September Update - Industry

 My first one of these for my new challenge! I've been really enjoying this, it makes a refreshing change. I'm also nearly at the point where I can start scaling this with more characters. My current position:

And here is the the JEveAssets graph:

I currently have 223.8Million ISK, or an increase of 10.2Mil ISK/day. Seems strange to be talking in millions rather than billions! Still, I'm pleased with how this has started. From a 8 million ISK starting point, things began quite slowly as I was severely limited in terms of ISK, slot and skill points. Taxes were high and I was doing a little mining to supplement my industry. I was also initially operating on BPOs, which I've already completely divested from.

Things really started taking off on the 24th September when Cap Booster 400s were going for over 100% margin, and I sold hundreds before the price has come back down. They are still profitable, but I've eased off on producing them now. I've moved more into mobile depots, as they are decently profitable (~15-20%) and they fly off the shelves allowing me to recycle my ISK faster. This has really allowed me to double my ISK in a week, and I'm currently limited by ISK not slots, which is actually pretty surprising and nice. I'd expected to need another character by now.

My character has 9 build slots and 5 research, with 5 builds currently running and 0 research. I put up another 2 researched BPOS on contract today, and I've sold 4 BPOs so far with another 7 outstanding. This is a bit of a slow burner but as I get more ISK I should be able to research higher value BPOs that take longer to research, and so I should be able to offload them before the next ones come out of the cooker.

In 18 hours I'll finish training Advanced Mass Production 4 and then in 5 days I'll finish Accounting V. Once I have that this character can arguably be considered "finished" from a T1 manufacturing point of view, and I could create a new one on this account to get some extra build slots, which I may do.

So, how am I doing versus my overall targets?

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original - Success!
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

I wasn't expecting to do much more than this this month, but nice to get something ticked off early.

Targets for next month:

• Reach 1 Billion
• start up an extra account
• Move a character to Null
• Build something in Null
• Add an extra high sec character

September Update - Trading

 So, this should be an interesting write up. My current position:

My current net worth is 951.2Bn ISK,  or an increase of -38.8Bn ISK. That works out at -1.29Bn ISK/day.

How the hell has that happened? Weren't you a Trillionaire a few weeks ago? I hear you ask. Well, here's a picture that sums up a lot of it:

The sensible thing to do would have been to try and cash out my HyperCores before the end of quarter in case CCP did another sale. I, however, didn't do that, and as HyperCores are now worth 297,100 ISK and I had 470,000 of them, this sale has hit my net worth to the tune of 69.5Bn ISK. I have since bought more at this new price, and will look to cash out at a much lower value this time. Others have done the same thing, and in a trading Discord I frequent there were others talking about being caught in a similar position to me (I think even Oz failed to cash his out in time). Still I should make this back, I'll just have to be less greedy in future.

In addition to that I used trading funds to buy a years worth of PLEX for my new industry account, which cost me 19.1Bn ISK. So in reality my BAU trading after factoring these two losses amounting to 88.6Bn ISK I come out to having made a regular trading profit of 49.7Bn ISK. This is actually a pretty good month, almost 50Bn profit would make it my second best month ever, so my underlying trade performance is still good. What this whole incident has taught me though is that I should focus on expanding the amount my hub sellers are selling as a priority rather than throwing more money into investments that might blow up in my face.

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

Rens Seller

128Bn in sell orders and revenue of 41.8Bn. 

Manufacturing character

Did nothing this month, been focussing on my other industry challenge. Not sure what to do with this guys going forwards. Maybe move him to horde and be a market seeder?

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 128Bn and revenue of 86Bn.

Hek Seller

Has 49Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 37.5Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business but surprisingly close in revenue terms. I think I need to expand the amount of ISK this character is playing with.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 106.5Bn sell orders and income of 70Bn!

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 made 3.1Bn this month. Mainly been playing with PLEX trading when profitable, could use a bit more love.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold some 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 301Bn revenue this month. I haven't touched this character after i hit the Trillion. Seems essentially a waste of a character at the moment.

Amarr station trader

Made 1.3Bn this month, Not a lot of love this month.

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 investments with this character as well. Main contribution is cashing out of Gnosis's, which I've almost done.

Sobaseki Seller

Has sell orders of 19Bn and revenue of 6.2Bn. Not amazing but I gave him very little love.

So looking at last months plans:

• Hit 1 Trillion - Achieved, though I'll need to do some work to get back there.

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion. Again.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments.

A disappointing end to the month, but I think I'll get back there soon enough. I'll probably also take another hit to open another industry account this month, so it might take an extra month to get back tot he Trillion, depending how HyperCores bounce back after the sale ends (probably tomorrow).

Oh no.

 The day I've been hoping would be a little while has finally arrived:

I had been waiting for hypercores to push towards 490k before cashing out, so as the buy orders disappeared and the price crashed I'm down 30Bn in about an hour. Ouch.

On the flip side skill extractors have spiked slightly, so I'm trying to cash those out to buy more hypercores at a very cheap level.

This might seem like throwing good money after bad but provided I'm more sensible about cashing out it should still be good. And I can use some of the money in more diverse investments as well.

The worst part about all of this is I'm technically no longer a Trillionaire, though that will be corrected soon enough as before this point (and starting my industry character) I was well over 40Bn up for the month so day to day trading is still good.

My first hundred million

So yesterday I passed the first real milestone of this journey, turning 8 million starting ISK into 100mil. According to JEveAssets it was actually 115mil and today I'm up to 146mil. 

That's quite a spike in the last few days, so what's happened?

There's a couple of components to this. First, I achieved a milestone in the opportunities program that awarded 8million ISK and 5 PLEX. I have been accepting these small rewards as they're part of the new player experience these days and they'll soon become inconsequential. I sold the PLEX to fund my Advanced Mass production skillbook, so now I have 9 build slots, rising to 10 in a few days. Once I achieve this I might spin up a new character on this account to get more slots.

The next aspect is I've sold 2 more of my researched BPOs, for 7.5 and 10mil respectively. JEveAssets counts BPOs at NPC value until the contract is accepted, so I only see the profit when I actually sell it. This is quite neat from an accounting point of view. 

Another major part of it, and a large contributor to me logging in with 84mil in the wallet this morning was cap booster 400s. Jita has been almost cleaned out of these over the last few days so I was able to build and sell some for over 100% profit margin! I've got more in build to try and take advantage of this.

One thing that's surprised me is how easy it has been to make money by skimming the first couple of pages of BPC contracts and building from them. I don't know how things will look when moving into null but for high sec industry I think the only reason I would buy BPOs is to research and sell them. Making money with BPCs is just too flexible and easy.

Making money from BPOs

 So as part of my switch to using BPCs to manufacture rather than BPOs, I've been looking to divest my current small BPO collection. As I've put ME research time into (almost) all of them I can't just sell them on the market. What I can do though is research from TE to make them 10/20 and sell them via contracts, which is exactly what I've started doing:

Not pictured is a Microwave S blueprint, which I bought for 20k, spent about another 20k researching, and then sold for 300k.

One thing to note with the contract UI though is there is no way to see at a glance what your total sell contracts are up for. This makes accounting for them quite annoying.

JEveAssets does total them for you, but it calculates the cost of the BPOs at NPC sell price, not at the price you put the contract up for:

That tiny yellow dot on the bottom right is 1.01million of BPOs up for sale, even though I've actually put them up for 31.5million. 

This leads on to a wider question of how I do my accounting for this challenge going forwards. Updating my spreadsheet manually as I have done throughout my trading will likely become too unwieldy with contracts and builds to consider (also not covered well my the UI). JEveAssets does cover items in build as well.

I am going to explore if the Excel addin can get this information, if it can't then I will almost certainly se JEveAssets for the accounting of this going forwards. So long as it's standardised and covers all my activities (which this does) it should be fine. 

Also, I'm finding that since transitioning away from the tiny BPOs to BPCs, I'm more limited by ISK than by manufacturing slots. This is kind of good as it means I can keep expending a little without imminently having to start up second characters/accounts or invest 26mil in advanced mass production. Though I want to do all of those things soon.

BPOs versus BPCs and an early mistake

 A while ago I did a post on an experiment manufacturing by sitting in Jita, buying BPCs on contract, building them in place and selling for profit. This demonstrated the profitability of doing things in the most cost inefficient way, and was something I intended to implement. It also showcased the other advantage of BPCs, that being flexibility. I could easily switch what I was manufacturing to what I found profitable, and wasn't limited to any blueprint library I happened to have.  

I then started this challenge and immediately forgot about all of that and bought a bunch of BPOs. Low value ones, and profitable even without research, but still. This has 2 problems. One; as mentioned, the limitations of flexibility, and two; All that money in BPOs is sat there doing nothing when those BPOs aren't being used. As the library grows I would effectively have a ever growing pile of assets sitting there doing nothing to grow my net worth. Also you have a break even point with BPOs, which isn't so bad for small ammo blueprints worth a few hundred thousand, but for bigger blueprints the BPO break even point could be several thousand runs, which I'm unlikely to ever do from a single blueprint.

I've started to correct that, and bought a couple of BPCs to use in the Raitaru in Ikuchi to build from. In doing so, I found a nice looking rig blueprint that looks nicely profitable, and would use up my last free slot and most of my available capital. Perfect.

You can't see the popup on hover over but it says "Activity requirement not met". Essentially I don't have the skills to use the blueprint. Damn. Injecting those skills cost me almost half a million and will take about 9 hours to learn. An annoying mistake but a relatively low cost learning point. Something to keep an eye on in the future!

Getting going with my first character

 So I've not had as much chance to play EVE as I'd have liked the last few days, but I have made a bit of progress on my industry journey. First off I have been training skills to get some industry slots, get my market fees down etc. I also applied my free 1,000,000 SP from refer a friend. My recent skills trained looks like this:

I also have Broker Relations V and Mass Production V. I haven't learned Advanced Mass Production as the skillbook costs 26mil to inject, and I don't have that!

I have done a few runs of manufacturing, will my sell orders currently looking like this:

Not pictured is some other ammo that has already sold.

I have also utilised my 5 research job runs to research ME 10 on some other blueprints, mainly rockets and light missiles. These have now finished so I've switched those to producing (they're mostly higher profit anyway) and put my ones I was building with into research to up the profit margins.

These are all OK, giving me anywhere from 10-50% profit each, though the absolute profit is obviously quite low. 

I've also mined about 100,000m3 of veldspar, which is very little.

I'm coming up against 2 barriers at the moment. The obvious one is ISK, I do not have enough ISK to even inject advanced mass production, which is leading to the other bottleneck of job runs. I am utilising them all profitably but I feel there's more I could be doing. I'm sure one will unlock the other, and once I have made enough with mining and manufacturing to get and utilise my max build and research slots then I will start additional characters on this account and another account, but I'm holding off just a little bit on that for now.

Starting out in Industry

 So I took the first step. I created a new account using a refer-a-friend link from myself for the free 1,000,000 skillpoints, created a new character and undertook the new tutorial.

I must say, the new tutorial is much better than previous. Your actions are extremely trimmed down, giving you a lot of focus. The HUD is hidden so as not to overwhelm new players. And the whole thing plays out like a playable set piece, with full voice acting and taking advantage of EVE's fantastic visuals in quite a neat little storyline to introduce you to the AIR corporation and to being a capsuleer. 

After that you're pointed in the direction of career agents (which haven't changed in years) and are given a bit of a nudge through them by Aura, before being left to it. 

I used this time to buy a years worth of PLEX from my trading accounts for ~19.1Bn ISK, contracted to my new account and applied it. I thought about recording this as a "loan" to be paid back, both to keep me still a Trillionaire and as a promise that I would to keep me motivated with my industry. In the end I opted against this, though I made a note in my spreadsheet and will for future accounts where I do this. This took my trading wealth down to 983Bn, though it is already back to almost 992Bn. 

Then I got really ill for 4 days and did essentially nothing. I wasted my weekend, barely ate for 3 days ( a bit of excess weight off is great, but not like this), had 2 days off work, and didn't log into EVE.

Today I was feeling better though and managed to get a trade run in and crucially did the career agent missions in Akiainavas. This had 2 uses: 1, get me some starting capital (I have 10mil atm) and 2, get me a slight broker fee improvement in Jita.

See, this character is planned to be based primarily in Jita, no matter where I end up taking my industry. I want at least 1 character there as it is the only place where you will find the full range of blueprints, original and copies, on contract. If I want to get some new prints out to null I don't want to fly a Horde character from Perrigan Falls to do it.

The fee improvement is minimal but my Jita boker fee sits at 1.47% now having trained broker relations V, which is not bad. What is bad is my sales tax. I've just bought and started training the accounting skill, but that set me back 5.2mil, leaving me with just 9.9 to start my industry. I've identified several BPOs that should be profitable though, so I'm going to give those a go.

Industry Challenge

 So, having made 1 Trillion ISK primarily through trading, I want to try something different. For some time now I've wanted to get into Industry more seriously, but half heartedly doing the odd production run on a single character simply doesn't compare to the ISK I was making with my trade characters. 

However, I am intrigued as to the ISK that can be made if I really commit to it and look to scale it, as well as expanding to other areas beyond t1 manufacturing. To that end I am going to start a whole new challenge. New characters, new accounts, no financial help from my trading accounts. The one exception to this is I will buy PLEX on my trading accounts to PLEX my Industry accounts, at least initially. I fear going 0 to PLEX using industry would be extremely limiting and time consuming, so I want to replicate what I initially did with my trading which was paying my subs with real money.

I want to focus on industry, so making money using:

• Manufacturing (t1 and t2)
• Blueprint research
• Blueprint copying
• Invention
• Mining (to a limited extent)
• Reactions
• Career missions to get a starting fund an some basic station standings

And that's about it. What I will not be doing is trying to replicate my trading. I also want to have certain milestones to hit to keep me on track and mark some progression. These are:

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

These are lofty goals, and primarily must be completed outside of highsec. Building Supers/Titans will also require being in a gated corp in Horde, as they don't let just anyone build supers (understandably). I've gone back and forth a lot on where to base myself, high or null. I think I'm going to settle on both. I'm going to have at least 1 character in high to take advantage of Jita and the blueprint market there, and most of my characters out in null to take advantage of the access to reactions, null bonuses and ores.

Also, I will be tagging all posts relating to this challenge with "Industry Challenge" and all my end of month trade updates with "Trading Challenge" so if you only want to see one or the other you can select the label on the right hand side of the blog.

With that said, off to create a new account!

1 Trillion

 I've finally done it! 1 Trillion ISK. 1,000,000,000,000. In assets anyway, not in liquid ISK. To say this has taken a while would be an understatement.

Here is my current position:

And a more condensed version:

And here is a bonus JEveAssets graph of worth since my return from hiatus in April:

As you can see, JEveAssets says I have 1.103Tn, but this is because I take a provision of 20% against sell orders to allow for reducing the price to sell. Since I aim for about a 20% profit margin this works well. JEveAssets doesn't account for this though and treats my sell orders as though they are all going to sell for that price, which would be great if it was true.

One thing that's clear from this graph is I could really do with upping the amount I sell in other hubs. It's been hovering at about 600Bn since April, and I've earned more than 200Bn in that time so I could do to look at this and see if I can up my revenue even further.

It's taken a almost 9 years to get here, with some big gaps along the way!

There's this post: Distribution of player wealth (reddit) of a screenshot from a talk at fanfest 2023 talking about the wealth distribution amongst players. According to this if you have 495Bn across your accounts (in terms of assets) you're in the top 1% of players. To get into the top 0.1% you'd need 1.9Tn. I'm somewhere in the middle there, so top 0.7% or so probably, which is quite cool! Based on analysis of that on reddit and elsewhere people estimate that there are 20-30 players with more than 10Tn, which is just insane.

How it started

My first EVE character was born in April 2009, not long before my final exams at university (perhaps not the best decision I've made). I didn't really commit to this character and forgot the login, creating a new account in August after I'd graduated. That first character was Stranathor, the alias I use mostly online, who would later become my "nullsec main" and thus is actually not included in the characters for this challenge. 

The second character though is included. I started a highsec mining corporation with my siblings and a few friends, and we would chat and make great plans together. I would also buy the minerals at a set price and build things with them to sell. We even collectively joined a group of nullsec renters briefly, eyeing up the nullsec ores and expecting to make our fortune. This didn't work, so back to highsec and our corp we went.

After a while doing this, Brave took off and offered anyone an entry into null (before this you needed vouches/a certain amount of skill points to be accepted into any null sec corp basically) and I signed up to experience that side of the game. From low to null and even a month in their wormhole corp, I had a great time, but they got ground down and kicked out of Catch by Pandemic Legion, the high SP big boys of the time. They then started their own newbie corp, Pandemic Horde. After a while of being on the "losing" side with Brave I decided to switch and join Horde, where I have a couple of characters to this day.

Through all of this I never made much ISK in the grand scheme of things, and I had begun reading a lot of ISK making blogs such as Gevlon Goblin, Eve-fail, and most influencially for me, MarketsForIsk.

In particular, Croda's method of buying in Jita, shipping to Amarr/Rens/Dodixie etc. seemed straightforward enough to follow, and I thought I could replicate that. So that's exactly what I did.

Starting the trade journey

On 17/11/2015 I created this blog and started my journey, with 3 characters across 2 accounts, and 3.1Bn ISK: it begins...

It took a little bit of time to ramp up to use all those funds, but once I did I started in earnest. I did however have my first break from the game and from trading in April 2016, returning in August of that year. At that point I had 25Bn ISK and I didn't write another post for almost 2 years, returning to the platform in July 2018 with 171Bn ISK and ending the year on 270Bn End of year 2018. Not a bad ramp up from a break!

2019 was a good year for me, I played and blogged consistently, added more characters, got into manufacturing, and made 296Bn, more than doubling my wealth in a year and breaking well past the half way point: End of year 2019

2020 was a bit more mixed for me (as I'm sure it was for everyone!). Lockdown provided much greater opportunities to play games, so this should have been a bumper year for me. But I was beginning to feel the burnout, and my monthly increases ranged from 2.6Bn to 43Bn depending on how motivated I was feeling and how much of other games I was playing. However I kept up the blogging and ended the year on 782Bn, an increase of 216Bn. Worse than the year before, but still I thought I was on track for the Trillion in 2021.... End of year 2020

I did not become a Trillionaire in 2021, which I'm sure is obvious as this post goes up on the 4th September 2024. Indeed, I did not make another blog post until April of this year, over 3 years without a post! This was for multiple reasons, burnout primarily, but I also got really into WoW Classic TBC and Wrath. I had a great time reliving my youth playing those games and achieved a lot more than I did when I was a teenager, whilst playing with some really cool people along the way. Interestingly the average age of my guilds seemed to be about 40, how times have changed!

Recent changes

Since returning to EVE though I've been feeling motivated and refreshed. I've taken stock of how my trading works and optimised it a little. In particular switching from doing all my own hauling to using public courier contracts. A full run around for my traders used to take me about 2 hours including updating orders, buying new stock and flying it to be sold. It was also kind of an all or nothing deal as I used to do it with my Rens seller character, not a short hop to Jita. This meant if I didn't feel like dedicating 2 hours of play time it wasn't really worth it. 

That's a big commitment on a near daily basis, and the main benefit now is that I don't have to do it like this. I can assess where each character is, updating one set of orders at a time and when they're done I can either log on to the next one or log off completely for a few hours and wait for a delivery.

Another big change I've made was to PLEX all my accounts. Previously I'd been paying for 3 with real money, and funding the other (ish) through selling skillpoints. The idea behind this was to keep RL money and in game money separate, but CCP have put the subscription up and it would be the best part of £50 a month to do it that way, so I made the switch to PLEX. 

The final big change only came about in the last month or so. Whilst I was away I was aware of changes to broker fees to make updating orders more costly. The formula is complex but it mostly works out to about 25% of your initial broker fee to change an order now. I had been leaving my orders to sit rather than pay this, but for August I went hard updating orders to stay on top as much as made sense, and my revenue shot up by 4 or 5 times and lead to record profits, more than double July!

All in all I've got things in a good place now, where I can do my day to day trading without much time commitment, and put any excess into either PLEXing accounts or longer term investments to scale with ISK rather than clicks.

What's next?

Initially, I had planned that when I hit 1Tn I would continue trading, sending half my profits each month to my null sec character and use the money to do whatever my heart desires. I may still do a bit of this, but this isn't my primary plan any more. 

I've also thought about funding smaller corps to do fun stuff, and planned to do this for a guildmate from WoW who was giving EVE a go. Alas, he has since stopped playing so I'm not really looking at this right now.

I actually intend to start a new challenge in the same vein, this time centred around manufacturing. I need to work out how to make a filter or split so that I can have both trading and industry covered by this blog but split if you're only interested in one or the other. It might sounds silly to immediately start a new challenge after finishing one that's taken me the best part of 9 years (on and off) but the great thing about EVE as I see it is having the freedom to make these big goals and go after them. Something very few games can offer. More on this soon. 

If you been reading this up to this point, thanks! I started this blog for me as it's the sort of thing I enjoy reading, and I hope you've got something out of it too. It doesn't end here though!