November Update - Industry

 A big uptick in terms of profit here, and a few changes! I haven't added any new characters this month but I have upskilled and begun tech 2 production, and started making use of the EVEGuru tool (highly recommend by the way). My current totals:

And here is my jEveAssets graph:

My current new worth is 3.045Bn ISK. That is an increase of 2.191Bn or 73mil ISK/day. 

That's a lot better than last month, for the same few characters. You can probably notice a sharp uptick in the graph from the 12th onwards. This is when I started using EVEGuru. It's an 3rd party desktop app that at its simplest will trawl all the items in the game that you give it parameters for (so for me mostly t1 stuff, modules and rigs) and spit out all of the profitability at Jita sell prices in a sortable list. As well as giving you breakdowns on how to build, create shopping lists etc. 

I initially looked at this and took some of the higher profit items, bought BPOs and merrily went to build. This led to a very sudden and sharp increase in my worth as jEveAssets thinks I just turned (e.g.) 100mil of minerals into 200 or 300mil of items. This is great in principle but most of those items are actually artificially inflated so to actually sell them you have to either undercut or chase the sell price down. This has lead to the effect you see in the graph, where the manufactured amount is not increasing much (or at all really) but the sell orders is spiking. I am selling stuff, just not as fast as I'd like.

This is an important lesson in interpreting data like this. What I really need is turnover. An item can be up for sale for 1Bn but it's meaningless if it takes me a month to sell when I can sell an item for 150mil 10 times in the same period.

My nullsec character has skilled into (some ) tech 2 construction. I've started building a few things, drones and rigs mostly. I'm enjoying the process, and the turnover is much better than a lot of the tech1 items I build which is great. There's an awful lot of refining of the process to do however. 

I have hopes for EVEGuru again for this though. They are working on getting pricing data for player owned structures which would be huge for me as my main null market is a Keepstar. Also when I upgrade to a paid version I'll be able to utilise all of my characters so I can properly make use of the production ledger to plan t2 production projects. Currently I'm on the trial version which gets you 1 character in the app, the paid version being 200mil per month. Something I'm definitely going to do especially if the pace of development stays anywhere close to what it is now.

So, how am I doing versus my overall targets?

• Invent a t2 item Success!
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original - Success!
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions - One done and another in progress. I might start including these in vertical integration of tech2 production. TBD
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

Another item ticked off which is nice.

Last month's targets:

• Earn 1 Billion - Smashed
• Build a T2 rig - done
• Invent a T2 item - done
• Do more reactions - done, sort of

Pretty good versus my targets actually

Targets for next month:

• Earn 3 Billion
• Skill a highsec character into tech2 production
• Add another null character
• Do more reactions

Early steps into tech2 have been fruitful, so I want to expand that. I also need to work out a process for managing it better as the multiple steps make it harder to track expected profits. I'm going to be relying on tooling for this I think. Trying to avoid having to create my own spreadsheets if I can.

November Update - Trading

 This month I have scaled back the amount of time I spend trading, basically doing 1 update/shipment on Mondays and Fridays to catch and then react to weekends where most of my revenue comes. I've done this mainly so I can concentrate on my Industry. However, some investment price moves make this month a record breaker, my current position:

My current net worth is 1.059Tn ISK, an increase of 76.2Bn ISK. That works out at 2.54Bn ISK/day.

That is record breaking! My previous highest month was 56.7Bn, so this is well above that. Also the first time I've managed over 2Bn a day! So how have I managed that whilst keeping my time played low?

First, I've focussed entirely on buying in Jita and selling in Rens, Hek, Dodixie and Amarr, and a little station trading in MJ-. The other characters I have not touched. They add very little to my business at the moment so I don't see it as being worth my time right now. In fact I intend to funnel some of their assets to the main group.

Second, my investments have been good this month. I was able to cash out of capacitor control circuits and power circuits for good margins, and HyperCores have finally shot up a bit. To the point that I've started cashing some of them out that were bought at a very low price. I have no intention of being caught short by a CCP sale a second time! I have put some of that money into other investments, namely Skill Extractors and Large Skill Injectors but I am intending to expand my main group this month as well.

Compared to the last couple of updates I haven't had any significant PLEX outlay either, though I am expecting more down the road so TBC in December.

So looking at last months plans:

Hit 1 Trillion. Again. Tick

Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments. Sort of, want to lean into this more though

Move the majority of my stock from Tash-Murkon to Amarr to liquidate and repurpose this character. Tash-Murkon frequently has expiries, and it's just not working out. I need a wholesale rethink here. Failed. I didn't log into that character once. Will do in December though

Targets for this month:

• Move Tash-Murkon's stock and liquidate it
• Make 50Bn operating profit (discounting any extra PLEXing I do to support industry)
• Continue to expand the amount of money invested with my main group of traders

Similar to last month the cadence works well for me, though with Christmas upcoming this month might be a little lower in terms of when I can log on.

Ganked

 So, had my first setback being ganked. I was hauling about 100mil worth of stuff from the industry park to MJ and I wasn't checking intel. Jumped a gate and saw a neutral orthrus sitting waiting for me. Not much I could do but attempt to burn back to gate, which failed:

Even after this setback I'm still 50mil up for the day, so could be worse. Still, will teach me to be more careful in future. I can't wait to get to a point where I'm using jump freighters, then I'll be 100% safe going from structure to structure!

First invention runs

 My Null sec character has finally got to the point where he has the skills to begin t2 invention and production. There are more of these than you'd think, as you can see from this afterburner BPC:

I've created max run copies of 5 different items, and will use those as my "learn by doing" blueprints. These are not strictly the most profitable, but they're small and in good demand and should each be individually profitable, hopefully.

EVE Guru works out the decryptors you should need to get the best result. For these items it's none, but I checked with other items and they do get worked out, I guess the maths just doesn't make sense here:

Invention runs are slightly more time consuming than I thought, so I'm doing a couple of runs of each. Not ideal given the success chance is around 35-37% depending on item but it'll give me a chance to check them later and look to actually build some:

I have, however, run out of lab slots to invent them all, I guess this is why people have copy alts and invention alts! It'll take a bit of working out to get a systems I'm happy with set up for this. But I feel learning by doing is important for me to work out where the kinks are and where I can start to streamline. 

Reactions profit calculator

 In my ongoing search for a way to do reactions profitably as an in and out simple production line I've come across this tool: https://reactions.coalition.space/

It presents, in simple terms, the profitability of each type of reaction based on Jita prices. This is exactly what I was looking for, and after having a little poke around I decided to do a Carbon Fiber run:

Reactions do take a long time, which explains why Sir SmashAlot has so many accounts dedicated just to reactions. A lot of people do reactions as part of vertical integration for tech 2 production, but my initial plan here is to export the result to Jita and sell it. Hopefully the profit margins hold up by the time it comes out!

An Interview with one of EVE's biggest industrialists

 I recently watched a video on OZ's channel where he interviews Sir SmashAlot, an extremely large player in the T2 ship and structure rig markets, who has scaled to a point where he apparently pays 6% of the universes install fees alone! And has revenue of 7.5 Trillion a month!

That is just...staggering. Inspiring, but staggering. It's a great interview where he talks about his setup, how he got where he is and what it's like to play at that level. 

Interview with Sir SmashAlot

As someone who is currently struggling to get tech 2 production straight in my head, and grappling with scaling I think this is something I'll come back to to gain some insight and motivation. He describes null industry as having lumpy demand, which is definitely something I've experienced even at a small scale and become frustrated with. I have been tempted to simply revert to primarily highsec for a while but I think that what I'm facing is clearly surmountable, I just need to work things out properly to get there. 

I highly recommend this if you're looking to scale industry seriously, and would be fascinated to find anything similar or how other people have done it as I haven't cracked it myself yet.

EVE Guru

 A while ago I was able to catch a stream of Oz_EVE where Fern Kitsuen was showing off an industry tool they've been working on called EVE Guru. Details of it can be found in this thread on the forums:

https://forums.eveonline.com/t/software-eve-guru-a-best-in-breed-manufacturing-planning-tool/464297

I don't use much in the way of tooling, I've downloaded ISK per Hour but haven't really set it up, and I use JEveAssets but that's about it. This tool though aims to combine a lot of information and functionality from other tools and present them in a easily consumable way, as easy as anything to do with EVE industry is consumed anyway.

The run through looked impressive, and a feature I particularly like is you can add a bunch of filters for items you want to build, T1, 2 etc. small, medium, large, rigs, component, whatever. You can then set a minimum demand (average daily trade), profit margins and other stuff, hit update and it will search all the items in EVE that meet your criteria, work out the build cost, taxes, profit, profit per hour or m3 and present it in a big sortable list, where you can drill down and work out what you needs and build shopping lists etc.

I've used settings like this to look for items to build, and, well, here are the results in my jEVEAssets:

That terrible squiggly line shows when I installed and started using EVE Guru. I've gone from making ~40mil a day to well over 100mil a day! And most of it is highsec based.

One thing to bear in mind with this is you get a free trial for 30 days and then it's 200mil a month for unlimited characters and all the features. They're adding more on a near daily basis and have quite a roadmap of stuff to add. If I keep making money like this then 200mil a month seems like the deal of a lifetime for this much productivity!

Free week of Omega with Revenant

 Quick one this, for the release of Revenant CCP has put more login rewards in and also given people a free 10 PLEX and a 1 time offer of 1 week of Omega time for 10 PLEX in the NES. It's also reminded me to collect on the weekly 15,000 SP you get for going into the NES which I often forget. Especially as I'm skilling up for T2 production these are very valuable right now. So log in and claim your free stuff!

Corp Industry management

So in order to scale my industry effectively, in highsec at least, I've been exploring how to have assets accessible by anyone in the corp so that I don't have to make a bunch of item exchange contracts to move assets between characters on the same account. it seems what I wanted to do is possible, if a little unintuitive.

First, you need a corp, obviously. Then, in your station or upwell structure you need to rent an office. I am operating out of a Raitaru in Ikuchi that is not owned by my corp, but I am able to rent a corp office there for 10,000ISK a month. I just need to remember to have that amount in my corp wallet. This should give you a bunch of corp hangers to use:

In order to rename these (like I have done) go to the corporation window as the CEO and select the "Divisions" button:

You can then rename these as you wish. Then you can put items/blueprints into the hangars, and when doing industry jobs you can select the input/output hangars for blueprints owned by corp:

And that's it! With this I can just have the one character do the buying/selling in Jita and transporting, while having full view of all my available blueprints and stockpiles and my other characters remain in situ and operate out of what gets brought in. No contracts required!

October Update - Industry

My second Industry Update. I've done a bit of scaling here, and started out in Null. Enjoying it so far even though there is a lot that I need to learn! My current totals:

And here is my jEveAssets graph:

My current net worth is 854.6 Million ISK. That is an increase of 630.8 Mil, or 20.3Mil ISK/day. That's OK but slightly disappointing if I'm honest. I had really hoped to break the Billion, and 20 mil/day across what is now 3 characters is not amazing, though it has started spiking  recently as the graph shows. I was also away for 4 days towards the end of the month. I suspect if I had been here for those I would have broken the Billion mark, so maybe not as bad as I think.

I have made several advancements this month though. First I created a new account and moved a character to null. The way things are done is definitely different in null. I have to do my industry 3 jumps away from Horde's main staging to take advantage of the Sotiyo for manufacturing and other structures for research/reactions, so I'm currently hauling in a Tayra. This isn't ideal, but it's working at the moment. There are alliance hauling services which I've primarily used to move things to or from Jita but they also do moves within null. I don't really feel I'm at the place where I want to utilise that yet though. My hauls are too small to warrant it. Also the hauling takes a day or so to go to/from Jita, which is slow enough. I'm not at the scale yet where I can wait that long for every job.

Secondly I have made another highsec character to get more job slots, and created a corp to share funds etc. I still need to work out how best to store Blueprints for corp use and pool the outcomes so I don't have to make item exchange contracts to get the stuff to/from my Jita seller. Very much a work in progress here but vital to get right if I'm going to scale this at all.

Early on with T1 manufacturing I have noticed a pattern emerging though. A gap of high profitability opens on an item, it can be ridden to fast profits for a while, then people realise and flood the market and the profitability drops off again. First month it was Cap Boosters that I got a lot out of, this month it was Mobile Depots. For almost the entire month I was able to build them for 1.6mil each from an unresearched BPO, 1.5mil researched, and sell them for 1.9mil. They would also fly off the shelves. I could put up 100 and within an hour they would all be gone. This was great and I scaled this to at one point 12 production lines, but the price has dropped to about 1.75mil. Still profitable with researched BPOs but not worth going crazy about. I've started exploring rigs as an alternative but I think this is going to be the nature of the beast with production.

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 - I've completed 1, I still need to research this as I haven't even sold the result of my first one yet.
• 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.

Last month's targets:

• Reach 1 Billion - Failed, but close
• start up an extra account - done
• Move a character to Null - done
• Build something in Null - done
• Add an extra high sec character - done

Pretty good versus my targets actually

Targets for next month:

• Earn 1 Billion
• Build a T2 rig
• Invent a T2 item
• Do more reactions

As you can see, this month targets revolve around getting into tech 2 to work that out. I keep hearing this is where the money is, so let's find out!

October Update - Trading

 Another interesting month for a couple of reasons, though I maintain it has been a good one. My current position:

My current net worth is 982.7Bn ISK, an increase of 31.5Bn ISK, or 1.01Bn ISK/day. 

This is at least positive, but well below where I was, so why do I think this was a good month? 2 main reasons. 1, I started a new industry account, paying 20.2Bn for 1 years PLEX. I have now spent a total of 39.3Bn ISK starting up industry accounts. If I hadn't done this then my monthly profits would be 51.5Bn ISK, which is actually pretty good. 

The second reason is, against all odds the price of HyperCores have come down this month. I am honestly baffled by this one. The 2 for 1 sale ended, and PLEX has been spiking, so the true price for a HyperCore should be about 580,000ISK now, but it's going for 292,000 at the time of writing. I know a lot more people bought a lot more this time, so the stores people have are huge and some people will gladly cash out for a couple of % profit but the fact it's dropped by 5,000 in a month is insane. If it had just held level I'd be 3Bn ISK better off.

On the flip side of this I have cashed out several of my investments for a profits, Logic circuits in particular have done well for me, so it's not all bad. Considering I have hardly touched any characters other than my big 4 sellers (Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek) and my null trader a bit, I'd call this a successful month.

I'm enjoying my Industry and the minute, so I think I'm going to continue to focus on these characters primarily and consolidate my trading to keep the required time down to a minimum. If I can continue to maintain 50Bn a month for this level of effort I'll be pretty happy as it allows me plenty of time for other things.

So looking at last months plans:

• Hit 1 Trillion - Nope, though I would be if I didn't start another account. Will do definitely this month.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments. - Sort of, I still have 246Bn in investments, but my money for BAU trading has increased a little. I think this'll be an ongoing thing really.

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion. Again.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments.
• Move the majority of my stock from Tash-Murkon to Amarr to liquidate and repurpose this character. Tash-Murkon frequently has expiries, and it's just not working out. I need a wholesale rethink here.

Similar to last month overall, but a rhythm I'm mostly happy with given the time investment involved.