A new Industry Creator

 I've recently started watching a new EVE industry content creator on youtube, EVE Compass 

He has done an industry podcast with a couple of guests, the most recent one being Ardel Corvalon, CEO of ARDCO, who I've loaned 5Bn to support his industry buyback program. 

The new podcast takes more of a conversational tone, going into why the guest got into what they're doing, challenges they've faced and how they overcame them, as well as things like burnout. A really good listen.

He's also started his own progression series, From Rocks to Riches, where he started with an alpha character and is making a go of industry. Only 1 episode so far but I'll be keeping track with interest.

It's nice to see some recent additions to the industry content creation game. I've said this before but I think we're in a really good place for this sort of content and there's a lot more than there used to be a few years ago, which is great. Gives me stuff to watch on the train into London!

Deflation and reduced economic activity

 So, at the moment we're in a period of arguable deflation within EVE. Oz has done an analysis in greater detail that I could here: Feb MER analysis

But essentially, ISK velocity is down, mining is up, destruction is down, prices continue to fall.

As to why, I think we're really feeling the effects of Pandemic Horde's collapse. Both them and Goons were gearing up for a big war, which would have meant large amounts of destruction, requiring replacement ships/modules/deadspace kit and pushing up the ISK velocity. 

Instead what we have is a place where the 3 big blocs, Goons, INIT and Frat, are all in full "stockpile" mode, where they are mining/building like crazy and not destroying much. This pushes prices down due to a flood of minerals and salvage, and demand down due to not needing to replace anything at scale.

What this means for me, personally, is it's becoming harder and harder to make money. My core regional trade business is suffering as the demand for deadspace/faction items is dropping so my overall income is down. In my industry side things are worse as I'm having to drop prices to keep pace with where things are and get some liquidity, which I'm using to keep slots busy for smaller margins. And since I'm essentially just adding to the flood of the market I either push my prices down to get liquidity, or I keep them where they are and just build up sell orders that are never going to go anywhere. It feels like I'm running just to stand still.

These phases happen in EVE, and if it continues too much CCP will step in or eventually a significant conflict will kick off, but right now it's hitting my motivation as it just feels like I'm not achieving much right now.

I'm still waiting for skills to train to get some alts into producing T2 hulls so I can switch to higher margin items as well, which is again frustrating but at least gives me something to look towards.

February Update - Industry

 An even worse month than trading this one. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 61.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 500mil, or 18mil/ISK/day.

Truly dreadful, so why?

Well, likewise I only played half the month as you can clearly see on the graph. I have also been fighting to try and improve my main issue, which is revenue. 

Without revenue, I don't have the money for materials to build things, so I need to improve that. Currently I struggle to keep my slots all busy. Therefore I've been much more aggressive than usual in updating sell orders for my wares. The problem is, salvage is falling in value due to peace time well and truly setting in, so rigs are also falling. 

I'll keep fighting like this until things stabilise, but I also need to branch out. I've been saying for a long time that I want to give low sec industry a go, and I've finally started moving in that direction.

I have 1 character who was building t2 haulers while the margins were good, but that has completely evaporated in high sec now, and has been like that for a while. However, looking at EVEGuru the margins if you do your own reactions and build t2 components in lowsec are very good. As a result I've moved this character to Aunur, to the lowsec foundry run by EVEGuru, and I'm training skills for this new venture. These include things like Mass Reactions and the Advanced form, but also Advanced small ship construction (I'm thinking or starting out doing Sabres) and other skills needed for the t2 components that go into ships. Step 2 will be to buy the blueprints I need, ship them down and start researching them, then ship in materials and do a couple of exploratory runs.

I'm excited for where this goes. I'm also working on a "building rigs in high sec" guide as well, which I hope to publish this month so that people can tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to improve my process. Interesting times ahead!

February Update - Trading

 Not an amazing month this one, I hardly played for the first 2 weeks and it showed. Still, here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.161Tn ISK. That's an increase of 8Bn, or 285mil/ISK/day.

So that's pretty poor, why so bad?

Well, as explained, I basically didn't play for the first 2 weeks, but additionally, when I was updating my "investments" towards the end of the month I realised I had 100 extra master-at-arms cerebral accelerators listed on my sheet than I actually had in my inventory. This wasn't a new mistake and was listed on my last sheet, so I could go back and adjust my accounting there, but that could get messy so I'm just updating it here. So operating profit wise I'm probably about 6Bn better than that.

Additionally, I've not really been doing anything new with my money. What I am starting to prep for is seeding a market to branch out. I've chosen the "PleniMart" in Kihtalid for this experiment. It ranks in the top 40 markets galaxy wide and is being operated by Thanak of the Building my Industrial empire series. Well worth a watch. What started out as one man trying to get into industry has turned into an alliance encompassing high sec and null sec, and has pulled in the likes of ARDCO into its ranks. 

This planned seeding will be using different items to my normal regional trading, likely more common items to get greater turnover. I will also be competing with Croda, who has recently started seeding this station. We'll see how this goes. I suspect my item choices might be slightly different from his, but greater supply can only help further cement PleniMart as a real secondary trade hub.

This should also help me hit one of my other goals I've had for a while to hit 1Tn in sell orders, which I'm also there at right now.

A rare gank attempt

 So the other night someone attempted to gank me.

I was on my way back to Akonoinen, in a DST with about 3Bn in materials for a run, then when I jumped into Vellaine I loaded grid with 7 ships, mainly Oracles. I knew what was up and aligned to warp and turned my tank on along with my MWD. I was promptly locked up and...brought to about half shield. I remembered I hadn't overheated so did that and the second volley hit...knocking off about another quarter of my shield. 

By that point CONCORD had flooded the grid and all 7 assailants died in an expensive fireball, leaving me with 7 kill rights to use, which is nice. 

I was never going to use them myself, but fortunately I don't have to, so I made them available for all to use for 10 or 15 million each. Over the next 2 days I got these mails:

And just like that I was about 90mil richer. Just goes to show that it's worth having your haulers fully tanked, and remember to train Thermodynamics so you can overheat. 

If he had calculated properly it would have cost me about 3.3Bn, as he failed it cost him somewhere around 700mil and I gained 90mil. Quite the swing based on results.

January update - Industry

 Similar to my trading update here in that I didn't play that much, and there were headwinds that affected my overall profit quite heavily. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 61.2Bn ISK. That's an increase of 1.4Bn or 45mil/day.

That's really poor. 

The primary reason here is a lack of proper play and investment, so my slots were not kept busy very much this month. Additionally, logic circuits and medium rigs were fluctuating and frequently unprofitable, negatively affecting my worth even when I was producing.

Really, what I need to do is diversify my characters skills and blueprints, so that I can pivot more easily in these situations going forwards. Also, I should buy a freighter, so that I can shift minerals more easily. Rig margins vary quite heavily and can move quickly, but something I produce a bit of every now and again that maintains a healthy margin is Siege modules. And I don't specifically mean Siege Module I or II, but the category of modules that fall under that. In my case I sometimes produce Medium or Large Industrial Cores. Both the T1 and T2 versions are always profitable, though a job run can take a week to do. I suspect this plays into the margins. They are however quite space intensive, usually requiring several DST runs to shift the materials or the modules one way. I can fix that with a freighter, which I think my CEO character can now fly.

The other thing I'd like to do is look into longer running jobs. For a least some characters. Rigs are great for a quick turnaround but I can't always log in enough to take advantage of that, so some longer running things would be great to weave in. Maybe take a look at building t2 hulls in Auner. We'll see.

January update - Trading

 A bit of a delayed update this one, for a couple of reasons. Real life has thrown up a fair amount over the last month or so, with work being pretty hellish. We had a number of time critical bits combined with major incidents and our product owner is leaving us, so I've picked up some of his responsibilities in his absence. So I've had very little time for coding and little time and energy for gaming. I've also been ill this last week or so, well enough to work but ill enough to not want to sit staring at a screen gaming. The worst kind of illness. 

Anyway, my numbers from the end of Jan:

And the full breakdown:

I have a net worth of 1.153Tn ISK. That's an increase of 31Bn ISK, or 1Bn/day.

All things considered I'm pretty pleased with that. I haven't done as many trade runs as usual, but I'm back to making a healthy profit again which is great. I've also gone in and done 1 or 2 updates from some expired orders in sobaseki (far right of the sheet) in addition to my normal sale locations of Amarr, Rens, Hek and Dodixie. It's not a big earner but I want to liquidate that before deciding if I want to pick it up as a proper sale location again.

Some investment increases have helped as well, Large Skill Injectors have taken a bit of a jump, as well as hypercores taking another step towards PLEX parity. I've begun liquidating these, hoping to be completely free of HyperCores by the end of March realistically.

Loans

You may have noticed an extra line in my summary, "loans". This is just one loan actually, but I've left it as a plural in case I end up giving more out. Ardel Corvallon, COE of ARDCO and creator of the series Zero to fuel tycoon has begun expanding into wanting to run a buyback to support his miners and get some materials for his corps fuel block production. I've spoken to him on and off over the last few months, he seems like a good guy who's passionately trying to carve out his own niche in EVE, and a number of people seem drawn to his enterprise. I've been keen to support him, even though creating fuels blocks doesn't really fit with my style of industry, so I offered him investment if he needs it. 

I was initially turned down, as he was keen to learn from a smaller base and build up, which is probably the best way and I respect that. However to get some seed money for his buy back he came to me and one other anonymous benefactor asking for 5Bn at a 4% interest rate, with an unspecified return rate.

Now on the face of it this isn't great for me, 4% return for an indeterminate amount of time isn't great. However, this is really about me supporting another content creator in the game, and helping to make the EVE cluster feel more alive, so I'm more than happy to provide this, even if, through burnout, personal circumstance or simply a scam I never get the 5.2Bn. It's hardly a major loss for me (I've lost more to erroneous broker fees than that!).

I'm keen to see where his journey takes him, and how he can make this scale and work in the future.