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.

The power of buy orders

 As my revenue has increased, I find I've sometimes got a little bit of ISK to play with after putting most of my slots to use. I'm also finding a bit of a pattern with certain items coming up time and again for building. I've been experimenting with combining these 2 things to get buy orders up to try and get cheaper input materials to enhance my profits. 

A good example is Medium Ancillary Current Router II. I tend to invent BPCs that are 3 run and take the following input materials:

As you can see buying from sell orders costs me 64mil to build 3. I can put these up for sale for ~67mil, which makes them barely profitable currently (the margin for these is usually better, but I've been sucking up salvage available in MJ- recently and pushed some prices up inadvertently). 

If I were to get my input materials from buy orders though it looks like the following:

Power circuit - 39 * 200,000 = 7,800,000

Logic Circuit - 39 * 600,000 = 23,400,000

Power Conduit - 9 * 1,920,000 = 17,280,000

All told that's 48,480,000 in materials, a saving of 13.5mil.

This isn't the best example as it's barely profitable to build these currently (actually I don't think it is at all buying from sell orders) but the principle works for other things. Large Trimark Amor Pump II are a better example as the margin is much larger currently. 118mil buy orders vs 140mil sell currently, selling for 172mil.

The downside of this method are that you need to know what you want to build in a couple of days time in order to collect the materials from buy orders. This is risky as profit margins can move and then you need to find something else to build with the materials or have them tied up. It also requires tying up ISK in buy orders rather than buying inputs to use immediately. 

At the moment I'm not really able to utilise this excessively, but as I grow and get into more dependable runs this is a great way to extract more profit from your build slots than you would otherwise. Though you could argue I'm piling trading profits into industry ones. I don't mind that in this case though as the items are profitable regardless of how I acquire the inputs.

1 year back in the game

 I'm actually 12 days late in this. I picked up 5 days Omega time recently and I think there were 1 or 2 other instances of free PLEX over the year so I've only just had to re-PLEX today. I thought it'd be a good opportunity to assess where I am and what I've achieved in the last year. With that in mind here's my current trade position:

This compares to Last year's position where I had 778Bn ISK after PLEXing for a year. Today I have 976Bn ISK so that works out at 198Bn over the last year or an average of 16.5Bn ISK/month.

That's...actually not great. And wait, wasn't I a Trillionaire yesterday? what the hell happened???

Well, err...

Now, this might not look like it should have much effect on my net worth. And actually the impact was a bit less than I expected, but still dramatic. The NES sale meant that people liquidated everything to buy PLEX to convert to skill extractors, causing HyperCores to drop at one point to 250k..! (since recovered a bit) and send PLEX soaring to currently 6.7mil from 6mil yesterday. I bought my PLEX a while ago at 6 mil so I should have been quids in but I spent it on PLEXing my accounts. Still saved a fortune on that, even if 86Bn in one go is pretty painful.

I have 5 LSI's which dropped to 790mil but that's only a 5-6Bn loss in isolation. HyperCores account for another 13Bn or so in losses today.

I did recently buy 30 Skill Extractors during the cash sale and sell them a few days ago for ~5% profit after tax which was nice. And I've decided to spend 30Bn on 75 now with an eye to hopefully making 10% or so over the next few months.

All this does go to show the sheer volatility and unpredictability of investing in PLEX and PLEX adjacant items. You are completely at the whims of CCPs marketing team. I will probably keep dipping my toes in here knowing me, but I want to get to 1Tn of normal sell orders and then start investing in in game items more, like salvage.

All this doesn't give a full accounting of my operating profits either. If I add in the amount spent PLEXing my accounts (86Bn) and PLEXing my industry accounts (58Bn) I'd have a current position of 1.12Tn, which works out to 342Bn over the year or 28.5Bn/month. That's much more healthy and reflective of what buying in Jita and selling in Amarr/Dodixie/Rens/Hek has done for me. I'd love to achieve that again this year. Time will tell.

In September I also started my Industry challenge, starting from zero on a new character and seeing how I get on. Currently on 10.5Bn and loving the change of pace. Though one thing I was going to make a post about today that has now become a foot note is that Zydrine has exploded in price. Now up from 2,500 a few days ago to 3750 in Jita. I have no idea why this is and no-one appears to be discussing it. This has made mobile depots (for one) completely unprofitable. I'd love to get an idea why this is and if it's an isolated thing or a disturbing trend. I can't think of anything in the Capsuleer day event that would cause this but maybe I'm wrong. Suggestions in the comments if you've any idea please!

A little bit of mining

 Recently I decided to try to add an activity to my arsenal for when I'm waiting  for my runs to complete, mining.

For some people this will have been one of the most boredom inducing sentences it's possible to read about EVE Online, but I have my reasons. For one thing, it is undoubtedly industry related, so fits within the confines of my challenge well. It's something I can do ad hoc as the Industry Park I operate out of in null is upgraded with mining anomalies so there's always something to go after. And it also gets me out in space which aside from hauling isn't something I do much. 

At the moment I've started very small, a single Retriever with a semi-tank fit that is protected by my main with actual piloting skills who sits in a Gila and kills any rats that warp in and threaten my barge. 

My other null-sec character is currently training into flying barges as well so I should be able to up this fleet to 3 soon. I've registered with Horde's "mining tax" website which works out how much you mine in a month and sends you an invoice of ~10% per character over 1 Bn. I find this whole system a bit silly, but given that I am very unlikely to go over this limit any time soon I'll just tick that box and carry on as I please.

I am considering putting my main in a porpoise to provide boosts, but I'm not sure if that counts as "cheating". I do have a rorqual on that character but it seem egregiously silly to risk that to boost a single mining barge. Maybe one day as things scale up.

I will never make mining my main activity but it's something to do in a bit of downtime once all my slots are taken care of.

I also passed the 10Bn in worth this week, which is a cool milestone. In the last few days things have slowed as Mobile Depots have started dropping in price and the mats have gone up, though I have been able to source some from buy orders. I will probably slow down on producing them for now and move those slots to something else until margins improve again.

Speaking of slots, I'm still struggling with keeping my 2 null characters fully utilised. As one of them does all the buying/selling/hauling, I find workign out what my alt is going to do, then hauling the materials and trading them + blueprints back and forth a bit tedious, especially when I'm trying to also keep on top of reactions that are done in another system. I can see how people like Sir SmashALot ended up in a Lowsec freeport with a corp office for themselves. I think it's something I'd consider looking at in future though i don't know how the logistics for that would look and I'm a long way off flying my own Jump Freighters. TBD on this. The other option is a alt corp blue to pandemic horde, but I don't know the details of that so it might not be for me either.