July Update

 This month has been an interesting one. The Equinox expansion has provided me with some opportunities in terms of investments but has hit my BAU inter-region trading because more people are running DEDspace sites now so DED modules (which I trade in quite heavily) have fallen in value across the board. This has meant every time I got update my orders I have to mark these down, often quite dramatically. Anyway, my current position:

My current worth is 933.5Bn ISK. This is an increase over the last month of 25.8Bn ISK, or an increase of 737Mil/day. This is quite a step down on last month, though I was away from my PC for the first 11 days and as I say, Equinox has been a very mixed bag in terms of my business. 

Taking advantage of the skill extractor sale has lead to a reshuffle in terms of my investments held, and I continue to keep an eye on things like salvage materials. A lot have dropped in price recently but I was able to cash out on some intact armor plates for a healthy profit, if they swing down again I'll definitely snap more up.

I'm hoping that in game activity will start to improve towards the end of the month as people finish their holidays and that we should start to see a bottoming out of DED module prices and alliances flip over to the new Sov structures and things settle. I don't see a need to panic and massively rework my items I'm trading just yet.

One thing I have dabbled with quite a bit this month is PLEX trading and arbitrage (well not really, but sort of). I have a separate section in my spreadsheet now which given a buy price with give me the break even point for flipping PLEX and derivatives in Perimeter, Ashab, MJ-, Rens/Dodixie and for moving them between those hubs. I was able to take advantage of this a bit as some PLEX could be bought in MJ- and transported to Jita for sale for a profit, and vice versa. I've also been regularly trading PLEX in situ in MJ- as the margins are consistently profitable, even if the volume is pretty tiny comparatively.

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

Rens Seller

115Bn in sell orders and revenue of just 15Bn. Disappointing, but I think that's going to be a theme.

Manufacturing character

A little bit done here, but not a vast amount. Might expand my blueprint collection to vary this up a bit and make it more interesting.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 167Bn and has made sales amounting to 35Bn ISK this month.

Hek Seller

Has 57Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 9Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business. Still on the list to give this one more love.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 116Bn sell orders and income of 22Bn.

Nullsec station trader

Sits in Pandemic Horde's home system and station trades common items (ammo, filaments, minerals etc) and needs surprisingly little babysitting. Money is his own. This character has made a barnstorming 11Bn this month! The PLEX trading amongst other things has really allowed this character to take off, and I've invested a lot of time here (too much probably).

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold my investments. I've taken to buying/selling on my Jita trader character instead as his broker fees are better sitting in a Perimeter. So very little activity here other than buying and then contracting to my other hub sellers.

Tash-Murkon Seller

Currently 94Bn sell orders and 4.6Bn revenue this month. Doesn't sound like much of an improvement on last month but I'm actually pleased as a lot of the revenue has come from modules/ammo etc. that I've started shipping in on the cheaper end similar to Sobaseki. A bit more love and I should be able to improve this dramatically.

Amarr station trader

Difficult to say what this character made this month as I raided his wallet to fund some of my moves into skill extractors. 10Bn in revenue is OK though, i assume some money was made (probably around 2Bn).

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita.  I have moved into buying and selling my investements with this character as well, so his makeup looks a lot different this month. Not least of which is sales totalling 145Bn! Buys of 174Bn shows the other side of that, and given his business buying for other character it's impossible to work out how much I made from station trading, but I suspect it's not much. Still, this is a critical character in my expansion to leverage ISK rather than time/characters.

Sobaseki Seller

Ticking along nicely. Made 7Bn in sales this month, same as last month. A bit more love and this should scale fairly well.

So looking at last months plans:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day - failed
• Try to come up with a better strategy for my tash-murkon - I'd say this was successful on a small scale, I'll try and increase the number of lower value items to sell here and see if I can improve things
• try and get at least 1 manufacturing run done - Done a few more, I want to vary this up a bit

Targets for this month:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day
• Generate a monthly profit of 33.25Bn (Half what I need to hit the Trillion)
• Expand Tash-Murkon/Sobaseki
• Investigate Alliance seeding in null.

If I can achieve these I should be on track to hit a Trillion in September, and talk about what to do next.

Sales Tax reduction

 So the patch notes yesterday included a fairly large Sales tax reduction across the board, with no explanation or fanfare. Reducing Sales tax from 8% to 4.5%. After skills this looks like this:

This is a pretty huge reduction! Apparently it's the second half of changes that were put in a while ago to up the fees around industry to rebalance things a bit and encourage a bit more specialisation in construction rather than essentially forced vertical integration. I can see the logic here.

Crucially though for me it means greatly reduced sales taxes for my "BAU" business of buying in Jita and selling elsewhere. For items like PLEX the margin has already shrunk to accommodate the new normal so no change in how those markets operate.

A big gamble

 So I decided to pull the trigger. I sold all my 15,000 PLEX holding for 5,400,000 each, and threw that ISK into 158 skill extractors at 500,000,000 each. A part of me wonders if I pulled the trigger too soon as PLEX is currently selling for nearly 5.5 mil each. Still, I got in on the bottom price for skill extractors, the buy is currently sitting at 505mil with sells at 520. 

At current prices that means I'm currently about 1.5Bn up this afternoon. Doesn't sound like much for a move on that scale but every 10mil the price of extractors goes up is an extra 1.58Bn I can cash out for, which is pretty good. Especially since the skill extractor history looks like this:

Based on this if I hold these for 2 months or so I should be able to cash out for a healthy profit before another sale hits. Assuming CCP doesn't do any extra sales, which they might.

A tough month so far, an attempt at something else, and a sale

 This has been a tough month so far. When I came back from my holiday I had to relist everything in Tash-Murkon for a sensible price, which ended up being 10Bn below where it was when I first listed it all. Ouch. 

Then a week or so later I decided to do something I don't do much and update my Amarr traders sell orders to match the going rate. Deadspace modules seem to have dropped quite a bit across the board, and this exercise lead to another 10Bn markdown. 

A few days ago I was updating all my characters and somehow I was 3Bn down on the day before. This one baffled me. Non of my investments had moved significantly, and the money appeared to disappear from my Jita station trader. I searched for underpriced orders and misplaced assets but found nothing. Even JEveAssets showed the drop. No idea what happened but I must have messed up somewhere or lost something. 

All that is to say I'm currently only a few billion up on the start of the month, when there should be an extra 23Bn or so. Annoying, but that's life sometimes I guess.

PLEX and PLEX accessories

As part of my current obsession with thinking of ways to scale with ISK rather than just time/accounts, I've started looking at trading PLEX, Skill Extractors and Injectors. I've added some rough maths to my spreadsheet that gives me the break even for these items in the various stations/structures I trade in as well as some arbitrage between them. 

In particular interest here is PLEX itself. When you buy or accept a contract for PLEX, it goes straight in your PLEX vault, no matter where your character is. This means I could (and have) buy PLEX in Jita using a buy order, contract it to my null character and have it instantly teleport for sale in null where the margins are better. Completely risk free. I do have to be careful as the broker fees are worse in null, as is the volume traded, but it's something I'm doing on a small scale to see how viable it is.

Skill Extractor Sale

I've kept my trading in Skill Extractors quite light so as not to get caught too badly in the next sale, and it's now arrived. A 20% sale on skill extractors for PLEX in the NES. The price of skill extractors instantly dropped in Jita and PLEX has spiked a bit. Not too significant but I'm hoping I can take advantage.

A missed opportunity and dealing with expiry

 So while I was away there was a brief sale in the NES that allowed you to get a years multi character training for free with a years PLEX. This made skill farming suddenly very profitable, and a number of people jumped on it. Alas, I was hundreds of miles from my PC so I missed out.

What I can take advantage of though is the effects of this on the market. As a lot of people bought PLEX to buy this deal the price of PLEX has spiked a bit. I was about to sell all my holdings for 5.4mil but it'd fallen back a little by the time I got online. I'll hold off and keep a close eye on this for now. I'd expect the price to fall back a bit as a lot of big spenders have made their PLEX purchases for a while so demand should drop a bit. If buys drop to 5mil or below I'll probably snap some more up and sell if it hits 5.4 again.

The other effects of this are on extractors/injectors. As more people are skill farming now the demand for extractors has skyrocketed, and the price has to boot. I don't want to pile in here as I'd expect CCP to drop a real money sale on extractors sooner than later to counteract the skyrocketing price, but I've put a buy order up for 10 to see if I can make a quick flip on them. 

Large skill injectors however I'd expect to steadily fall in price over the near/mid term at least. With that in mind I've sold mine off for 910 mil and will look to pick some more up when I feel it's bottoming out. Not a massive profit on those but better to cash in and put that capital elsewhere than hold for potentially months for a larger profit.

Order Expiry

So, I've been back in the game for a little over 3 months now. Part of my attempt not to burn out, and also because adjusting sell orders is costly, is that I tend to put up sell orders at sensible prices and leave them. This means that across my accounts today I've had a few items per character expiry and I've had to relist them. Next time I'll try to remember to adjust them with a few days to go as this is cheaper than relisting. There is one notable exception however, Tash-Murkon:

 Oh dear.

It actually worse than 46Bn but that's the in game valuation. Tash-murkon has been terrible since I rejoined, but I wonder if the market has simply changed in my absence. I almost contracted this all to my amarr seller for him to cash out with these items, but I think what I will do instead is take a leaf out of my sobaseki playbook. I'm going to relist these items and in addition I'm going to ship over some lower end items, modules, learning implants, rigs etc. and see if building a more well rounded market will attract customers. We will see.