May Update - Industry

 A very strong month this month. I forgot to take screenshots of jEveAssets on the 31st, so I'm missing the values table for this month. However I have the graph, which I'll trim the latest data points off:

My net worth is 19.09Bn ISK, that's an increase of 6.34Bn or 204.5Mil ISK/day.

Nearly a 50% increase in profits on last month, which is a great improvement! Revenues of 53Bn ISK this month mean a profit margin after fees of 11.9%. This seems to be a good sustainable margin as it's been within 1% of that for the last 3 months.

I've been moving this month towards specialisation. As Lord Maldorer puts it in Clarion Call 4 (excellent watch, I'd watch the entire series if you haven't already) "If you build a ship to do 1 specific thing in EVE, it can do that thing very well". This applies to characters and setups as well. I've noticed that most of my profits come from t2 ship rigs, large and medium. Both my null characters can build them as can 1 of my high sec characters. I fell this is an area that ticks a lot of boxes for me:

1. it is "value-dense". Both the input and output materials are low m3 and can be quite expensive, meaning logistics are easy

2. The Margins tend to be consistently pretty good

3. The total market size is pretty large, so I am unlikely to be able to flood the market and thus keep my slots busy.

Therefore I intend to work my setup to be primarily focusing on that. What this means is training up my second and third high sec characters for t2 rig production (the easy part) and getting hold of some extra blueprints to expand my range of products within this basket. I also need to work out the best way of brining in material to null on a regular enough basis as the salvage market in MJ- already struggles to meet my needs with 1 character. The final step with null will be to work out how to balance selling locally vs shipping back to Jita. Alliance Jump Freighter services are cheap but it adds a time delay to everything, which isn't ideal until/if I decide to do my own logistics.

One way around this would be to fly my high sec character to the nearest low/null sec system in a blockade runner and dock in an NPC station, hand off the cargo to my null character who carries it to MJ- in another blockade runner, and the reverse with end product. This has the advantage of me being able to do it on my own time and not wait, but the disadvantage of it taking time and therefore probably not being scaleable. TBD on this.

On the subject of Alliance Logistics, Goons declared war on Horde and invaded a fringe region. This hasn't been disruptive in any way yet but it has given the market a bit of a kick. I came back to ~4Bn in my null wallet as people fit up ships and gear up for the war, which is great for the game and for me! Remains to be seen if goons will actually push into Horde homelands or whether they will get bored before that point (I suspect the latter, despite the reddit spam) but either way a conflict between blocks can only be good for the game as a whole.

On targets for the month I smashed my 5Bn target, though I did not keep my reaction slots busy. The local reactions market has been weird recently but I'm hoping things pick up and I can start utilising this better again. 

I'd be very happy if I can maintain 6Bn profit for next month as I'll be away for the last week of the month, but we'll see how things go.

May Update - Trading

 A better month this one, even though I had my parents staying with us for most of a week towards the end of the month so I didn't get as much playtime as I otherwise might. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.038Tn ISK. That's an increase of 31Bn ISK, or 1Bn ISK/day.

Being back at 1Bn a day is a good place to be, and it's been a while since that was true. There's very little to talk about terms of investment updates, which in some ways is nice. I've been trying to plunge as much money back into day to day region trading as I can, to get to the 1Tn in sell orders point. This screenshot was taken just after logging in after almost a week off which is why I had so much in wallets. I have now taken and reinvested this so it actually looks a bit better.

I did a little station trading in Amarr this month utilising the free trial of the EVEGuru module for station trading. In truth I only logged in to do some trading about 4 or 5 times, which underpins that that's not something I'm enjoying right now, and is reflected by the fact that I only made 500mil on that character. I won't be subscribing to that module and I think I'll probably mothball this character again. I can probably put that 20Bn to better use with my main traders. 

I did do a bit of station trading in Horde staging, almost entirely trading PLEX where I made 4Bn profit this month. I like this as it's only 1 or 2 items to watch and it's high value high liquidity, but low competition in null. I'll keep this up as it's very low input for the reward.

I smashed my target for the month of 20Bn, but I'm away for a week this month so I'm going to say the same target again for this month, if I can hit 1.06Tn I'll be pleased.

Moving away from public Raitarus

 So the public Raitaru I was researching out of in Hirtamon went low power, screwing me over for a third time in 7 months. This time all I was doing was researching ME on some blueprints in there, so all I lost is time and the job cost, but I'm not making this mistake again. The worst thing is I didn't have a character parked in there which means my assets had to go into asset safety, and I can't claim them for 5 days! This means I've lost access not only to some BPOs for that time, but all of my BPCs I was planning to invent from. 

I searched around for a nearby high sec NPC station to move to where I could do the full range of production, research, copying and invention from. There are a few, and Vellaine looked like a good option with good system cost indexes. However there are no available offices in that station so I've had to go 1 jump over to Akonoinen.

As you can see this offers the full range of activities and has a system build cost of 4.74%, which is fairly average for Caldari high sec.

All this does make me want to revisit the idea of putting up my own private raitaru somewhere to operate out of, but it still kind of feels like I'm not where I need to be to make that a profitable idea at the moment. I'll run the numbers and see if it's worthwhile.

April Update - Industry

 Another strong month for the industry side of things. My current position:

And here's the graph:

My current net worth is 12.75Bn ISK That's an increase of 4.35Bn ISK/day or 145mil/day.

That's another record. Nearly a billion more profit this month than last month. That's really good, considering I haven't added any characters, I'm just utilising the ones I have better. I had revenues of 39Bn ISK, an extra 10.2Bn ISK more than last month, which means my profit margin has been 11.1%, very similar to last month at 11.8%. If I can keep this margin and expand my revenues then I'll be very pleased.

The main thing I've tried to change this month is to start looking for processes that can scale. Mostly the form that has taken has been to look for things I build regularly and try to get the input materials from buy orders rather than sell orders to increase the profits per run. The issues with this are that you have to have isk to tie up for a few days while those orders fill, and also you are exposed toa changing market.

An example of this is I started getting input materials for Mobile Depots from buy orders, which improved my margins per depot but then the price of Zydrine spiked and now depots are unprofitable, at least if you buy from sell orders. 

Buying from sell orders to sell to sell orders is the most common way to assess an items profitability because that demonstrates the value you are adding purely from the manufacturing process. Any extra profit you can get from buying input materials cheaply or selling in an obscure market or whatever are bonuses. If you have to do those things to make a profit but the item itself is unprofitable you'd be better off finding something else that is inherently profitable to build instead.

As a result I've completely stopped building depots, and taken more of a look at the rigs I build regularly. I build a lot of Trimark Armor Pump IIs (in null) and medium/large Capacitor Control Circuits in both high and null. This is good to identify because it means I can spend a few hundred mill getting materials for those rigs, and some materials are used for both those types, and know that I can use them profitably in the short to medium term.

This feels a step or two away from batching, which is where you have defined batches of products you make and you know in advance when you will start and fulfil those batches, and you might have a schedule for what you make. I believe most large scale industrialists like SirSmashALot operate in this fashion. I don't think I quite have the capital to operate in this way yet, but it's something I want to work towards over the next few months.

Target for this month is to up my profits to 5Bn for the month, and try and utilise 20 reaction slots near 100% of the time. This will involve balancing the input reactions with the composites but should be achievable on a small scale. 

April Update - Trading

 A slightly better month all round here. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.007Tn ISK. That's an increase of -66BnISK. This is due to spending 14,400 PLEX to PLEX my trade accounts for a year, which came to 86.4Bn ISK. If you discount that effect then my operating profit this month was 20Bn ISK or 666mil/ISK/day. Slightly better than last month but still not incredible.

There were a few sales this month which I rode to a few billion profit, and my investments are largely where they were at the start of the month somewhat implausibly. I think this sort of shorter term investing/swing trading might be a better approach in the longer term. I do still want to up my every day sell orders from ~700Bn to 1Tn and then the rest into investing. To get there though I need to do some serious expanding in terms of day to day. I think I get swept up in "opportunities" in places like discord when really I should focus more on what I know, the day to day region trading.

I have restarted a little station trading as well the last couple of days. Just 1 character in Amarr, messing around with the EVEGuru station trader module and I'm only 120mil up so nothing amazing, but I'll see how it goes.

Aim for next month is to maintain at least 20Bn profit and to pour that into extra sell orders. Should be simple but it reflects where my attention lies right now.

2 new Modules for EVEGuru

 EVEGuru is the primary tool I use to calculate my industry profits for me and work out what I want to build at any given time. It has been revolutionary, and means that I do not have to have any spreadsheets for my industry at all (at this moment in time, TBD on any future use cases).

The have just released 2 new modules for it though, a "Station Trader" and a "Regional day Trader". 

This is, to my knowledge, the only third party tool that charges a subscription, so bear that in mind, though as I say I subscribe for the Industry tool. The 2 new modules charge 200mil/month for the station trader with a free 30 day trial and 1Bn/month for the regional trader tool with no trial. The logic behind the region trader being that it is the more powerful of the 2 tools. I will have to do more investigating to see if I want to add the regional trader. My bread an butter trading is exactly that, but with specific parameters. I have built up quickbars over the years of items that are small (implants, rigs, blueprints, factions/dedpsace modules), expensive and move slowly. What this tool seems to be about it finding any opportunity between hubs that is profitable. I do not know at this point if I can bend it to work with my parameters as I don't want to start having to utilise freighter hauling if I can help it. Though it might be good for null sec seeding.

The station trader free trial though is what interests me for this post. It is a bit more straightforward at first glance, and I have a fully trained up alt in Amarr who has ~19Bn in ISK and assets that I used to station trade on. I moved out of doing much station trading as it became too much work for the money it was making and I wasn't enjoying it, but I'm going to make a go of it with this free trial and see if the tool can help make station trading enjoyable and worth it enough to bring it back into my routine.

The tutorials for these 2 modules can be found here: 

Station Trader

Regional Day Trader

Riding the wave of CCP sales

 CCP have recently put out 2 big sales on Skill Injectors, first one for cash and then a 2-4-1 in the NES store.

During the cash sale I bought 30 for up to 490mil each and sold them for 535, an after tax profit of ~732mil.

Then during the NES sale, I picked up 100 for 390 mil, and the day after it ended the price jumped back up and I sold them all for 433mil, an after tax profit of 793mil. So all told a profit of 1.5Bn ISK in a couple of weeks on a 30Bn investment. I could have held on to the injectors for greater margins, but I've decided to cash in my win and put the money somewhere else. 

PLEX spiked hard to just under 7mil each during the NES sale, but has since fallen back. I was able to pick up 7000 PLEX for 6.1mil today, as the liquidity (that is, people with money looking to buy PLEX) has dried up. The margins on offer aren't necessarily going to be as big as with SE, but as so many people bought into skill extractors ( I saw screenshots of people with thousands, and months of supply went through Jita in a few days) that I think PLEX is more likely to be a faster ROI over the next few months than SE. I can just see SE ending up being like HyperCores where stocks are so massive that the price just doesn't increase much.

Speaking of HyperCores, they've dropped again. Hard. People with big stockpiles liquidated them en masse to grab cheap SEs, so they dropped in price to below 275,000 at one point. They've come back up to 290,000 in Jita at time of writing but that's still lower than a week ago. I'm still exposed here and considered picking some up for 250-260k but I decided not to in the end.

On a separate note, I've just had my second ever contract failure. Someone hauling 12.5Bn of my stuff from Jita to Rens decided to go through Rancer and got ganked in a gate camp. I always over collateralise, in this case collateral was 15Bn, so I came out 2.5Bn ahead. I'll put that money straight into another load to bring in to Rens. I won't link to the killmail but the gankers got a payday, the plastic wrap dropped with all 12.5Bn inside! I am glad I switched to paying people to haul for me.