June Update - Industry

 A slightly less positive outlook for this side of the business:

My current net worth is 67.1Bn ISK, and increase of 3.9Bn ISK or 130mil/day.

A slight improvement on last month, but at a cost of 1.015Bn ISK per month in Omega each for 3 accounts, I'm still barely covering the Omega costs for the industry. A large part of this has come down to demotivation. As you can see the month started strong, really strong, then fell back as salvage prices dropped and then my updates stopped. 

Producing a small basket of items gives me good control of my inputs but it does mean that if the market shifts - and it frequently does - I'm completely at its mercy. I need to have a wholesale rethink about how I handle this part of the business and how I approach things going forwards in a better way. I have been skilling up towards building bigger tech 2 ships, and I have been selling inventory to free up money to pivot as I need to. At time of writing I have over 25Bn in the corp wallets, which is a good starting point for any new direction I take my industry.

I have also partially reclaimed the money spent shipping in fuel block components to Auner by flying my finished T2 haulers myself to Rens and Hek. They sell for a big mark up there and it saves me hauling costs. This is time consuming though and not at all scalable, so I don't want to pivot too hard towards this as manually flying back and forth, even if it's only 3 jumps each way, is the sort of thing that drove me to quit before COVID!

I'm going to spend some time this month exploring a few things though and I'll hopefully have a plan and a direction to bring fully online after our family holiday in August.

June Update - Trading

So, a bit of an unusual on this one. Here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.22Tn ISK. That's a change of -25Bn ISK, or a loss of 833mil/day.

That's a dramatic decrease, but I'm honestly thrilled! 

So, what happened and why am I happy? Well, as outlined in my previous posts this month, I cashed out all of my Skill Extractors and HyperCores, as they reached my profit window and I could smell something coming in the NES. In the event I wasn't quite right in my guess, but I cashed out at the right time! I was able to end up with about 430Bn ISK to plough into PLEX, and then the day after FC dropped a 25% off Omega sale in the NES. I pulled the trigger for all 7 of my accounts, both trading and industrial, meaning most of my accounts are Omega'ed until the end of 2027.

Given I paid 4.5mil per PLEX and a years Omega cost 2700 per account I paid 12.15Bn ISK per account, for a total of 85.05BN ISK.

If you add that back in they I would have a net worth of 1.305Tn, or a monthly operating profit of 49Bn ISK.

A chunk of that is due to the increase in Skill Extractors and HyperCores before I sold them, and also I sold all my PLEX during the sale for a high of 5.1mil per PLEX (or about 12% profit before fees), which is why I'm sat on 445Bn ISK at the end of month. Once the sales all end I expected PLEX to drop in price again and I would pick more up. 

This ended up being exactly what happened and at time of writing I'm sat on 92,000 PLEX bought for (at max) 4.6mil each.

My trade revenues "feel" good though, and a large portion of my profits also came from that. I'm making trade runs regularly and am pretty happy with that part of the business, even though it isn't really growing right now it's just feeding money into my gambling investment pool.

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.