May Update - Trading

 Another decent month this one, here's the summary:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.257Tn ISK. That's an increase of 30Bn ISK, or 967mil ISK/day.

That's decent, I'm happy with that. Some of the increase is down to an increase in the value of Skill Extractors, though that is offset by a decrease in the price of hypercores. Both of these seem to have levelled off a bit now, and I'll probably start liquidating them both next month to avoid being caught out by another sale. My general plan with these now is to build up PLEX during off times/cash sales, then spend it during NES sales on items such as Skill Extractors and Hypercores. Then ride the price rise, sell the items and invest the money back in PLEX. Rinse and repeat. If I can make 20% profit per go at this it will really multiply my ISK, as there is no real ceiling on the amount I can pour into this the market cap is so massive.

My day to day regional trading has been fine, no real news there. I usually do a trade run once per week or when a character has about 10Bn in cash, so it doesn't take me much time to keep on top of it.

One point the dipped my worth this month is the writing off of my 5Bn ISK loan to ARDCO. Ardel Corvallon made a short video outlining that he was no longer enjoying the game and was leaving. It is always a shame when a content creator leaves the space, however this ultimately is a game and I wish him well in whatever he chooses to do going forwards. I had never seriously expected the money back anyway, I was just hoping it would help drive some in game content which it seems to have done.

Auner structures saved

A quick on this morning. I logged in to check the result of the armour timer for the Auner facilities having asset safetied my stuff last night, to be met with this:

 I'm genuinely pretty surprised by this. The discord is still locked so no info there. Also nothing I can see on Reddit about this. I'm guessing after Ray's actions Snuff decided not to turn up?

On the one hand, this means I don't have to spend ages moving my setup if I don't want to, which is a nice option to have. Although this is the second time this has happened, so it likely will again. 

The downside is I have another 4 and a half days before I can access my stuff as I put it into asset safety. Then I'll have to spend ages ferrying it back and forth from the NPC station, which is annoying.

I honestly don't know if I'm going to continue here or not. It's the path of least resistance but I'm not sure if it's the most stable long term. I guess no-one can answer that.

One thing I have learned so far doing industry is you need to be prepared to move on very little notice! Trading is much simpler in so many regards, this especially.

Moving my low sec industry set up...

 I had been planning to finally get my May Update out (I've just been lazy on that, though it's actually been pretty positive), however I have something pressing to deal with this evening:

These structures were reinforced not too long ago, and it didn't come to anything. So why is this different?

Well...

There was some drama recently over a EVE streamer taking offence to someone posting a pride flag in his chat (this is relevant I promise). That turned into some Reddit drama, but wouldn't normally affect too much outside of him.

However, in this case, Fern Kitsuen, the public face and community manager of the EVEGuru project waded in and used the EVEGuru platform and YouTube channel to post a video. I did not see this video, but from snippets of transcripts I saw floating around it seemed like he went really off the deep end into some really foul far right talking points that I won't go into here. Like I say, I did not see it before it was taken down, I was mostly enjoying a weekend with my family away from all this.

All this while the developer of EVEGuru was away on holiday with his family, so largely unaware this was going on/unable to respond about it.

The EVE community in the main took this...poorly. The EVEGuru structures were reinforced almost instantly, with a firm promise they will be destroyed, and I expect a lot of piling on for the kill mails here.

Since returning to the fray, the developer, Ray Zolo, has handled all this I think very well. He put out an apology, distanced himself from Fern/the views expressed, got hold of the Youtube account details from Fern, took down the video, and kicked him from discord/is trying to remove him from the corp and everything else. A lot of damage control.

I do feel for Ray, he seems like he want to quietly develop the tool and play the game, and let Fern handle the public facing parts that he doesn't want to do. And Fern cause him all these issues. Also the discord server has descended into a level of toxicity I have not seen in quite some time, and had to be locked. The internet can be the worst sometimes.

Also Fenris Creations is going to have to do some PR/damage control as both the people involved in this are (at time of writing) part of their EVE partner program. There are going to be some tense meetings in the office tomorrow morning.

So why does this affect me? Well, I have been recently operating out of the EVEGuru facilities for T2 ship production. I haven't fully dived into it headlong but I'm in the middle of my 5th production run, and was getting into the swing of things. Now, suddenly, I have this evening to make a decision on whether to asset safety my stuff there or try and get it out. As the reinforce timers come out during the night this can't wait until morning.

I don't have any jobs running right now (I had some reactions going that finished this evening) but I do have almost 1 million m3 of materials in system. My characters there currently do not fly anything bigger than a Tayra, I'm training into DSTs there. I do have a DST in Akonoinen but that is 25 jumps away. So getting my stuff out is going to be a time consuming exercise.

On balance of time I think I'm going to have to asset safety to in system (should only cost me 0.5% of value to pull out) and then over the next however long do runs to extract the stuff to akonoinen and complete this run from there. From there I'll have a decision to make about whether to go to one of the existing freeports in Amamake or Huola, or join a null block and work from there.

Absolutely non of this is fun for anyone involved, and I hate that we still have incidents like this occasionally. Here's hoping this is the last we see of this sort of thing.

April Update - Industry

 A belated update on industry. And another fairly flat month:

My net worth is 59.5Bn, that's an increase of 600mil, or 20mil ISK/day.

Well, it's not negative, but it's not really positive either. So what gives? Have I just forgotten how to make money with industry?

Not exactly. My usual medium rigs have been continuing their slow downward trend which makes profiting off them very difficult. I've been constantly chasing prices down just to get revenue. But I have been making money with them. The bigger thing has been starting a lowsec industry set up.

I've spent time and money getting a set of blueprints and reaction formulae to Auner in Minmatar lowsec, and working out the logistics and contract mechanisms. That all went fine, but I also found I had to spend hundreds of millions on skills that I was lacking across a couple of characters, which eats into my profits. 

Also, building ships is slow. These first few runs have really been test runs to get the mechanisms setup, make sure my blueprints are in the right place, materials in the right stations, that sort of thing. This aspect has been a success, but actually selling the finished product has been a challenge.

Sabres have fallen in price, when I started my build run they had a 22% profit margin, but they have fallen to a 52 week low price where the margin is just 2%...I spend more than that on shipping alone!

T2 transports haven't been much better either. Though I'm just getting started with those. TBH I'm not thrilled with the outcome so far, but there's a lot to work out. Onwards!

April Update - Trading

 A better month this one, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. Here are the numbers:

And here's the full numbers:

My current net worth is 1.227Tn ISK, that's an increase of 55Bn ISK, or 1.83Bn ISK/day.

That's a massive jump, close to a record I think. So why the big increase?

Well, there's one reason, and it's not to do with my regional trading. As pointed out in an earlier post CCP (now Fenris Creations, or FC I guess) made a return to FOMO sales in a big way. The headlines were 3 for 1 HyperCores and 3 for 2 Skill Extractors. Both are huge, but the hypercores are unprecedented.

As such I liquidated everything I could and dumped as much as possible into both of those items, with a heavy emphasis on Skill Extractors as those tend to recover in price faster. The sale has now ended and the price of both commodities jumped a lot more than I was expecting to be honest, currently up 44% and 21% respectively.

The more I think about how to scale wealth into the trillions the more I think this is the best way to do it. The market cap for PLEX adjacent items is massive, far far bigger than any in game items. This will allow me to keep putting more and more money into it and get a similar percentage return regardless as I am unable to ever have enough to meaningfully affect the market price. As such going forwards I'm going to be putting what profits I can from my regional trading towards this kind of speculation, and try and ride the waves of NES sales for profit.

With these current investments I am looking to start selling off hypercores once they hit 300k or we get to 4 months from the sale (late July), whichever comes first. For the Skill Extractors I want to sell off once the price hits 480mil(ish), with again a cutoff of late July to start liquidating. That's because I would expect more big sales in late summer/early autumn to entice people back in after their summer holidays.

Lowsec Industry - early observations and bottlenecks

 So far on my industry journey I've stuck to high sec, and within that primarily rig manufacturing. What this has done is trivialise logistics, as Jita is only ever a few safe jumps away, my stuff is in NPC, and salvage and rigs are low volume, with a single stage of manufacture. It's industry on easy mode (which is why I've been surprised at how far I was able to squeeze the profits with it until relatively recently).

Lowsec ship productions, particularly tech 2, has a whole range of issues though.

Firstly, getting materials to lowsec. There is a corp, Citadel Hauling Solutions, with whom EVEGuru has a deal that makes this step easy, even though it involves a bit of waiting. It does add some cost though.

I say it makes it easy, but that's only partially true. Minerals such as Tritanium are very bulky. Indeed so much so that for my transport ship run I elected not to import the minerals for the Tayras I need. I will need to work out if either bringing in compressed ore works best (probably) or running it myself from Hek. I will need refining skills for this though, which I currently don't have. 

Secondly, with these being multi stage projects having up to 5 stages Fuel Blocks and reactions are real time bottlenecks:

These are just for 1 type of ship! Then once I've done all that I need to do this:

It's clear that reaction slots are going to be a real bottleneck going forwards. Sir SmashALot said the same in his interview with Oz where he was going over his industry setup. I'm really starting to appreciate why that's the case.

Fuel blocks present their own relatively minor logistical issue. The inputs for fuel blocks are simple and the manufacturing is fast, but the end product is bulky and I need to move them from the Forge to the Foundry to run reactions. These 2 structures are aligned to you insta-warp from 1 to the other, which is nice. But today I had to move 250,000m3 of fuel blocks, in a Badger. I was able to fit it with all the expanded cargoholds and rigs I wanted as it's very safe. but it was a lot of back and forth trips. I think ultimately I'll want a freighter in system for this purpose alone.

So, how do I resolve these bottlenecks?

- Mineral capacity I need to train for refining and work out which compressed ores to import for what minerals. I'm sure there are tools for this. I'll find one and use it. I might even be able to do it in EVEGuru.

- Reaction slots, again this will involve training characters and bringing them down. I think I'm going to move a few characters down to support this and leave a smaller setup in high sec.

- internal logistics I think I will bring down my former null sec character with his deep space transport and use that for hauling between the structures. It can carry over 60,000m3, which is a lot better than the badgers 16,000m3

I'm enjoying this new challenge of working all this out! To be honest pumping out the same rigs in the same station in high sec had become dull, so it's nice to have a whole new set of challenges to work out.

Setting up the next run - Deep Space Transports!

 So while I work through the stages on my Sabre run:

I was thinking about next steps. I remembered that I had some T2 hauler BPCs that I hadn't utilised, due to the profit margin being in the single digits or negative most of the time. But I decided to run it through the industry calculator for Auner and see what it comes out with:

Well that's slightly better than 2%!

I decided to commit and ran all my hauler blueprints down to Auner, and buy the materials for 10 Bustards as a first run, remembering to include the blueprints this time. This cost me a grand total of about 2.5Bn, along with 145mil hauling fees. Noted for later.

EVEGuru makes this really easy, as you can create a project in the production ledger, and then selecting the project it gives you a shopping list. From there you can right click and copy for multibuy, imports from clipboard in EVE and there you have it, all input materials bought!

I will say, having not previously used the production ledger much, being able to check off the stages of a multi stage project is really nice. I can see this being the way I keep track of these projects going forwards. Just have to try and keep them up to date, cross checking with amounts when I have several stages going at once. 

I feel like there's a lot of process to optimise here, but I am liking this so far. Doing t2 ships also has the advantage of stages running for multiple days, so I don't have to be as ever present as I do for medium rigs. Once I find a flow here I can see this being something I need to check on every few days to keep on top of it and make a healthy margin, which will be really nice.