Record Balance

A quick one this, not much to talk about but having sold everything I have the largest wallet balance I've ever had, at over 560Bn, which is neat.

 I'm hoping not to keep it for long though. The current NES sale for Omega ends on 20th September, with a Major Update coming out on the 22nd. Often with these major updates there's a free week given out to encourage people back to give it a try, which usually means a drop in the price of pretty much everything. If that happens I'll be able to buy PLEX up for as cheaply as possible to then wait for the next FOMO sale. Fingers crossed.

Beginning Null Seeding

 I've been slowly dipping my toe into various things in null recently. By which I mean familiarising myself with the geography near to UALX-3 and doing a little bit of ratting and more recently, mining.

I don't, if I'm completely honest, understand the nuances with mining these days. With wastage being a concern and a source of drama within null groups and new null sec ores etc. I decided to keep it simple by buying a couple of battle procurers and taking them out in a nearby Industry park.

The idea behind the location being that there are tatara's on hand for reprocessing, asteroid anomolies of various descriptions to mine, an ice field, and a bunch of raitarus to build things from the minerals. 

I was pleasantly surprised to find the rats that jump into those anoms seem quite small and easily handled by my barges, so I'll probably push the limits here as I build up.

Another thing I was looking at was the margins between staging and Jita. I found them to be healthy, and the alliance hauling services to be nice and cheap, so I've bought about 850mil of a few items and set up a contract for them to be hauled to staging. I will likely look at industry in null at some point but that might involve importing some materials, whereas importing the items to sell for a profit looks to be a simple way to open a new profit avenue.

Separately, I've had a sell order to Skill Extractors up for a very, very long time that I refresh periodically. It was for 570mil sell, by far the highest in Jita, from an attempt to flip them a very long time ago. This is purely dead ISK, so I've reduced it to a more sensible 470mil in an attempt to unlock that ISK and then put more into PLEX when the Omega sale ends. I have sold my PLEX stockpile for a minimum of 4.95Mil each, so I'll wait for the price to drop back to the 4.65-4.6 region and then buy them all up again. At that price from my initial 99k PLEX I should end up with 101k, so a small but notable profit. With the extra 100Bn from the extractors I should be looking at around 120k PLEX, which is a lot to take into the next FOMO sale.

30% off Omega in the NES

 So currently in the NES you can get 30% off Omega time on 1 month Omega, and 20% off 6 months Omega:

The 6 month one is the most significant, which at 280 PLEX/month and PLEX currently sitting at 5.03mil means you can get omega for 1.4Bn ISK/Month.

Now, this is good, but nowhere close to the 1.1Bn ISK/month I paid earlier on in the year, so I won't jump on this right now.

I do have 99k PLEX on hand though, and the price has jumped up slightly. Given that this is a short term sale I will sell my PLEX and then put up a buy order for the same at the old buy order price (~4.65mil) looking to scrape a few % profit. I'm hoping this should net me about 20Bn, but we'll see.

August Update - Trading

 I was away for some of this month, and working silly hours for other parts, so an underwhelming month. The raw numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.263Tn ISK, and increase of 16Bn ISK, or 516 mil ISK/day.

Hardly impressive, but as I say, I've hardly played for a lot of the month. To be honest with my trading I've just been going through the motions, doing my same old same old, watching the numbers tick slowly up, while focussing on other things.

One thing I have been doing is building up PLEX stockpiles using profits. Up to 99k now, 1000 more and I'll be at the 100k I was hoping for to take into the next FOMO sale.

I have been trying a little bit to get started in null on my main, which is actually a slightly more involved process than I remember. A lot about null life is getting to know the geography, what systems are where, where the Ansiblexes are, where the industry parks are, etc. etc. etc.

I fell into the simplest thing of death cloning, buying a ratting Gila and going not far from staging and ratting enough to pay the Gila off by doing Forsaken Hubs, but I haven't achieved much more than that. More on what I'm doing to get settled in another post but I'm trying to keep my game time focussed on that, or else I'll never really get the most out of the experience and I might as well stay in high sec.

I've also noticed, and I don't know if others are the same, but when there is a lot of stress going on in my real life, for whatever reason, I struggle to motivate myself to do things I find fun, such as play EVE. So you will always see a bit of a drop off in terms of activity and progress when I have other things on my mind. This is probably a natural response to stress, but I've noticed it more consciously recently where I finally finished work, and had a bit of time to log in, and wanted to, but just...couldn't bring myself to, and went to bed instead. 

Fingers crossed the worst of the work stress is behind me so I can get the lay of the land. I half remember the lay of the land in Catch from over a decade ago, but Tenerifis is a completely different animal that I'm still getting used to.

July Update -Trading

 A delayed update as work has been insane with a lot of out of hours work followed by being away for a week on holiday, but July was a fairly standard trading month, with not a lot to talk about. the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.247Tn ISK, an increase of 27Bn ISK, or 870mil ISK/day.

As I say, not a lot to talk about here. I just went through the motions doing my normal regional trading strategy of buying in Jita and paying a public contractor 1% of collateral to fly the goods to Amarr/Dodixie/Rens/Hek and selling them there. It's easy, relatively brainless, and works out to about 1Bn per day if I do a trade run at least once or twice a week.

The only other notable thing is I have been buying up PLEX with my ISK I got from cashing out the last FOMO sale. I'm up to 96,000 PLEX at this point, and will probably pause accumulation when I hit 100k. Then use it on the next sale and on and on it goes.

I had been more focused this month on trying to work out a home for my main, settling on Brave Newbies. It was quite an involved process getting in but aside from doing a tiny bit of ratting I haven't actually done much here. Hopefully things should calm down a bit IRL now and I can get some proper play time in.

June Update - Trading

So, a bit of an unusual on this one. Here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.22Tn ISK. That's a change of -25Bn ISK, or a loss of 833mil/day.

That's a dramatic decrease, but I'm honestly thrilled! 

So, what happened and why am I happy? Well, as outlined in my previous posts this month, I cashed out all of my Skill Extractors and HyperCores, as they reached my profit window and I could smell something coming in the NES. In the event I wasn't quite right in my guess, but I cashed out at the right time! I was able to end up with about 430Bn ISK to plough into PLEX, and then the day after FC dropped a 25% off Omega sale in the NES. I pulled the trigger for all 7 of my accounts, both trading and industrial, meaning most of my accounts are Omega'ed until the end of 2027.

Given I paid 4.5mil per PLEX and a years Omega cost 2700 per account I paid 12.15Bn ISK per account, for a total of 85.05BN ISK.

If you add that back in they I would have a net worth of 1.305Tn, or a monthly operating profit of 49Bn ISK.

A chunk of that is due to the increase in Skill Extractors and HyperCores before I sold them, and also I sold all my PLEX during the sale for a high of 5.1mil per PLEX (or about 12% profit before fees), which is why I'm sat on 445Bn ISK at the end of month. Once the sales all end I expected PLEX to drop in price again and I would pick more up. 

This ended up being exactly what happened and at time of writing I'm sat on 92,000 PLEX bought for (at max) 4.6mil each.

My trade revenues "feel" good though, and a large portion of my profits also came from that. I'm making trade runs regularly and am pretty happy with that part of the business, even though it isn't really growing right now it's just feeding money into my gambling investment pool.

Cashing out the cash out

 Well, no sooner had I poured everything I could into PLEX than FC woke up and decided to put a 25% discount on Omega time!

This means I can get a years Omega for each of my accounts for 2700 PLEX, which when bought at 4,500,000 ISK each (ish) means a years Omega for 12,150,000,000 ISK, or 1.012Bn ISK/month

That is an unbelievable bargain. My 4 main trade accounts are omega'd until next april, but my 3 industry accounts run out this year.

I'm instantly going to add game time to my industry accounts, but I'll give a little more thought to my traders. This sale might come up again at the end of the year and I could potentially make more ISK with the money in the mean time.

The rest of the PLEX though I will sell instantly. It currently sits at a sell price of 5.1mil which is about 350,000ISK profit per PLEX after taxes. When this sale is over and the price drops down again I can simply buy the PLEX again.

Indeed, as write this I have already sold 54Bn ISK worth for a profit. I have no idea how much money I'll end up with at the end of this month, but I'm really happy I got out of Skill Extractors while I had the chance! Shame I still have a bunch of HyperCores to sell, but I'll get over it.

Cashing Out

 So, in the last FOMO sale I invested heavily into Skill Extractors and HyperCores, hoping to see a jump and then cash out before the next NES sale. I had in mind mid-late July to start cashing out but FC recently launched a big real money omega/PLEX sale, and handed players 10 PLEX in a pack for Federation Day.

Traditionally NES sales follow real life cash sales, and this one runs out on the 28th June. Also the SE and HyperCores have approached (in hypercores case hit) my "cash out point" of 480mil/280k respectively.

As such my spidey sense is tingling that an NES sale is incoming and I'm unlikely to get too much more profit out of simply holding my items. So I've spent this weekend/week selling these items and putting all the money into PLEX, which has been incredibly stable price wise recently:

I've managed to sell all my SEs for 459mil average, a ~26% profit before taxes/fees.

I'm currently selling HyperCores for ~282,000, though most have been sold for ~272,000. This represents about a 70%(!) marging before taxes. I still have about 300,000 of these I'm selling as well.

I've been buying PLEX at an average of 4.5mil each, and have accumulated...some.

Best case scenario, I'm right and another NES sale hit in July, giving me another opportunity to make 20-30% profit on all this in a few months. Worst case, nothing happens and I use this PLEX to get another years Omega if they run a omega discount around the new year (they usually do). But ultimately this is gambling so I could lose a lot if the price of PLEX tanks. This is not financial advice!

This feels like a strange way to make a lot of in game money through trading real world items rather than purely in game means, but that's unfortunately that's what's incentivised by these FOMO sales.

May Update - Trading

 Another decent month this one, here's the summary:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.257Tn ISK. That's an increase of 30Bn ISK, or 967mil ISK/day.

That's decent, I'm happy with that. Some of the increase is down to an increase in the value of Skill Extractors, though that is offset by a decrease in the price of hypercores. Both of these seem to have levelled off a bit now, and I'll probably start liquidating them both next month to avoid being caught out by another sale. My general plan with these now is to build up PLEX during off times/cash sales, then spend it during NES sales on items such as Skill Extractors and Hypercores. Then ride the price rise, sell the items and invest the money back in PLEX. Rinse and repeat. If I can make 20% profit per go at this it will really multiply my ISK, as there is no real ceiling on the amount I can pour into this the market cap is so massive.

My day to day regional trading has been fine, no real news there. I usually do a trade run once per week or when a character has about 10Bn in cash, so it doesn't take me much time to keep on top of it.

One point the dipped my worth this month is the writing off of my 5Bn ISK loan to ARDCO. Ardel Corvallon made a short video outlining that he was no longer enjoying the game and was leaving. It is always a shame when a content creator leaves the space, however this ultimately is a game and I wish him well in whatever he chooses to do going forwards. I had never seriously expected the money back anyway, I was just hoping it would help drive some in game content which it seems to have done.

April Update - Trading

 A better month this one, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. Here are the numbers:

And here's the full numbers:

My current net worth is 1.227Tn ISK, that's an increase of 55Bn ISK, or 1.83Bn ISK/day.

That's a massive jump, close to a record I think. So why the big increase?

Well, there's one reason, and it's not to do with my regional trading. As pointed out in an earlier post CCP (now Fenris Creations, or FC I guess) made a return to FOMO sales in a big way. The headlines were 3 for 1 HyperCores and 3 for 2 Skill Extractors. Both are huge, but the hypercores are unprecedented.

As such I liquidated everything I could and dumped as much as possible into both of those items, with a heavy emphasis on Skill Extractors as those tend to recover in price faster. The sale has now ended and the price of both commodities jumped a lot more than I was expecting to be honest, currently up 44% and 21% respectively.

The more I think about how to scale wealth into the trillions the more I think this is the best way to do it. The market cap for PLEX adjacent items is massive, far far bigger than any in game items. This will allow me to keep putting more and more money into it and get a similar percentage return regardless as I am unable to ever have enough to meaningfully affect the market price. As such going forwards I'm going to be putting what profits I can from my regional trading towards this kind of speculation, and try and ride the waves of NES sales for profit.

With these current investments I am looking to start selling off hypercores once they hit 300k or we get to 4 months from the sale (late July), whichever comes first. For the Skill Extractors I want to sell off once the price hits 480mil(ish), with again a cutoff of late July to start liquidating. That's because I would expect more big sales in late summer/early autumn to entice people back in after their summer holidays.

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.

Deflation and reduced economic activity

 So, at the moment we're in a period of arguable deflation within EVE. Oz has done an analysis in greater detail that I could here: Feb MER analysis

But essentially, ISK velocity is down, mining is up, destruction is down, prices continue to fall.

As to why, I think we're really feeling the effects of Pandemic Horde's collapse. Both them and Goons were gearing up for a big war, which would have meant large amounts of destruction, requiring replacement ships/modules/deadspace kit and pushing up the ISK velocity. 

Instead what we have is a place where the 3 big blocs, Goons, INIT and Frat, are all in full "stockpile" mode, where they are mining/building like crazy and not destroying much. This pushes prices down due to a flood of minerals and salvage, and demand down due to not needing to replace anything at scale.

What this means for me, personally, is it's becoming harder and harder to make money. My core regional trade business is suffering as the demand for deadspace/faction items is dropping so my overall income is down. In my industry side things are worse as I'm having to drop prices to keep pace with where things are and get some liquidity, which I'm using to keep slots busy for smaller margins. And since I'm essentially just adding to the flood of the market I either push my prices down to get liquidity, or I keep them where they are and just build up sell orders that are never going to go anywhere. It feels like I'm running just to stand still.

These phases happen in EVE, and if it continues too much CCP will step in or eventually a significant conflict will kick off, but right now it's hitting my motivation as it just feels like I'm not achieving much right now.

I'm still waiting for skills to train to get some alts into producing T2 hulls so I can switch to higher margin items as well, which is again frustrating but at least gives me something to look towards.

February Update - Trading

 Not an amazing month this one, I hardly played for the first 2 weeks and it showed. Still, here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.161Tn ISK. That's an increase of 8Bn, or 285mil/ISK/day.

So that's pretty poor, why so bad?

Well, as explained, I basically didn't play for the first 2 weeks, but additionally, when I was updating my "investments" towards the end of the month I realised I had 100 extra master-at-arms cerebral accelerators listed on my sheet than I actually had in my inventory. This wasn't a new mistake and was listed on my last sheet, so I could go back and adjust my accounting there, but that could get messy so I'm just updating it here. So operating profit wise I'm probably about 6Bn better than that.

Additionally, I've not really been doing anything new with my money. What I am starting to prep for is seeding a market to branch out. I've chosen the "PleniMart" in Kihtalid for this experiment. It ranks in the top 40 markets galaxy wide and is being operated by Thanak of the Building my Industrial empire series. Well worth a watch. What started out as one man trying to get into industry has turned into an alliance encompassing high sec and null sec, and has pulled in the likes of ARDCO into its ranks. 

This planned seeding will be using different items to my normal regional trading, likely more common items to get greater turnover. I will also be competing with Croda, who has recently started seeding this station. We'll see how this goes. I suspect my item choices might be slightly different from his, but greater supply can only help further cement PleniMart as a real secondary trade hub.

This should also help me hit one of my other goals I've had for a while to hit 1Tn in sell orders, which I'm also there at right now.

January update - Trading

 A bit of a delayed update this one, for a couple of reasons. Real life has thrown up a fair amount over the last month or so, with work being pretty hellish. We had a number of time critical bits combined with major incidents and our product owner is leaving us, so I've picked up some of his responsibilities in his absence. So I've had very little time for coding and little time and energy for gaming. I've also been ill this last week or so, well enough to work but ill enough to not want to sit staring at a screen gaming. The worst kind of illness. 

Anyway, my numbers from the end of Jan:

And the full breakdown:

I have a net worth of 1.153Tn ISK. That's an increase of 31Bn ISK, or 1Bn/day.

All things considered I'm pretty pleased with that. I haven't done as many trade runs as usual, but I'm back to making a healthy profit again which is great. I've also gone in and done 1 or 2 updates from some expired orders in sobaseki (far right of the sheet) in addition to my normal sale locations of Amarr, Rens, Hek and Dodixie. It's not a big earner but I want to liquidate that before deciding if I want to pick it up as a proper sale location again.

Some investment increases have helped as well, Large Skill Injectors have taken a bit of a jump, as well as hypercores taking another step towards PLEX parity. I've begun liquidating these, hoping to be completely free of HyperCores by the end of March realistically.

Loans

You may have noticed an extra line in my summary, "loans". This is just one loan actually, but I've left it as a plural in case I end up giving more out. Ardel Corvallon, COE of ARDCO and creator of the series Zero to fuel tycoon has begun expanding into wanting to run a buyback to support his miners and get some materials for his corps fuel block production. I've spoken to him on and off over the last few months, he seems like a good guy who's passionately trying to carve out his own niche in EVE, and a number of people seem drawn to his enterprise. I've been keen to support him, even though creating fuels blocks doesn't really fit with my style of industry, so I offered him investment if he needs it. 

I was initially turned down, as he was keen to learn from a smaller base and build up, which is probably the best way and I respect that. However to get some seed money for his buy back he came to me and one other anonymous benefactor asking for 5Bn at a 4% interest rate, with an unspecified return rate.

Now on the face of it this isn't great for me, 4% return for an indeterminate amount of time isn't great. However, this is really about me supporting another content creator in the game, and helping to make the EVE cluster feel more alive, so I'm more than happy to provide this, even if, through burnout, personal circumstance or simply a scam I never get the 5.2Bn. It's hardly a major loss for me (I've lost more to erroneous broker fees than that!).

I'm keen to see where his journey takes him, and how he can make this scale and work in the future.

End of Year 2025

 This year has been eventful. A year when I've thrown myself fully into the game, and upped both my activity and variety of what I do. Where I lost my Null sec "home" of the last 10 years, and where I find myself in a very different situation tot he start of 2025. So let's recap.

Trading

So, there's a bit to talk about here, but first here's the numbers:

And the whole sheet:

I have a net worth of 1.122Tn ISK. That's an increase of -67Bn ISK!!

So, that seems bad. And it is, no question, but there's more to it than that. Well, the main one is this month I had to buy Omega for another year for my 3rd Industry account, I bought PLEX for 4.45 million each, and spent 16Bn ISK on that. The next day, CCP dropped a 25% NES sale on Omega time for 1 year. Now, my trade accounts (all 4 of them) have Omega until April, so i could have held off on this for 4 months, but 25% off is just too good a deal not to jump on. So I bought PLEX for about 4.815 mil each and paid 2700 (rather than 3600) per account to Omega them for an extra year through to April 2027. What this worked out at is:

4,185,000 * 2700 = 13,000,500,000 per account

13,000,500,000 * 4 = 52,002,000,000 overall

That plus the industry account means 68,022,000,000 ISK spent on Omega this month. 

That wasn't my only expense either, as I spent 2.5Bn getting some assets out of asset safety and shipping them to Dodixie.

Additionally, you will notice that there are significantly fewer HyperCores listed than previously. As the price of PLEX tumbled HyperCores were approaching PLEX parity, and appear stuck at ~383,000 a unit so I decided to start liquidating my stockpiles and use that ISK elsewhere, dumping some into PLEX, some into Large Skill Injectors and some into other investments. Those other investments I'm not convinced about, and tbh I could definitely use the money for my regional trading, so a bit of a mistake there. Not the end of the world though, diversification is a good thing after all. 

I've not been able to work out exactly how much I paid in broker fees and sales tax for my HyperCores, but roughly:

150,000 sold this month * 383,000 (average price) * 0.0458 (~1.21 broker and 3.37 sales) = 2,631,210,000 ISK spent liquidating hypercores.

So, factoring all that in, that's ~73Bn costs versus 67Bn losses for an operating profit of just 6Bn ISK this month. Really poor all things considered, though I'm sure there are other costs I'm missing here. Having said that I wasn't playing much for the latter half of the month.

All that equivocating to say I start the year with just over 1.12Tn ISK, but only 2 Omega subs to worry about later on in the year rather than the usual 7. Only 80Bn made this year, but I have paid for 11 yearly Omega subs in that time. 

Industry

The Industry half of my business has been my main focus this year, and is really where most of the money making has been. Here is the values for December:

And here's the graph:

My net worth is 59.8Bn ISK. That's an increase of 10.2Bn ISK or 329mil/day.

That's pretty good, though not quite as good as last month. Early in the month Logic Circuits spiked hard, up to 2.4mil at times, and everything else came up with it. This resulted in an enormous revenue spike in the early part of the month, as you can see from the dark blue line in the graph. 

With revenue of 68Bn in the last month I quickly found myself with a lot of money to invest. I did achieve this by stocking up on plenty of supply of all of the materials I use in my day to day. I bought tens of thousands of datacores, decryptors, salvage materials, PI. I bought materials for dozens of Cranes which ended up not really working out tbh. When I put Cranes in the oven across 10 slots they were costing ~123mil to build and were selling for 147mil. By the time they came our the sell price had dropped to build cost, leaving me with a potential loss after fees. I've decided to hold onto these for now and wait for the price to rise as it's currently at a yearly low.

I've mostly been churning out Rigs as fast as humanly possible. I don't know how many medium CCC II rigs I've sold, but it's a lot. The price has been all over the place but settled back to a build price of ~12.5mil and a sell price of 15mil. I'm pretty happy if it stays like this as the revenue is reliable and I can use them to build up my cash buffer while I wait for other things to sell.

Early on in the year I pushed my 3 accounts to 9 characters, moved them all to the same place and brought them online, with a system that I can work through in 15-20 mins if all I'm doing is setting off rig builds and doing a quick run to Jita. This is great as I often don't have more than this during a given day but I would like to expand if possible. 

Plans for 2026

I have 7 accounts, 4 dedicated to trading and 3 to industry. However, I only have 5 characters dedicated to trading at the moment, a Jita buyer, and sellers in Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek. I have my "main" who is currently homeless and my former null seller/cyno character, who is sitting on a mountain of asset safety gear to get out. That leaves 5 characters that have been idle for some time. All of these characters have trade skills, and very little else. They've done a mix of selling in other hubs, station trading, and one did some building of Raitarus in the dim and distant past. That character is the whole reason I've got that blueprint section on the trade sheet.

First thing I need to do is to get all of my assets out of asset safety and up for sale in Dodixie. That will likely cost me close to 10Bn, but it need to happen to extract that value and clean things up. 

Next, I need to work out what to do with these idle characters. The easy thing to do would be to incorporate them into my industry. Add them to corp, move them to Akonoinen and get them churning things out the same as my other characters. For my Raitaru builder in particular this makes a lot of sense. I could "buy" the blueprints from my traders for NPC value to make the move clean and start from there. This is something I will likely look at doing this month.

The main issue that can arise from this is transport, I have 1 character who flies a Blockade Runner (BR) or a Deep Space Transport (DST) and another one with a DST. For what I do currently this is fine, though for things like ships or industry cores it can be painful as they take several trips. What I need really is a freighter. I have been quietly training one of my characters to fly a Charon, and I will likely buy one soon. I will keep to sensible limits when hauling, preferring multiple trips over stuffing too much value in to make a profit. 

I would like to start making a move towards building freighters this year. I think it'll be profitable to do where I am, though the start up costs are large. I will likely have to build up a month or twos spare capital to pull this off, but if I continue to make 10Bn a month this shouldn't take too long.

The final thing I need to do this year relates to my main. I like having Null access. It gives access to a different style of gameplay, to fly capitals, to rat as a serious form of income, to fly in big PvP fleets etc. I would jump in one of the remaining blocks but TBC Anniversary comes out soon (I know, WoW, BOO). It was always my favourite expansion and I do kind of have the itch, even though I definitely can't commit to strict raid times this go round. I will likely take a view on how into it (or not) I get, and if I ditch WoW this go round I'll jump into one of the null blocs and get some serious in space flying done on a ship with guns for a change.

I'd also like to thank everyone for reading the blog this year. I started this to keep myself motivated and on track, not thinking anyone would be remotely interested but it has lead to me being invited onto a podcast to speak to the devs, added to the think tank for ARDCO as someone who "knows what they're doing" and others. All that's to say it has really enhanced my experience being able to interact with others in this wonderful game we've all being playing more than half our lives, at least that's true for me.

Happy New Year!

Spreading out sales

 So I've been having a look at possible other sell locations for my rigs. At the moment I sell everything I manufacture direct to market in Jita, which goes straight back to input materials etc. But after chatting with Ardel Corvallon of ARDCO about Eden trade and general trade strategy I thought I'd take a look at Adam4Eve market checker tool:

https://www.adam4eve.eu/

That threw up a lot of the usual suspects, some of which I've had trade characters in previously. Previously I've tried to sell what I do in the other hubs, implants, deadspace mods etc. The issue with this was always demand for those high end items. People don't go to tash-murkon prime to buy a new deadspace shield hardener. However they might buy more common things, like rigs.

As I've talked about in other entries I primarily produce and sell rigs, mostly tech 2 medium rigs, as they have a consistently high demand. Mining barges, cruisers, battlecruiser, haulers, all need medium rigs. I decided to look at the price and demand for Medium CCC II rigs in Amarr, Rens and Dodixie and was shocked by the price difference. 

At time of writing the price of a Medium CCC II is:

• 15.5mil in Jita
• 18.3mil in Amarr
• 23.7mil in Dodixie!!!
• 22.4mil in Hek
• 19.6mil in Rens

For reference my build cost is about 13.5mil per rig.

There's very little daily demand in Hek, but there's plenty in the others. Dodixie in particular seems to be a wild mix of high prices and decent demand. I think next time some of my rigs come out of the oven I'm going to ship some to Dodixie and see how selling there goes. Logistics would be the tricky part of broadening my strategy like this but it looks like it could be lucrative. 

One thing I could do is sell some of the rigs to my Jita buyer when I do a drop off run at, say, Jita sell, and then I could include them in my public contracts that get shipped to the other hubs. This would mean I don't have to worry about extra logistics and my existing sellers can handle the market pvp, without having to run around on any of my industry toons. The downside would be that my traders would get this extra profit, not my industrialists, but it's all money my way in the end.

This might be my last day with the game for a while as I'll be travelling to family over the Christmas period, so something to try in the new year, but I'm excited about this new and potentially lucrative avenue into new revenue. I'm increasingly thinking specialising in rigs is my niche, so I'm happy to lean into that.

Starting to pull assets out of asset safety

 So with the fall of Pandemic Horde (which has now officially dissolved) I ended up with a bunch of assets in asset safety, primarily in Odebeinn. This presents a logistical and financial issue as it's on the opposite side of high sec from Jita and I'd need about 9Bn to retrieve my assets there to be shipped out. I've started this process though, parking my character in the station there and I flew out one of my characters in a blockade runner to retrieve what I could.

That character is not currently in my trading corp and had 2.5Bn ISK to his name, which I spent getting out some choice items, which I then shipped to Dodixie and traded to my seller there to sell. This is going to be my pattern with it going forwards. I could have transferred money to him and cleared it all out in one go, but decided not to. 

One, I didn't want to take away from the money being used by my traders elsewhere for this, at least not now. I have a years PLEX bill looming for one of my industry accounts and didn't need the extra expense right now.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, it won't all fit in a blockade runner. Therefore, i took the lazy route and will do several runs to get everything out as and when I feel like it.

There is one slight complication with this, and that is that Fraternity have anchored a Keepstar on grid with the asset safety station, to catch careless people retrieving their stuff:

They're just sitting there...menacingly...

This is why I want to use a blockade runner for this and do it over time. It'll make me much harder to predict, catch, and if they do catch me it won't be a big hit. No bubbles in Low sec is good too.

Eventually I'll get back on track, though I need to work out what to do with this character long term.

All this mess means that this month so far my industry venture has made more profit so far than my trading, which is a bit wild. The EveMogul leaderboard is another good motivator to get my trading moving again properly though as a lot of my purchases were before EveMogul can track as yet my profit there looks a lot lower than reality, but it should start to reflect reality over the next few months as it gets to track more of my buys.

EVEMogul is back!

 So the website https://www.evemogul.com/ has relaunched this week, 5 Years after it was shut down. 

For those who don't know it was a website that tracked your trade profits, gave a bunch of analytics info and most famously had a leaderboard for profit. Oh yes. Now, my trading is very much in maintenance mode so I'm nowhere near where I could be, but I signed my Jita buyer and 4 main sellers up so you can see my profits live on the leaderboard. Well, not strictly live, there is apparently a 6 hours timer on a lot of things and my personal dashboard shows a lot more profit this week than the leaderboard does, but anyway, a rough approximation.

There are a few caveats with it though that demonstrate why the values on there might be different to on my spreadsheet, particularly the NAV or Net Asset Values. EveMogul seems to value your assets at Jita (either split or sell, not sure) even if they're in say, Rens for sale for 30% more than that. What that means is I won't show any increase in worth for putting up sell orders. I only get that when the item sells. Which really is a truer sense of net worth as it values it as "if I had to try and liquidate everything in Jita what would I have?"

I'm hoping that it'll give me a little more motivation to trade a bit more and up my profits, nothing like a public scoreboard for motivation. I'm currently number 6 for profit this week, 6th for profit this month, and 5th for NAV overall, though this does not include my assets in asset safety in low sec, as the character is not hooked into EveMogul. So I should see a jump when I sort that out.

Also, Eden Trade used to top the charts when the site was last up, and he does already now, with 25Bn profit this week. Madness.

November Update - Trading

 Not a bad month this one, though I was hoping for slightly better. The upheaval of Hordes collapse has hit my potential profits, as has hypercores falling back slightly right at the end of the month. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My net worth is 1.189Tn ISK. That's an increase of 36Bn ISK, or 1.2Bn ISK/day.

All things considered not bad, but as you can see from the breakdown I have 65Bn worth of stuff sat in asset safety, waiting for me to claim it and move it to a trade hub for sale. I haven't full decided where to take it but I'm thinking Dodixie as a good middle ground of price versus volume. I could have taken it out on the 28th, but I didn't head down there yet as I imagine the station and system will be camped heavily as lots of players in the same situation look to get their stuff out. I'll try in a couple of weeks probably once the heat has died down.

Hypercores have levelled out in the high 380s, so I've switched to using the sell value for them. Given how PLEX has fallen to 4.7mil on the buy side though they are not that far from PLEX parity. I think I'll start selling them off soon, particularly as PLEX doesn't seem to be reversing trends any time soon.

Aside from this there isn't a great deal to talk about. My trading is very much in maintenance mode while I focus on scaling my industry operation out (there has been a lot of change and expansion there) but my trading is doing its job of taking me a couple of hours a week to update the 4 hubs, do 1 trade run each, and pay for PLEX for all 7 of my accounts. 

On that, I may even start moving characters that I no longer trade with from this venture to my other one, for no additionaly PLEX cost. Would be a cheap and easy way to expand my operations without opening more accounts. We'll see.

Horde is leaving Horde

 So, Horde is moving again.

Not long after the last announced move to R-AG7W it's been announced that Horde is leaving the coalition it leads altogether and moving out of dronelands to join forces with Init instead. This also comes with a change of leadership. This is all fine and might make sense from a mixing things up and giving members fun things to do point of view. 

For myself though, it's extremely annoying. 

I have 3 characters in Horde at the moment. 

A "PVP main" (Stranathor) who isn't part of either of my money making challenges and who used to do things like pvp and carrier rat.

My Null sec seller, who also acts as my cyno character for Stranathor.

My null industrialist, who has been winding down operations and attempting to sell up.

Normally when these moves happen I simply move myself in my capitals (I have a Thanatos, Revelation and Rorqual) and between those 3 I can carry everything I own to new staging and set up again. Easy.

This time though new staging is cryptic, and multiple jumps from where we live now. This would be fine if I didn't have 64Bn in sell orders up on one character, 8.5Bn on another and just having had 6Bn more stuff imported. 

I was trying to decouple my null industrialist from Horde anyway, but by selling his own stuff. At this point I think the simplest thing to do is to sell my assets to my Horde seller and get him out to high sec with his blueprints.

For the Null seller, I think I'm going to evacuate him and Stranathor to lowsec for now. The shipping services are all shipping stuff to Otsasai, so I think I'll head there while I contemplate my next move. There are plans to offer services to jump assets from there to Jita in the future, which I will likely take advantage of. 

This plan should mean my industry character takes minimal losses from all this, with my trader taking a larger hit. I have done one of these sort of lowsec moves before when I was in and then subsequently leaving Brave a full 10 years ago now. So I know it's not the end of the world but I have a lot more stuff to think about this time.

This does feel like a good time to reconsider my membership of Horde. I've been in the alliance on and off for 10 years now, though it has been quite a while since I actually joined a fleet. I like the access to Null space and the option to use big toys but Horde has always been heavy on the rules for using them. I don't know if I'd stay and see how this all shakes out, go it alone for a bit or even switch sides and see if the grass is greener. For now I think I'll take my time, evac my assets and go from there. By the time I next have the chance to really have a proper play session I might have made a decision.