Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

I am still up at my parents for a break over Christmas, so I am away from my main PC, and I forgot to send myself things like trade spreadsheets and market quickbars, which are stored in the client locally...Oh well! A proper update will have to wait until I return home.

For now though, I will talk about cyclical price spikes, or to put it another way, speculating.

Specifically, speculating on snowballs.

For the past year now, I have had a buy order up in Jita for snowballs that couldn't realistically be filled, in the region of hundred of thousands of them, for between 150 and 300 ISK each, depending on what the other orders are at the moment. This was with a  view to selling my collection over Christmas when demand, and therefore the price, spikes dramatically.

By the start of this week, I had accumulated approximately 650,000 snowballs. Assuming a worst case scenario of 300ISK each we get a total investment of 195 million ISK. Over the last few days I  put sell orders up for 1-2 hundred thousand of them at a time, priced between 1000 and 2000ISK each. All of these have now sold, and taking an average price of 1500ISK per unit (the price most of them sold for) and that leads to a total sell of 975 million ISK. Meaning a profit of 780 million, minus fees.

If you look at the price graphs for snowballs, you can pretty much guarantee that they will spike in both price and demand over the Christmas period (for obvious reasons) so this was a pretty "safe bet" as far as speculating goes. This is not an item that is particularly at the mercy of patch notes or changing metas, as people always want snowball fights.

You might be thinking "a whole YEAR for 780 million!?! there is plenty more I can do with the money in that time!" and you'd be right. But if you have a spare 100 million lying around not doing anything, it might be worth thinking about putting up an order and leaving it. I only updated this once every 2 weeks, and was probably the lowest effort money I've ever made, even if extremely long term.

When looking at ways to make money in EVE it is always worth looking for a niche to exploit. I'm sure there are plenty more than this, but I thought I would share one that worked for me.