Declarations of War

 Quick one this, I was invited onto Declarations of War, EVEs longest running podcast!

https://declarationsofwar.com/

It was an awesome experience, where I got to chat with CCP Okami (Game Designer) and CCP Kestrel (QA) about the recent mega-patch and CCPs wider goals on the economy. It's quite long but we were able to really get into the aims and expectations of what they're doing, which is great transparency from the devs.

It's a great podcast where they like to go in depth on all things EVE, and I'm fascinated to see what they'll do for episode 300! That's a huge milestone and an enormous amount of work to get there, so huge congratulations to the guys there!

March Update - Industry

 In contrast to my Trading, my industry has had a much better month. Here is my net worth:

And here is the graph:

My current net worth is 8.4Bn ISK. That's an increase of 3.4Bn ISK or 132Mil/day.

That is a very good month. This is the first time I've broken 100mil/day and represents a 68% increase on my net worth since the end of Feb. I had revenues of 28.8Bn ISK this month, an extra 10Bn on last month which means my profit margin has been 11.8%, higher than last months 7.1% and a very healthy rate. Honestly I'm thrilled with this.

I've changed a few things this month to contribute towards that increase. I've continued to be quite aggressive with my sell orders to drive revenue which is clearly paying off. I've got better with reactions, buying extra formulae and adding reaction slots on my alt so now at any given time I'm running 8 reaction slots. I want to increase this to 20 and also balance out the outputs, as I'm building up a surplus of certain things at the moment. I react the inputs for Reinforced Carbon Fibre and then the RCF itself, selling that on the market. I've found that even though this final step doesn't add a huge amount of value in and of itself it sells really well.

I've also added an extra high sec character, who is still training but currently has 5 build slots. Once I get my extra reaction slots trained I'm going to add another null alt as well. I also want to buy a couple of mining barges and give that a go during off times, but I haven't got that far yet.

I feel like I'm getting better at keeping my slots busy which is very satisfying and keeps things moving at a brisk pace. I think the next major step will be getting on top of batching and buying materials in advance for better deals, real optimisation type stuff. We'll see how I get on. One thing I can say is 6 months in I'm just as enthusiastic about this as when I started, which is the most important thing!

Also I was on the Declarations of War podcast this week which was really cool. It hasn't been released yet but I'll make another post when they put it out.

March Update - Trading

An early update this one as I'm going on holiday with the family this Friday so I'll be away from the game for a week or so. I was ready to come in here and talk about a better trading month, until I updated my "investment" worth....

Anyway, my current position:

And a full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.073Tn ISK.

That works out to an increase of 9Bn ISK, or 346Mil/day. Pretty poor, but when you factor in that HyperCores have dropped by another 10,700ISK each to below the 2 for 1 offer value, costing me 7Bn (Ouch) then my operating profit for the month would actually be 16Bn ISK. Still not great but considering I've been updating my orders once a week I'd consider that an OK return on effort. 

Honestly I wish I'd never bought HyperCores. How they have hit an all time low versus PLEX 6 months after the sale I don't know. Well I know the recent drop was people cashing out to put money in skill extractors/injectors, but still. I have thought seriously about liquidating them and using the money for something else, but given that most of my effort is going into my Industry challenge I think now isn't the time for me to look into reinvesting 200Bn ISK. Maybe once things settle after my holiday I can revisit this.

Another thing of note is that it's almost a year since I returned to the game! How time has flown. The downside of this is that my trade accounts (all 4 of them) are running out of Omega time, and I'll be PLEXing them all in the middle of the month. I spent 86.4Bn ISK on PLEX about 6 weeks ago in preparation for this, but it means I need to find another 14Bn ISK in April or I won't be a Trillionaire anymore! Should be fine provided HyperCores don't drop to 100k or anything, and I'm only half joking.

I'm aware I sound quite sulky here, but I am feeling positive none the less, here's to a second year back in the game!

Another High Sec move

 So I've moved my high sec manufacturing for a second time.

When I first started off I was building and researching out of a public Raitaru in Ikuchi. I was fairly shortly locked out of the structure as it went low power and I lost the materials of what I was building, thankfully not much in that case. 

I then moved to a NPC station in Ikuchi for building, and a public Raitaru in Hirtamon for research. This is a bit risky as there is a chance I can get locked out of the Raitaru, but at least I won't lose my production materials. However when I logged in today I noticed that the build costs seemed a little high. Upon closer inspection the system cost index had jumped up to 8.69%. This is still a lot lower than Jita or Perimeter but is a significant hit to margins, especially when combined with the increase in Sales tax.

So I've moved again, to an NPC station in Hirtamon, where the system cost index is currently 4.94%. I could build out of the same Raitaru I research/invent in, but I don't like that risk right now. Also they are charging 10% tax on manufacturing. I need to do some working out of the cost of putting up my own Raitaru at some point to take advantage of the bonuses and lower tax, but for now the NPC station will do. 

I am still building the same sort of thing, primarily rigs both tech 1 and 2, some modules and in null I've even built a few Raptors. 

I've also started scaling up Reactions a bit. Initially when doing reactions I tried to do one step and sell the output. In that instance it was Carbon Fibre, which had a on paper margin of 30% and seemed like a good call. However, selling it involved shipping it to Jita, and micro managing the sell order and it still took 2 weeks to shift. Not ideal. Going one more step to Reinforced Carbon Fibre though, while only adding another ~7% in terms of margin had a much greater demand. So I've been able to sell the output in MJ- for a similar price to Jita! I'm now skilling up to get beyond 6 reaction slots to expand this.

I've also added another character in High Sec. I was running out of immediately useful skills to train on my main character that does my hauling and I am increasingly finding I have excess cash that I could use for more slots, so I've started a third character on that account, remapped Int/Mem and am skilling up initially for 10 build/science slots and then towards tech 2. 

All this has contributed to me really kicking on in net worth this month. This is already my best month so far with 10 days to go already being 2.5Bn up on the start of March! 

Eve terminal shutdown

 Possibly one not many people have heard of, but a site I found useful is shutting down. 

https://eveterminal.io

It's a neat little website that lets you view the in game market from out of game, created by someone called Eurreka. I tended to use it to keep an eye on how much money I'm losing in HyperCores or the movement of PLEX from my phone when I'm away from my PC. 

It's always sad when things like this close, and I hope whatever has happened in their personal circumstances can be resolved.

February Update - Industry

 The picture for industry looks a lot healthier than with trading. Here are the values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 4.97Bn ISK. That's an increase of 1.3Bn ISK, or 46Mil/day.

While that sounds pretty unimpressive, it's not the complete picture. I started the month coming off a hiatus in half of January, and a lot of what I had up for sale was overpriced and wasn't shifting. This can be seen by the small gape between sell orders (light blue) and total worth (red). In order to pull this round and increase my revenue I started fairly aggressively reducing my sell orders to try and recoup the money faster, rather than maximising per transaction profit. This lead to ~10 days of fairly static net worth but allowed me to increase my amount manufactured at any given time. From there I was able to really ramp up production, regularly having over 1Bn in build at any given time allowing me to keep slots busier and turn over products for cash faster. That lead to a second half of the month where I was making almost 100mil/day on average and you can see the amount of manufacturing and cash I have at any point in time has jumped up while sell orders have stayed around the 2.5Bn mark. This is a much better state of affairs and should allow me to continue to utilise more concurrent slots and scale harder.

With this increased revenue I intend to skill up my 2 alts that don't currently do tech2 building to be able to do it, and it opens up options. I should be able to start additional characters soon as well.

I have had revenue of 18.3Bn ISK this month, which means my profit margin is currently 7.1% after all costs. Not amazing but Worth keeping track of as I go forwards.

One thing I have noticed is that there have been several "phases" to my journey already, which I have highlighted below to a very high production quality:

Phase 1 - Getting started, learning initial skills, getting starting capital and beginning my journey

Phase 2 - Establishing a manufacturing chain with a few reliable blueprints, steady expansion.

Phase 3 - I get EVEGuru, my net worth explodes, though most of the items I build are actually overvalued due to short term spikes.

Phase 4 - Correction and slowdown. I start to pull my items back towards more sensible sale values, though my capital and revenue is limited. Relatively stagnant here and items in build rarely beats 500mil. Christmas and then a very stressful time at work meant I didn't play much over this period either.

Phase 5 - Steady growth. Sale values have been pulled into a more realistic place. I have started to get a feel for what items sell well with relatively little micromanagement and I can tailor my slots to pumping out those. I have slowed down on buying new blueprints and skills in order to get in a better place in terms of cash and revenue.

This has been a really interesting journey so far. I am fascinated as to what problems I will have to solve at further stages going forwards. The scaling in terms of profits is definitely trickier than trading but there is more variety in industry and it keeps me very engaged, which is great!

Next month my plan is to continue to scale in terms of revenue, skill up my characters a bit and maybe start another character or 2. All about scaling for now.

February Update - Trading

 A very lacklustre month this one. I've been updating my orders monday and friday as I normally do but the revenue just hasn't been there. Maybe I need to be more aggressive in how I go about things but anyway. Here's my current position:

Broken down further:

My current net worth is 1.064Tn ISK.

That means I've made 10Bn ISK or 0.35Bn ISK/day. This is another very poor month. Partly I've not updated my orders as much as I probably should, as I've been enjoying my industry. Partly there is the continuous decline in price of HyperCores AND Skill injectors/extractors (seriously, don't take investment advice from me!). There also just feels like I'm getting less revenue from a weekend of orders. This is less tangible and possibly a bit of an excuse but I'll see if I can improve some of this in March.

One thing I have done this month is buy a years worth of PLEX for 4 accounts (14400). I missed the big PLEX + MCT sale as I was away from the game but when PLEX prices dropped back I snapped them up to use, as my main trade accounts all run out in mid-April. This cost me 87Bn ISK to do and I haven't updated my sheet with the current value as I will be redeeming them in early April. So I have another month to make 23Bn to remain a trillionaire! Should be easy but then I've not done it in a little while. Will be a good motivator though.