Month 4 Review

I have been away from home for a few days, which is why this update is slightly delayed. I try to keep my monthly recaps to the 17th of the month, but this has slipped slightly again.

Regardless, I have had a bit more chance to trade this month, and my trade numbers look better for it. My current position is as follows:

If you add my total assets plus sell orders this would put me at the milestone of 20 Billion, however I like to allow a 20% provision on my sell orders to allow for reducing sell order values to match the competition (which happens on a relatively regular basis). As such I consider my total "wealth" to be just over 18 Billion ISK. This still represents an increase of 4 billion in the last month, not bad, but definitely not close to my profit over Christmas.

One thing that does eat into my profits is that I continue to contract all of my hauling out to "New Evolution Express". I always use priority contracts, which are always completed within 1 day rather than the regular 3. This comes at an additional cost of 15 million per contract (and I have to make 3 per run, as I have 3 selling locations), but I believe this is worth it to get my good ready for sale next time I log on. I choose to contract my hauling rather than shipping it myself as a) I don't have to take the time to haul myself, which I increasingly do not have time for regardless and b) it outsources the risk of gank to someone else. As my contracts are over collateralized if the hauler was to be ganked then I would get approximately 110% of the value of my goods in ISK, rather than losing the whole shipment if it was me hauling. New Evolution Express have not failed a single contract for me though, and I consider my ISK well spent.

I also had a one off payment to make this month. My Amarr trader is on the same account as my "main" pvp character, that I keep separate from this endeavor. That character takes the priority for skill training on that account. However, this month I was finding my Amarr traders' 57 maximum orders to be a real bottleneck, so I spent 637 million ISK on one of the new Skill Injector items to gain 500,000 skill points for that character. I used this SP to learn Retail V and get to Wholesale IV increasing his available orders to 129. It should be a while before this becomes a problem again.

Over the next few days I will need to re-evaluate my items for sale properly, as I have about 7 billion sitting around in cash, which isn't earning me anything. My Rens trader is also skilled at manufacturing, and has some researched BPOs, so I may take a look at starting up some manufacturing. Some investigation required.

Taking stock of everything though, I am happy with 15 Billion ISK profit in 4 months of regional trading, it seems to scale well and I can sort all my characters out in about 45 mins per time logged on (which is often once every 2-3 days). I doubt I could make more money another way in this timescale.

Month 3 Review, very late.

So, a combination of real life stresses (work drama, workmen in the flat etc. etc.) means that I have barely played EVE at all this last month, and is also why this blog is almost a week late. The lack of playtime is really reflected in my trade numbers.

Given that on the 17th of January I was sitting at 13 Billion, this is not good and really represents that I have hardly played. I hope to be able to play more this month and bring the numbers up to a more respectable level.

As you can see, I have really just updated sell orders here and there, and basically haven't bought and shipped anything, which is why there is 9.2 Billion sat around in wallets. ISK in wallets isn't doing anything for me, so I'll need to get that working as soon as possible.

Month 2 Review

This month was an eventful one.

I fully brought online a third seller in Dodixie, which has consistently been my biggest market in terms of profits and money dedicated to it. Dodixie seems to have more volume than Rens but less competition than Amarr, so I am liking it at the moment.

I have also changed the way I trade. Until 2 weeks ago I was flying each of my characters to Jita, buying the items, and then giving them to my Rens trader to haul in a blockade runner. In the last 2 weeks I have created a new fresh character, i.e. has no skills, and sent him to Jita.

Thus my current daily routine looks something like:

• Log on to seller, update orders.
• Buy replacement items with my Jita character.
• Create and accept item exchange contract to my seller
• Create a courier contract from Jita to the selling system, to New Evolution Express, a hauling corp.

This cuts down the time I need to sort out all my orders dramatically, as I'm not wasting an hour or so flying around. On this point, the corp I have been using "New Evolution Express" have been fantastic. Fairly cheap rates, and my priority contracts have all been completed in 3 hours or less. I use "priority" contracts because I want to guarantee that my items are there to be sold the next time I log on, if I had to wait 3 days my profits would be reduced.

All this means that my current trade position is as follows:

As ever, I factor in a 20% provision on sell orders to allow for having to reduce my prices due to competition. This doesn't happen too much, but is well worth factoring in.

On the 17th of December my "wealth" sat at 5,725,520,800 ISK. This means that this month I have increased my wealth by 7,323,425,121.60, which works out at an average of 236 Million ISK per day. 

This is a dramatic increase in last month, but there were a few special conditions (a lot of time, snowballs) that contributed to this. Regardless, I am very happy with this amount of profit and especially my new way of working.

A reflection and a slight change of plan.

So the Christmas Holiday has been productive, EVE-wise anyway!

I had almost 3 weeks off work, and though I was away from my PC, I had access to EVE on another machine. A lot of access. I was able to spend a good 2 hours a day updating orders, researching new items to trade, and hauling the items around myself in a blockade runner. As things stand my current position is:

On the 17th of December I had 5,7 Billion, so that means an increase of 5.5 Billion ISK in 3 weeks! This is above and beyond what I expected for this time, and I'm very happy with how it went. However, my daily routine took a whopping 2 hours to complete, which I simply don't have time for on most weeknights. Which brings me to my change of plan.

I am going to stop doing my own hauling, completely. It is too time consuming, plus I'm running the risk someone will play "blockade runner roulette" and gank my BR on the off chance the loot is worth it. As such I will be trying out New Evolution Express for my hauling needs. They seem reasonably priced, and are vouched for by croda in his blog. If they work for him they will work for me. As such I will no longer be running my characters to Jita to do their own buying.

Up until now I had been keeping each characters money separate to keep track of who was making profit where, but as I will be contracting out my hauling I don't want to run around. Therefore I am creating a character with no skills who will sit in Jita, buy the items, then contract them to my other characters. Those characters will then create hauling contracts to New Eden Express to deliver them to my trade hubs.

All of this means I should drastically reduce the time spent flying around, to keep my daily routine to sub 1 hour, and allow more time for researching new items for sale. It will likely take a few days to get this up and running, so I'm expecting a dip in profits until I do. Long term though this should be much more efficient than my current "do everything myself approach".

Only time will tell.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

I am still up at my parents for a break over Christmas, so I am away from my main PC, and I forgot to send myself things like trade spreadsheets and market quickbars, which are stored in the client locally...Oh well! A proper update will have to wait until I return home.

For now though, I will talk about cyclical price spikes, or to put it another way, speculating.

Specifically, speculating on snowballs.

For the past year now, I have had a buy order up in Jita for snowballs that couldn't realistically be filled, in the region of hundred of thousands of them, for between 150 and 300 ISK each, depending on what the other orders are at the moment. This was with a  view to selling my collection over Christmas when demand, and therefore the price, spikes dramatically.

By the start of this week, I had accumulated approximately 650,000 snowballs. Assuming a worst case scenario of 300ISK each we get a total investment of 195 million ISK. Over the last few days I  put sell orders up for 1-2 hundred thousand of them at a time, priced between 1000 and 2000ISK each. All of these have now sold, and taking an average price of 1500ISK per unit (the price most of them sold for) and that leads to a total sell of 975 million ISK. Meaning a profit of 780 million, minus fees.

If you look at the price graphs for snowballs, you can pretty much guarantee that they will spike in both price and demand over the Christmas period (for obvious reasons) so this was a pretty "safe bet" as far as speculating goes. This is not an item that is particularly at the mercy of patch notes or changing metas, as people always want snowball fights.

You might be thinking "a whole YEAR for 780 million!?! there is plenty more I can do with the money in that time!" and you'd be right. But if you have a spare 100 million lying around not doing anything, it might be worth thinking about putting up an order and leaving it. I only updated this once every 2 weeks, and was probably the lowest effort money I've ever made, even if extremely long term.

When looking at ways to make money in EVE it is always worth looking for a niche to exploit. I'm sure there are plenty more than this, but I thought I would share one that worked for me.

Expanding to Dodixie

Yesterday I finally did what I've been saying I'm going to do for a month, in sorting out my character and setting up in Dodixie.

This character was previously a station trader in Jita, and has almost perfect trade skills, with access to 305 orders. I had made some bad buys not long before starting my regional trading (cough *Geckos* cough) which have dropped in value during my time of not touching this character. This meant that when I came to "cash out" yesterday I had to sell for a loss, meaning I got a bit less than I had hoped to start with. I have been building up a stockpile of snowballs which I am hoping to sell for a large mark up over Christmas, but everything else I sold to buy orders just to get access to cash.

I was therefore left with starting funds of 2,130,006,148 ISK.

I then spent a while looking for items to trade with a buy price of 100 million or less, giving me 46 items to trade to begin with. These are my usual types of items, i.e. deadspace mods, implants, and a few rigs and skillbooks. I also learned that you can create folders in your market quickbar, and the same item can exist in multiple folder. This is a huge help as the dodixie trader is on the same account as the Rens trader, and so they have a shared quickbar. Having quickbar folders makes it much easier to sift through the items I'm interested in to avoid mistakes. Speaking of mistakes...

I made my first blunder this morning.

I was watching a YouTube video on the other monitor whilst setting my sell orders in Amarr and I set up a sell order for 3 million instead of 30 million. This meant it sold straight to a buy order, and lead to an immediate loss of around 19 million ISK. Not a massive blow, but still expensive. I knew this would happen eventually, and I'm sure it will happen again! Still I will be much more careful entering orders in the future!

My current position (including the Dodixie trader) is outlined below:

Now I can finally compare effectively against my starting amount, which for reference was:

As ever, I factor in a 20% provision on sell orders to allow for having to reduce my prices due to competition. This doesn't happen too much, but is well worth factoring in. I only leveraged a small part of this initial wealth, but it demonstrates an increase in wealth of approximately 2.6 billion in my first month. I would expect a much higher return next month, with 3 traders and a lot more money to play with, and more free time!

Here's hoping the Christmas period is a profitable one!

Month 1 review

I started my regional trading on the 17th November, so now seems a good time to step back and evaluate my position.

When I started I decided to start with 2 characters, buying items in Jita and hauling them for sale in Rens and Amarr, with a plan to bring a 3rd character in to sell in Dodixie. Due to time commitments I was not able to play as much as I had hoped, so I never got around to getting the third character going.

As such, my starting positions were 119million ISK on my Rens character and 209 million on my Amarr character. I decided not to transfer ISK between characters, at least for now, to keep things easier to track. As of this morning, by current position is:

A current wealth of 2.85 billion, meaning an average profit of 84.6mil a day. A bit disappointing, but this should keep increasing as I have more ISK to invest.

The method I have been using hasn't changed much since day 1. I log in, update my sell orders, and scan eve-central to re-invest any profit in new items. I do not want to buy more than 1 or 2 of each item so as not to affect the market too much. I want people to basically ignore my orders (as I'm only selling 1 at a time) rather than bother chasing and 0.01ISKing me. I look for items with a low daily volume, and therefore hopefully low competition, but a profit margin of at least 20%. If the price does drop on these items, I will drop my sell prices until they sell. ISK velocity is more important than raw profit after a long time, and I can always find a new item to trade.

I now have 3 weeks off work, so I should be able to dedicate more time to this, and today I will finally be bringing my trader in Dodixie online. Hoping for a profitable few weeks!