Cashing out the cash out

 Well, no sooner had I poured everything I could into PLEX than FC woke up and decided to put a 25% discount on Omega time!

This means I can get a years Omega for each of my accounts for 2700 PLEX, which when bought at 4,500,000 ISK each (ish) means a years Omega for 12,150,000,000 ISK, or 1.012Bn ISK/month

That is an unbelievable bargain. My 4 main trade accounts are omega'd until next april, but my 3 industry accounts run out this year.

I'm instantly going to add game time to my industry accounts, but I'll give a little more thought to my traders. This sale might come up again at the end of the year and I could potentially make more ISK with the money in the mean time.

The rest of the PLEX though I will sell instantly. It currently sits at a sell price of 5.1mil which is about 350,000ISK profit per PLEX after taxes. When this sale is over and the price drops down again I can simply buy the PLEX again.

Indeed, as write this I have already sold 54Bn ISK worth for a profit. I have no idea how much money I'll end up with at the end of this month, but I'm really happy I got out of Skill Extractors while I had the chance! Shame I still have a bunch of HyperCores to sell, but I'll get over it.

Cashing Out

 So, in the last FOMO sale I invested heavily into Skill Extractors and HyperCores, hoping to see a jump and then cash out before the next NES sale. I had in mind mid-late July to start cashing out but FC recently launched a big real money omega/PLEX sale, and handed players 10 PLEX in a pack for Federation Day.

Traditionally NES sales follow real life cash sales, and this one runs out on the 28th June. Also the SE and HyperCores have approached (in hypercores case hit) my "cash out point" of 480mil/280k respectively.

As such my spidey sense is tingling that an NES sale is incoming and I'm unlikely to get too much more profit out of simply holding my items. So I've spent this weekend/week selling these items and putting all the money into PLEX, which has been incredibly stable price wise recently:

I've managed to sell all my SEs for 459mil average, a ~26% profit before taxes/fees.

I'm currently selling HyperCores for ~282,000, though most have been sold for ~272,000. This represents about a 70%(!) marging before taxes. I still have about 300,000 of these I'm selling as well.

I've been buying PLEX at an average of 4.5mil each, and have accumulated...some.

Best case scenario, I'm right and another NES sale hit in July, giving me another opportunity to make 20-30% profit on all this in a few months. Worst case, nothing happens and I use this PLEX to get another years Omega if they run a omega discount around the new year (they usually do). But ultimately this is gambling so I could lose a lot if the price of PLEX tanks. This is not financial advice!

This feels like a strange way to make a lot of in game money through trading real world items rather than purely in game means, but that's unfortunately that's what's incentivised by these FOMO sales.

May Update - Industry

 A bit late posting this, but a slightly better month overall:

My current net worth is 63.2Bn ISK, that's an increase of 3.7Bn ISK, or 119mil/day.

Not amazing, but better than last month. 

To be honest, there's not a lot to talk about here. The price of Logic circuits has risen again, and a bit of a margin opened up with several rigs towards the end of the month (medium CCC, Large EM shield, medium explo armor) which I was able to take advantage of.

I also got more aggressive with adjusting my sell orders to clear out some older stock, which I was able to do. You can see the pale blue line of sell orders plummet over the course of the month. This is great as sell orders sitting around don't do much for me, but cash I can leverage.

I was a bit blunted by the drama surrounding the EVEGuru industrial park, though ultimately nothing came of it and I was able to asset safety mu stuff back to the structures they were in, for a total of about 30million ISK. Annoying that I couldn't access any of it for 5 days but could be worse. I have since picked up that batch where I left off, but once they're complete I'm really not sure if I'm going to continue operating there or not. In the mean time I am training some of my characters towards being able to build freighters/jump freighters, although it is a long train.

I am feeling the call of null sec, and strongly think I'll be putting my main character in a null bloc sooner than later, to get a bit more "in space" time. I've also briefly chatted with CEO Pyrex of SquadB gaming about null industry setups as he used to build supers and titans. It kind of confirmed what I already suspected, but I would like to build my own titan at some point, so I might explore industry in null if/when I get there again.

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!