March Update - Industry

 A real slump this one, which I'll get into below. My current values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 58.9Bn ISK, that's a decrease of 1.8Bn ISK.

So, what's up here?

Firstly, as you can see from the graph and explained in my trading post, I didn't play much, especially second half of the month.

Secondly, and more importantly, prices have been falling across the board. The death of Horde has lead to a sustained peace across Null, and the alliances are making ISK and mining in a big way again. This combined with less destruction has a negative effect on the game economy. Basically everything I build has more competition, less demand and is worth less. So I am constantly having to drop prices to get revenue to keep slots busy. Essentially I am sprinting to stand still.

As a result of this, I've decided to have a bit of a reset. I've dropped a lot of prices of my sell orders, so my worth has dropped but is more representative of the true value of my wares. This gets me some cash to invest in the next phase of my project, which is moving some operations to lowsec.

I have moved 1 character there already, and he's been training in building Sabres, which he can now do. Also reactions. I've also started another 2 characters down this road, as I look to scale back on medium rigs in high sec and look towards bigger ticket items with a better margin. My priority over the next few days will be setting this up and getting my first batch of blueprints/materials down there so I can test the whole flow end to end and see how I feel about it.

Ultimately I think I'd like to get to a place where I'm building Black Ops battleships and Jump Frieghters, but for now a few Sabres will have to do. I'll update as I put this together with my learnings, but hoping this can be the shot in the arm my industry needs!

March Update - Trading

 Another less than spectacular month this one. The summary:

And the full values:

My total net worth is 1.172Tn ISK. That's an increase of 11Bn, or 354Mil/day.

That's ever so slightly better than last month, but still terrible. So what's up with that? 

Basically, I've hardly played. As you'll see from the industry portion of events I've only logged in maybe once in the last 2 weeks, and even before that I wasn't reliably doing trade runs. Part of that has been that revenue is low. We saw in the last MER that velocity of ISK is down and prices are falling, both of which are bad for my business. 

I tend not to run through any character that has less than 8-10Bn in their wallet as the hauling contract tends not to be worth it for people, so less revenue means less updates, less updates mean less revenue. You see the problem.

that's in addition to me having stuff on in  real life, work being insanely busy, parents being down, I've had to sort out new blinds, had some building work done in our kitchen and various other bits. Yes I'm just as middle aged as it sounds!

I haven't actually set up seeding the PleniMart yet, but I'm going to make that my main trading priority this month. Hopefully opening up a new revenue stream can help with my motivation and cash flow. It should also help with the quarter of a trillion I have lying around in wallets doing nothing for me.

On that note, I have noticed that PLEX has been trending up, slowly but consistently for over a month now. I'm not sure why it has though, as there hasn't been any particular sales from CCP or anything. Maybe we're reaching a natural turning point where players view it as being cheap enough to PLEX their accounts and we're seeing increased demand? Not sure. One I'll be keeping an eye on though if it continues on this upward trend. I could easily throw 100Bn at it as a sort of hedge.