready to start building from them in 27 days.

Gearing up for manufacturing

So, today after doing my trade run, I finally found some time to do some initial set up for my manufacturing.

I created my new character for this on the 22nd, a week ago, and since then he has been doing nothing but training skills. He currently has Industry IV, training V, Laboratory Operation IV, Science IV, and a bunch of other general skills like warp drive operation.

All in all at the moment he has access to 5 lab slots and 1 manufacturing slot. Not exactly inspiring, but this will improve quite quickly. I'm not skilling in perhaps the optimal way, but I'll get there in the end.

Meanwhile I've done some browsing for what to manufacture. How I did it is pretty ad-hoc. I went to Fuzzwork's blueprint calculator and scrolled through some options.

I've decided that I'm pretty keen on building citadels and related modules, but building citadels requires the "Outpost construction" skill, which I do not yet have. As part of my trading however I've noticed that citadel rigs can be transported from Jita and sold at a good profit. I therefore had a look at those, and found that most can actually be produced and sold in Jita for a profit, at ME 0. This is pretty unexpected, but welcome. At ME 10 most of them pay for the blueprint with a single run! The blueprints are 100mil each, so not too expensive either. A Raitaru for comparison is 4Bn!

I've therefore bought 5 rig blueprints for medium citadels (the most common ones in highsec) and set them to research:

It'll take about a month each for them to hit ME10, so I might find something else to build in the meantime, but these seem like they'll be nice little earners until I get the skills to build outposts, and am willing to front the pretty high startup capital to build them. The good news is most citadels, despite the high start up cost, are profitable to produce even buying the components off the market. If you build your own they're very profitable! I definitely think this is the way to go for me, as I can't really guarantee a log on every day, or even more than once or twice a week!

In terms of accounting for these, I'm recording the NPC price of the BPOs on my spreadsheet. I know a researched blueprint can sell for more, but market conditions can change that, and I can always guarantee NPC sell price for them, so that's how I'm valuing them.

I've never found a blog of anyone building citadels, so I'll try and record my thoughts and processes as I go along, for posterity if nothing else. A new chapter for my money making!

A New Manufacturing Character

Skill training completed:

I wish Aura still said that, such a satisfying sound.

Anyway, yesterday my Hek seller finished Tycoon V, and I consider him now "finished" from a sellers point of view. He has Accounting/Broker Relations V, and all skills that give more orders to V, giving him the maximum of 305 orders to play with (he's only using 80 atm).

This leaves me with the question of what to do with the other 2 character slots on that account. I had thought to create more region traders in the same vein as the Tash-Murkon trader, and if I was purely thinking from a profit point of view that would be the way forwards. However, for along time I've liked the idea of getting back into manufacturing seriously.

My Rens seller has a lot of manufacturing skills, and there was a period of time years ago when that was how I made money with that character. The problem is if he's flying around doing manufacturing related things, he's not in a position to update orders, or fly around collecting items on a trade run. 

Now however, with a free character slot, I can dedicate a character to just manufacturing. I haven't quite decided whether to go T1 or T2, or mix up both. I quite like the idea of building citadels, or other structures. This seems to be a bit of an underserved market outside Jita, and I have the money to take this seriously.

I also haven't decided where to base my efforts. I'm pretty much free to be where I want, so this is a tricky question. I can pretty much rule out Jita as a place to sell my wares, as the competition is too fierce, and profit margins are likely razor thin, if not negative.

Amarr appeals, being a bit less competitive, and I do transport some structure rigs there for sale, which means there is a margin to be made and I can likely still get all my materials at a reasonable price.

What I feel like I'm leaning towards at the moment though is Minmatar space. I know, it has the smallest trade hubs of the 4 races high sec regions, but that's kind of the beauty of it - trade hubS, plural. Rens is 6 jumps from Hek, and where I already have a character with good industry skills. If I pick a system somewhere between the two, I can serve both hub easily, and if I need more lines going I can easily bring my Rens seller across to build some stuff.

I'm probably several days away from getting started seriously, as I need to train a bunch of skills, industry, mass production, laboratory operation etc etc, so i can spend some time scouting out where to set up. I will probably operate out of NPC stations initially whilst I get a feel for things, then plop down my own citadel(s). 

I'm excited to try something new, though it's going to take a lot of prep and thought to do properly - stay tuned!

A day in the life

So this is a blog I've been meaning to do for a while now, what do I do on a day-to-day basis?

This is a routing that has changed numerous times, but I'll give an insight into my current set up. I have 4 accounts:

Account 1:
- PvP "main", in Pandemic Horde, not involved in my trade activities. My first ever character.
- Jita buyer, also manages my long term investments
- Amarr seller

Account 2:
- Rens seller/transporter. Picks up items for the hubs, has the most SP. My second ever character and used to do all things, mining, manufacturing, missions. Still does on occasion
- Dodixie seller
- Pandemic horde seller, like the trade hub sellers, except the items are shipped by a group in horde, not by me

Account 3:
- Perimeter station trader
- Ashab station trader
- Tash-Murkon region trader

Account 4:
- Hek seller, soon to complete Tycoon V and then I'll create other characters to fill out this account

At the moment due to my current living/work situation, I get very little time in the evening for playing games, and none in the morning during the week. At the weekend I get a few hours, enough for at least 1 "Trade Run" usually, though recently I've been playing a little bit of WoW classic, which cuts into my EVE time.

During the week if I get chance I log into my station traders and update the orders, putting up anything I've bought for sale. If I'm feeling really motivated I'll log into one of my trade hub sellers and update their orders. Often Amarr as this is the biggest money maker.

Trade Run

When I say "Trade run" in this blog, this is what I mean:

- Log in my Jita buyer, and Dodixie seller
- Transfer all money apart from about 500 million from Dodixie to Jita Buyer using corp wallet
- On Dodixie, run down my quickbar, making sure I'm the lowest price sell order on items where I have sell orders, where I don't have anything listed I check the price difference between Jita and Dodixie, using the corp chat and both market windows. If the price difference is over 10%, i usually buy 3 of that item
- Once I have been through my entire quickbar, contract the items from Buyer to Dodixie.
- Create courier contract for Rens to ship the items to Dodixie.
- Log out Dodixie, log in Rens
- Repeat steps 2-4
- log out Jita, and in Amarr, whilst flying Rens to Jita in a Crane
- Repeat steps 2-5, except with Rens doing the buying, to be shipped to Amarr
- Log in Hek, repeat steps 2-5
- Once I have all the contracts set up, I set my route with Rens to go Jita -> Amarr -> Dodixie -> Hek -> Rens
- Accept the contracts, and fly to the trade hubs
- Once the packages are delivered, put the new items up for sale, I can do Amarr and Hek whilst I'm flying, then Rens once I arrive, then finally Dodixie, as it's on Account 2 with Rens
- finally, update my spreadsheet.

All told, a full Trade Run as described above takes about 2 hours, so is quite a commitment. Possibly not the most efficient, but as I can't schedule my playtime at the moment it's what I can do.

My favourite ship. I should buy a SKIN at some point

In amongst these, I may also carry out steps 2-5 with my Horde seller, but shipping through an alliance service, or fly around collecting items on my Tash-Murkon trader.

Task-Murkon is a bit different. He's set up in a market citadel in Tash-Murkon Prime, paying 0.1% broker fee, and sets up region-wide buy orders with a healthy margin. These range from t1 drones to faction modules and implants. About once a week I log in, and fly around to every station where I've bought at least 1million ISK worth of stuff, take it back to the citadel and put it up for sale. I often do this whilst Rens is flying around.

I very rarely do all of this on the same day, but this is my current set up. No doubt this will change in the future, and hopefully I can get back to at least updating a few orders every day, as I feel my profits suffer when I don't (you can pretty much track when I stopped being able to do this from my profit).

Hope that's been useful, interesting, or at least given you something to criticise about my set up. I'm always intrigued when I read about other people's methods, and there's not many talking about it these days.

September Update

I've had another very busy month, which has really cut into my playtime. Combined with my new job situation means I can't even get a quick price adjustment in once a day like I used to - and I'm restricted to proper trade runs at the weekend only. Anyway, excuses aside, my current position:

I have 481.3Bn ISK. This is an increase of 21.8Bn. This represents an increase of 703Mil a day. I haven't had anywhere near as much time to play this month, and I think there's been a general dip in activity as people go away on holiday. Still, I was hoping to be up around an average of 30Bn a month, and this falls a long way short of that.

On a better note, my Hek seller is in the process of learning Tychoon V. once he does he'll be "finished" from a skills perspective, and I'm thinking of spinning up a couple of regional traders in the vein of the Tash-Murkon trader with the empty slots.

In the recent spikes in price for recons due to the announced cyno changes, I bought a blueprint of each racial cruiser and created some copies and did some invention. I only got 1 T2 Blueprint from 6 invention runs, and I haven't built it yet, but it helps me get a feel for the invention process. I may expand this in future, not sure.

I have 4 accounts, with 9 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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 74Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~161.8 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 94.5 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 93.9 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

My new character. Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. He was in a trade hub citadel, but that was put into hull turning off its market module so I moved to an NPC station like the rest of my selling characters, though this cost me about 1Bn in broker fees. Deals primarily in Rigs, faction modules and implants. I started this character off with 16Bn "seed" money and he's currently got 57.9Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

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 11.9 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 54.2 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.

Horde Seller

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 R10-GN. 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 3.4 Bn in sell orders.

I've done very little with this character this month in truth. I need to start it up again.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 4.3Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Ashab Hub Saved

For some time now, the Sotiyo owned by EVE Mogul has been where my Amarr station trader has been based, to utilise the reduced broker fees (even more important with the recent tax hike). When I logged in 2 weeks ago however I found that the citadel was in its hull timer, and the market was offline.

Due to this and a combination of IRL stresses I have not really logged into this character since, whilst I managed other things and tried to decide if it was worth relocating to another citadel or to go back to an NPC station.

In that 2 weeks however, the citadel has been fully repaired, and I have access to the market again - Hurray! As such I'll leave him in place. I have a lot of orders to update now though.

August Update

I've had an extremely busy - and stressful - month in real life, so my EVE time has been a bit limited. This, along with the PLEX price tanking has affected my profits this month. With that said, my current position:

As things stand, I have 459.5Bn ISK. This is an increase of 23.9Bn. This represents an increase of 746Mil a day. I was hoping to end up with 465Bn this month so I'm a bit disappointed by the dip. As you can tell, a lot of my investments have increased in price and sold, which is great. On the flip-side though, I have 7000 PLEX as an investment, and the price dropped from 4,159,000 to 3,799,819 ISK. That's a ~10% drop, which has affected my profit total. Additionally, I simply haven't been able to update orders regularly, and have had to relocate my orders on 2 characters.

Going forwards, there will also be the issue that CCP has increased the sales tax at Accounting V to 2.25%, and the base broker fee is now 5%. This means I need to sell items for 7.25% more than I buy them just to break even. I actually don't pay 5% as I have Broker Relations V on all my trade characters so it's a base of 3.5% but I only have standings increased to reduce this on my Jita trader and Rens seller. I may have to do some standings increasing on my other characters, but for now I'll simply pass on the cost to the consumer, by making sure that my sales have a slightly higher margin.

I have 4 accounts, with 9 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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 87Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~154.8 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 83.3 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 89.5 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

My new character. Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. He was in a trade hub citadel, but that was put into hull turning off its market module so I moved to an NPC station like the rest of my selling characters, though this cost me about 1Bn in broker fees. Deals primarily in Rigs, faction modules and implants. I started this character off with 16Bn "seed" money and he's currently got 42.4Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which shouldn't be too difficult.

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 10.2 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 52.5 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.

Horde Seller

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 R10-GN. 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 3.8 Bn in sell orders.

I largely stopped updating this character this month whilst the staging was ongoing, but I'll start him up again now that Horde are back home and it's business as usual.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 3.6Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Another Citadel in hull

It's beginning to seem like there's a co-ordinated effort going on. My Amarr station trader operates out of a market Sotiyo in Ashab, and today when I logged on to update my orders I was once again faced with this:

Someone has put the citadel into its hull timer, and put their own up. Once again I'm going to have to tear down my orders and set up elsewhere.

These guys are the ones who've put the new hub up, and I'm guessing they're responsible for the reinforcement of the EVE-Mogul hub. Curiously, EVE-Mogul are the ones who put the Hek citadel into reinforce and threw down their own there. There is clearly an active power struggle going on for the high-sec trade hubs.

The only one that is stable it seems is the Tranquility Trade Tower in Perimeter, largely because it is a profit sharing scheme/protection racket between Pandemic Horde, TEST and Goons.

I may set up in the new trade hub in Ashab to save on broker fees, but this whole episode is making me question the efficiency of citadels for trade in high sec, if I have to move semi-regularly.

Locked Out

So I logged onto my Hek trader yesterday to be met with the following message:

Ah.

This was confusing, as being a public trade hub Citadel I couldn't see me being put on any sort of block list, my corp has never even been at war. When I undocked the reason became clear:

Someone has put the ICY trade hub citadel into its hull timer, turning off any modules, which includes the market. Another Citadel has been anchored in system, this one at 0.3% tax. Presumably they're the ones who are reinforcing the ICY citadel, or at least the ones who paid mercs to do it.

Either way, I don't want to get caught up in these shenanigans in future, as it meant I had to tear down all of my sell orders and transfer everything to a different station. I decided to go with the NPC station where most trading happens in system to avoid being locked out in future, even though it means paying 2.5% broker fee. This meant spending about 1Bn ISK in broker fees up front, but I can never be locked out of this station, and I tend to have a 10-20% profit margin on my items anyway.

If I had logged in later, when the citadel was destroyed, I would have had to pay for asset safety to retrieve my items for sale. AFAIK this is about 10% of their value, which would come to about 4.5Bn. Ouch. Suddenly the broker fee in the NPC station doesn't seem so bad.

This may mean I make slightly less money on this character, but I think from a quality of life point of view this is a worthwhile move. Not sure I can be bothered running missions to bring the broker fee down though.

July Update

A pretty good month all things considered, had a fairly normal amount of playtime, and managed to spin up a 4th account to cover off my gap of a seller in Hek.

My current position:

As things stand, I have 435.6Bn ISK. This is an increase of 36.3Bn on the 30th of May, and represents a daily average of 1067Million per day! Virtually identical daily average to last month. Hopefully this represents a new normal of just over 1Bn a day profit, which would be a fair step up in my race to the big T.

This month has been largely normal, with the exception of spinning up a 4th account to start and train up a seller in Hek, in a Tatara with 0.1% broker fee. I used a buddy invite to give myself 750,000 SP on this character, which was used to jump to accounting IV and 77 orders, a solid start. I also spent 2.2Bn on PLEX for this account, as I'm not sure I can really justify £40 a month on EVE, and I pay for my other 3 accounts with cash.

I have not included the PLEX in the monthly profits (as it's spent and gone), but I will have to factor in buying it monthly going forwards. Paying for all of my accounts with PLEX will cost me, at current prices, 8.8Bn a month. This is a bigger hit than I am willing to take, so this happy medium will do for now. The PLEX on my investment sheet is just that, investments, and won't be spent unless things get desperate.

I haven't done a "trade run" (more on that in  another post) since Sunday, which is why I have 34.5Bn ISK in cash at the moment, normally I'd carry less and more in sell orders, as cash sitting around isn't doing anything for me.

I have 4 accounts, with 9 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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 87Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~138.3 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 79.3 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 79.8 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

My new character. Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub (the ICY Tatara in Hek) and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Deals primarily in Rigs, faction modules and implants. I started this character off with 16Bn "seed" money and he's currently got 24.5Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which shouldn't be too difficult.

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 9.9 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 50.8 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.

Horde Seller

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 BWF-FF. 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 2.1 Bn in sell orders.

I largely stopped updating this character this month whilst the staging was ongoing, but I'll start him up again now that Horde are back home and it's business as usual.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 3.3Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Adding another account

Yesterday I did something I've been resisting for years... I added a 4th Omega account.

I have always tried to keep my in game and out of game money separate, I've been paying for my 3 accounts with cash for years now, and I can quite happily pay £30 a month for the entertainment EVE provides me (not like I go clubbing anymore, so beer money is now EVE money).

At the same time, there has long been a hole in my high sec trade operations. The 5 main high sec trade hubs in the game are Jita, Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek - in that size order. I have traders at all of them except Hek.

I've long been considering adding a seller there, particularly as my sellers in Amarr, Dodixie and Rens have been plateauing a bit lately. However, all of my accounts have 3 characters, that are all utilised, and so I cannot dedicate one of them to moving to Hek. So I finally decided to take the plunge and create a 4th account.

I actually created the account at the weekend, using a refer a friend link from myself to create an alpha account, create a minmatar character, and fly straight from the tutorial system to Hek. I didn't PLEX the account then, just wanted to get the lay of the land.

Now, there are restrictions on trade hubs that do not allow you to anchor citadels in them, to cut server load and prevent spam, but for some reason in the case of this restriction, Hek is not considered to be a trade hub, despite being almost the same size as Rens from a trade point of view. So there are citadels there. Specifically, there is an ICY (IChooseYou) Tatara in Hek that has a broker fee of 0.1%. This is brilliant, saves the requirement to train broker relations (though I'll probably do it anyway) and I don't need to worry about standings. So I set my shiny new character up there.

As I don't want to pay real money for a 4th account and this account should easily be able to PLEX itself, I decided this will be my (for now) only account funded by PLEX. So when doing a trade run last night I transferred this character ~18 Billion ISK, bought 500 PLEX for about 2.2 Billion, and went Omega. When you activate a refer a friend link you also get 750,000 SP to inject, which is great. So I bought a bunch of trade skills, queued it up, and injected. As things stand this character has accounting IV, 77 orders and is working on accounting V. I then bought items and put them up for sale for ~24 Billion ISK, and went to bed.

Despite picking a bunch of items that sell at least once per day, faction/deadspace modules mostly, when I logged on this morning to have a quick check, absolutely nothing had sold. This is disappointing, but it was a Wednesday evening, so I'll give it the weekend. Most of the items I'm selling though are up for sale in an NPC station in the system, so maybe people are buying their items there instead of the Tatara, despite my orders being the cheapest? Who knows. If I have to move I will.

Once this character is trained up, I will probably use the other slots for other characters, maybe another regional trader and either someone to trade exclusively skill injectors, or possibly a manufacturer. Feels strange having a 4th account though, weirdly feels like a big leap.

Early June update

I'm going to be away this weekend, so I'm making my update a couple of days early. Leaves a weekends worth of sales for the next month!

My current position:

I currently have 399.3Bn ISK. This is an increase of 29.2Bn ISK on last month. A pretty good month by all accounts, even with a slow start. This makes an average of 1064 Million ISK per day, finally broken the 1 Bil a day average!!!

This month has been all about my investments. As you can see my investments character is overseeing an extra 9Bn this month compared to last month. A lot of my investments, particularly my ships, experienced a sharp jump in value. This is probably due to the outbreak of a war in the north. I've plowed as much as I can back into investments. This seems to be a very scalable way of making money, even if it takes patience.

I would have broken 400Bn this month, but I experienced a boo-boo, where I entered a sell order for 123 mil rather than 1.2 bil. Woops. Fortunately not something happens very often, but a days worth of work gone in an instant is annoying all the same.

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 am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 87Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~138.7 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Finished training Tycoon V on this character to increase orders to maximum. 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 78 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 87.5 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 9 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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.

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 46 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.

Horde Seller

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 BWF-FF. 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 2.9 Bn in sell orders.

Horde staging has changed recently to SH1 to support the war in the north. This hasn't seemed to affect my turnover much, but I am considering relocating to try and make money off the deployment, rather than staying in BWF.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 2.9Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably. 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.

Large Skill Injectors, trade in station or transport?

On my Jita/Perimeter trader, one of my consistent money makers has been Large Skill Injectors. These are, like PLEX, high volume, high value, and low margin items, that are directly tied to the price of PLEX (so you can usually guess which way the price will go by watching the PLEX price). I've done some rep grinding on this character to get my broker fee down to 2.1% in Jita, and as Caldari are "allied" to Amarr, my broker fee in Amarr is 2.58% (from memory).

One thing I've noticed over the course of my activities is the different price spread between Perimeter (razor thin), Jita (slightly wider) and Amarr (much wider). For example, this morning Buy orders for skill injectors were 995 mil in Perimeter. So if I were to buy one there I would have the following sell options:
Perimeter - 995 * 1.016 = 1010.92 mil (0.3% broker, 1% transaction, 0.3% broker)
Jita - 995 * 1.034 = 1028.83 mil (0.3% broker, 1% transaction, 2.1% broker)
Amarr - 995 * 1.0388 = 1033.6 mil (0.3% broker, 1% transaction, 2.58% broker)

The sell prices (approx) were:
Perimeter - 1018 - 1010.92 = 7.08 mil profit
Jita - 1048 - 1028.83 = 19.17 mil profit
Amarr - 1088 - 1033.6 = 54.4 mil profit

Seems like a clear winner right? Not entirely. The volume in the forge is 5000-7500 per day, but in Amarr it's 500-750. There is also transport time to consider (in a sub 2 second align full tank Ares, but still). I used to exclusively buy in Perimeter and sell in Jita, but recently I've been buying 20 at a time, transporting them to Amarr and putting them up for sale. Any extra I buy in the meantime I tend to sell in Jita for a fast turn around. If you can be at the keyboard for a reasonable length of time I still think Jita is the place to sell due to the volume, but as I get 5-10 mins most mornings, a quick trip to Amarr can be the way to go.

May Update

Not a spectacular month, but not a bad one either. I feel like I'm into a flow now with my different trading methods working well. My current position:

As things stand, I have 370.1Bn ISK. This is 21.5Bn more than last month, or 716 Million ISK per day. A step down from last month, and slightly less than the monthly average I need to meet if I want to double my ISK by 02/01/20, which is 22.5Bn a month. A few good months mean I'm still ahead on that target, so I still think getting 540Bn by the start of next year is very doable.

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'm not doing a good job of accounting when it comes to these profits, but it's definitely earned me a few billion for very little work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 78Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~124 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing.  I'm training Tycoon V on this character to increase orders to maximum. 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 76.9 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 76.6 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 8.8 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, 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. Test has recently declared a profit sharing agreement with Horde in Perimeter, which has lead to the KeepStar taxes returning to 0.3%. This is annoying, but I'll have to deal with it.

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 44.8 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 have recently started buying some Large skill injectors on this character, then flying over to Amarr to sell them, for a profit margin of about 40mil each. This is MUCH bigger than the spread in Jita/Perimeter, though it involves more travel time.

Horde Seller

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 BWF-FF. 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 2.9 Bn in sell orders.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 2.6Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably. 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.

Null Sec seeding tool

I was chatting in the horde industry discord, and someone put me on to tool that had been made for seeding our staging system.

It looks at what our standard PVP fits are, and estimates how many are needed to keep us supplied. It also looks at the current price in the staging Keepstar, the price in Jita + delivery cost and highlights any items that appear overpriced at the moment.

In short, it lists out and highlights what some of the most profitable common items are in BWF-ZZ currently, for ease of importing. Brilliant!

Some of these items I was already importing, but it should make my nullsec seller more profitable, and reduce the workload when looking for items to buy. Credit to Testament81 for putting this together!

Croda is back!

So, a bit strange to make a post about a blogger returning from a hiatus, especially given my own hiatuses from blogging, but this one is especially relevant to me. Croda at his blog http://marketsforisk.blogspot.com/ was the blog I first read that inspired me to start my own high-sec trading empire, and go for the Trillion ISK that I'm hopefully on the path towards now.

He outlined the process of buying slow-moving items in one trade hub, transporting to a new one, and putting them up to sell that has been my bread and butter for the last 3 years.

Interestingly, he went from nothing to 420Bn in his first go round, but he then gave everything away. He has recently started again, new accounts, no skills but all his old knowledge, and has gone from nothing (well, 10 mil) to 3Bn in 21 days! My blog started with 3Bn, so I can make a direct comparison with his progress from now.

For those of you looking for how to get going with this way of trading, as well as reading a more entertaining blog, now is the time to subscribe to him. You can see him make a fortune from nothing in real time, and he does a much better job of explaining his processes than me, which gives me ideas for posts of my own.

April Update

A fantastic return to form this month. A combination of re-evaluating my sell orders and diligent play time have seen record daily profits! a HUGE increase on last month. My current position:

As things stand, I have 348.6Bn ISK. This is 30Bn more than last month, or 967 Million ISK per day!!! A full 140 mil a day more than my February update. This really is a staggering amount of money, and close to the magic 1Bn a day, which I didn't think was realistically possible as an average. Some of my investments have turned over, but nothing excessive, it's mostly been good turnover on my hub traders.

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'm not doing a good job of accounting when it comes to these profits, but it's definitely earned me a few billion for very little work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. I cashed out my skillbook investment for about the new NPC price, for about 1.7Bn total profit. Not bad for holding some items for 2 weeks. Currently holding about 75Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~122 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing.  I'm training Tycoon V on this character to increase orders to maximum. 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 76.3 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 76 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 8.5 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.1% 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 39.9 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 have recently started buying some Large skill injectors on this character, then flying over to Amarr to sell them, for a profit margin of about 40mil each. This is MUCH bigger than the spread in Jita/Perimeter, though it involves more travel time.

Horde Seller

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 BWF-FF. 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 2.9 Bn in sell orders.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

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 2.1Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably. 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.

Skill book rebalance

So, the skill book changes have come in, much quicker than I expected.

The long and the short of it is that core skills can now be purchased from your character sheet, for a 30% markup, and the skill books sold by NPCs have had their prices adjusted. Skill books have long been the biggest ISK sink in the game, and CCP is keen to reduce the net amount of ISK being added to the game, to balance the game economy a bit.

Before the patch I speculated that capital skill books were a bit under priced, and would likely be seeing an increase. To this end I bought 5 of each racial carrier book and 2 or 3 of each racial dreadnought, coming out to 11Bn at NPC price (500Mil and 100Mil respectively). After the patch carrier books are being sold by NPCs for 550Mil, and dreads for 150Mil. Turns out I should have bought more dread books, oh well.

I've put my stocks up for sale, carrier skill books are currently being sold in Jita for about 624 Mil, and dreads for about 170 Mil. Assuming all sell I'll have made 2-3Bn for holding on to some skill books for a week. Not bad all things considered.