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 - Industry

 This month was a record breaker, a lot has happened. I'll give the numbers then go into the detail:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 49.6Bn ISK. That's an increase of 11.8Bn ISK, or 393mil/day.

That's massive, and a new record by some margin (previous being about 7Bn), so what happened?

The main thing is that the market changed. When Horde collapsed, the price of salvage started to climb pretty dramatically. Logic Circuits in particular are worth double what they were a month ago and they're used in most of the rigs I build. I already built Medium CCC II rigs regularly, as even when the margins aren't great they still sell incredibly well and reliably, they're very like Mobile Depots in that sense, only higher value and easily transportable in a Crane. Those rigs in particular jumped from selling around 6.5mil each to 15mil each! I threw everything I had into producing them, and you can really see this take off in terms of revenue and profit.

Additionally, I had 2 characters that were null sec based and 2 that were training, so 5 characters building in high sec at the start of the month. I have since moved the null characters to high (selling what I had to my null trader to remove that liability) and brought the 2 trainers online, meaning 9 characters pumping items out in high sec.

Not all these are making CCC rigs, I also mix up with some large versions and some shield rigs as well, to insulate me against market movements. These have also done very well. My CEO character also builds things like mercenary dens and auto-integrity response drones, smart bombs etc. and I have a character doing nothing but building Cranes (I want to train a few more characters into T2 ships as I think they could be a long term way of doing things and keeping my slots busy easier, but I digress) and 1 character faithfully pumping out mobile depots.

Having all of these characters operating out of 1 corp office in a NPC station 4 jumps from Jita has meant that my way of playing actually scales really well. The extra characters just add a few clicks to set off the jobs. All the product collection, transporting and selling is done on my CEO character, so no additional work there. This also means that when I want to add extra characters I can do so in the same place and it shouldn't affect my workload much, which is fantastic for someone time poor such as myself. I have stale characters from my trade venture that I might "recruit" for exactly this purpose but I want to see how salvage/rigs level out first before throwing more characters onto the pile.

Another aspect of all this is my sell orders have dropped dramatically as prices have risen pretty much across the board of what I sell, so a bunch of older orders have sold leading to the massive spike in wallet balance you can see in dark blue on the graph. I have 21Bn ISK in cash while sell orders have dropped to 10Bn for the first time since June. This is great, but that big pile of cash isn't actually making me any money right now, which is bad. 

What it does enable me to do is to try and procure pretty much all of my input materials from buy orders, as having the ISK tied up is not an issue any more. This pushes my profit per item up which is great, though I don't currently always manage to fully stock up before I build so I am buying from sell orders as well. I will have to look at building a "stockpile" sheet to make sure I have enough input materials in stock at any given time and manage buy orders appropriately. EVEGuru has it on their road map but as it's not there currently I may have to build it myself in a spreadsheet. We'll see if my laziness or impatience wins first on that one.

The low sec experiment is on hold for now, I'm doing so well with my current setup that I'm going to ride this gravy train for a bit, and maybe look at low sec again when I start to look at bigger projects like jump freighters or Black Ops battleships. 

Here's hoping for an even better month in December!

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.

EVE Content I consume

 So I've been meaning to compile this list for a while, but I'm going to list the blogs and youtube channels I consume related to EVE if you're looking for recommendations.

• https://marketsforisk.blogspot.com/ Market blog, the one that inspired me to take on my own regional challenge a decade ago, and still going strong. Written by Croda.
  
• https://evehermit.wordpress.com/ General EVE blog (and some other games such as X4), One I've dipped in and out of for a long time
  
• https://tellicorp.blogspot.com/ EVE Industry blog, relatively new
  
• https://alphatoomegawithregionaltrading.blogspot.com/ New player regional trading challenge blog, still in the early stages
  
• https://alwaysanoob.com/ General EVE blog
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@OZeve CSM and trader the OZ. I am also part of his discord which tends to have a lot of good chat on EVE economy and trading. Provides weekly analysis of the economy. Croda a frequent guest here.
  
• https://declarationsofwar.com/ General EVE Online podcast. I was invited to be a part of episode 299 and got to talk to CCP Okami and CCP Kestrel about the Equinox expansion and aims for the economy, a really cool experience! I haven't listened back  to it though as I hate the sound of my own voice recorded.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@strange_Net Dedicated EVE industry videos, somewhat inactive now
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@CEOPyrex Economy and industry focused channel, a lot of good guides and insight here, very active.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@Gamingsincethe70s/videos Industry channel run by Thanak, charting his experience running his own personal industry, as well as a high sec corp and a null sec one! Gives a bit of insight and a peek behind the curtain at corp leadership
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@EVEARDCO/videos A new one, Ardel Corvallon charts his attempt to start a fuel block building empire in high sec, has a close association with Thanak and corp. He's recently invited me to join his "think tank" and provide whatever help and advice I can. Early days but hoping to see this enterprise flourish!
  

When I first started playing EVE there was a plethora of blogs and content related to all things EVE, then it felt like a few years ago there was a bit of a lul as some of the old guard dropped out, but in the last year or so things have picked up and there is an awful lot of great passionate people keen to share their experiences with this great game we all play. Long may it continue! If you have any good recommendations I haven't listed here I'd be keen to hear them.