Saturday 29 September 2018

Further musings

I have a bit of time to play this weekend, quite unusually, and was completely ready to liquidate some of my PLEX stock to get the money to buy, ship and set up a Fortizar in Frarn. However, I realised by the time I'd got my freighter to Jita, bought the fort, and shipped it back (with a webbing alt to make sure I don't get ganked) I wouldn't be able to guarantee I'll be online at the same time tomorrow in order to online a service and take it to full power mode, and make it public. A low power fort left next to a trade hub really is begging to be wardecced/killed.

So I've done some more scouting/studying dotlan, and come up with a couple of alternatives to Frarn. In Heimatar, there is a level 4 mission hub in the system of Lustrevik. I used to do all my level 4 missions out of there myself, and judging by the sheer number of NPC kills there and in surrounding systems a lot of people still do. There isn't a huge market near there for things mission runners need, drones, ammo etc. which surprised me. I wonder if sticking a Fort in there I could seed it myself and create said market, whilst paying only 1% sales tax myself. It would also be much less likely to be destroyed, as people are unlikely to care and there is no competition.

The system next door to that is potentially more interesting though. Eystur sits on the border between Heimatar, and Hek. This therefore puts it 1 jump from a trade hub, whilst being 1 jump from Lustrevik. Potential for an overlapping market of PLEX and mission supplies. Now, being in a different region from Hek, you actually can't see any orders in there from Eystur, but being on the main route between Rens and Hek you'll get a decent amount of traffic. If the IChooseYou trade hubs can't see the orders in Eystur, they might not notice a market fort sitting just next door. I view this as being a lower risk alternative to a trade hub in Frarn, as it's not really competing with Hek orders (directly), so I'm less likely to get wardecced. To be honest I'm really liking this idea, even though I will likely get less in the way of PLEX/skill injector orders. I think sticking it in Eystur on the Lustrevik gate would be the optimal position to be noticed by traffic on its way to Rens, and mission runners in Lustrevik who are sent into Eystur to do missions.

I still need to think about this and plan the putting up of the Fort to minimize the risk of an instant wardec, but I am liking the idea, if nothing else it'll be something I've never done in EVE, and that's always nice.

Friday 28 September 2018

Market Fortizar

I've been thinking recently about other ways of making ISK, specifically having my own market Fortizar.

Normally this would be a terrible idea to suggest, as IChooseYou and their backers/protection Pandemic Horde have a basic monopoly on Fortizars near high sec trade hubs. Interestingly Eve-Mogul has the one by Dodixie.

I was doing a bit of scouting around however, and I noticed that in Frarn next door to Rens, there is the IChooseYou Fort, and a market Fort run by a 5 man corp seemingly unaffiliated with IChooseYou. Maybe they are not that diligent about removing competition these days.

I've been playing around with the mechanics on Singularity, anchoring my own Fort in Frarn and setting it up for market access for everyone, whilst accessing it and setting up orders on my main character who is in Pandemic Horde. A Fortizar and Market service on Tranquility costs about 10.25 Billion ISK. All the other market forts in high sec have 0.5% broker fee. In order to pay off the cost of the fort people would have to set up orders to the amount of 2 Trillion ISK. When someone places an order the broker fee instantly appears in the corp master wallet, which is nice.

By way of example, lets assume I have a Fort in Frarn with 0.4% broker fee, in order to try and take customers from the other forts. At that level I would need people to set up 2.5 Trillion ISK worth of orders in my fort in order to get 10.25 Billion in broker fees. A commonly traded item in Fortizars is Large Skill injectors. In Rens/Frarn about 75 of these are traded a day, for an average of 720 Million ISK. 2.5 Trillion divided by 720 mil is 3559 Injectors. I would need about 47 days worth of orders to be set up in order for it to pay for itself. Now, if I could also grab PLEX, small skill injectors etc. it would pay for itself much faster. Anything after that point would be pure profit.

Now, the fly in the ointment, and my dilemma. Inevitably, at some point I would get wardecced. It will happen. I have never seen a ping for Pandemic Horde to come after any markets other than Rens, but I'm sure IChooseYou would engage the services of SOMEONE to kill my fort eventually. Probably sooner than later. The question is, do I set one up in Frarn and hope for the best (noting that the other fort appears to be unmolested) or do I go the other way and anchor it in Odatrik? Anchoring in Odatrik would probably lead to less orders, but it's probably less likely to be noticed.

I'm leaning towards gambling and anchoring it in Frarn, but it is a 10 bil gamble, and I have no realistic way of defending the fort if attacked, as I simply don't play enough. This is probably a silly idea, but it's something I have never done, and has the potential, if it stays up for a couple of months, of earning me a lot of ISK. I'll have to mull this over.

Sunday 23 September 2018

Expanding Station trading

So on the quiet in the last few months I've been training up and gaining standings on a station trading character for Jita. Gaining standings is a long and very very tedious process. From a brand new character I did all the career agents for Caldari and Amarr (allied), 6 sets in all, then traded in tags for further standings, and lastly trained into a badger for running level 3 distribution missions for Caldari Navy. I spent several weeks idly running distribution missions as long as my sanity could manage whilst doing other things on a second monitor.

I eventually called the character done at 6.51 Caldari State standings and 6.58 Caldari Navy. With Broker Relations V and Accounting V this give me a broker fee of 2.21% in Jita and a sales tax of 1%. I then set up my character in a player owned trade hub in Perimeter, namely "Perimeter - Safe Trade Hub - Panfam Secured" owned by a member corp of Pandemic Horde. This trade hub (and indeed all of them in Perimeter) has a broker fee of 0.5%, which brings the total cost of buying and selling an item in Jita to 3.71% of the items value. I chose this trade hub in particular is I am a member of Pandemic Horde on my main, so if I have to give broker fee money to anyone, I might as well give it to the alliance.

Once set up , I transferred money from my other seller characters, 5 bil from Amarr, and 2.5 bil from Rens and Dodixie, to this new character and began station trading. I haven't had huge amounts of time to play, but I've been having a little more success in Jita than I have in Amarr and I'm currently sat at a little over 11 billion ISK after a week of trading. Not fantastic, but I'm still getting to know the market and I really haven't had much time to trade, a quick 5-10 mins to update orders before work most mornings and that's about it. However I think this is a good extra source of income, so I'm going to keep at it and see if I can play more intelligently and improve my profits.

I'm still training on this character, need Margin Trading V and some more order slots, but once I'm done I'm going to give my Amarr station trader Day Trading II in order to be able to update orders from a trade hub in Ashab, and reduce the fees I pay on that character by about 2%. That should lead to an appreciable increase in profit.

I've started using eve-mogul https://beta.mogulfinancial.space to track my profits on my station traders, as a way to work out which items are making me money, and which I need to cycle out for something else. It provides profit figures on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, so it should make weeding out my worst items a lot easier. You probably won't be seeing me on the leaderboards anytime soon though!

On a separate note, the PLEX sales have ended and the value of PLEX has risen above 3.1 million. 70% of my PLEX was bought for 2.75 mil or less, so this is really heading into profitable territory. If it breaks 3.2 million I will probably cash out most of it and look for other mid-length investments with the cash.

Wednesday 5 September 2018

September Update

I've been away a lot this month (major life events) so I haven't really played much. Indeed, I didn't play at all for almost 3 weeks. Still, I've made some progress, so here's a quick update.

I've provided the 2nd of September sheet, as a nice round month since the last update. As things stand, I have 205 Billion ISK. This represents a monthly increase of 16.2 Billion, or 522.2 Million ISK a day. This is slightly less than last month, which considering my play time is frankly astonishing.

I've also finally breached the magic 200 billion barrier. 20% of the way to being a Trillionaire! OK, that goal is still a LONG way off, so if I'm going to make it before they turn the servers off I'm going to have to branch out into other things, and experiment with new ways of making money. with that in mind I've set myself a target of 300 Billion ISK by 1st January 2019. That's ambitious, but if I'm creative, clever, and a bit lucky I can do it. More on what I'm going to try next update.

I have 3 active accounts, with 5 characters currently dedicated to my trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has no training, and simply buys from buy orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~97.2 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Very close to the magic 100 Billion on a single character. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 55.3 Billion in sell orders.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 55.2 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my good from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. This is mostly implants, so high value, small volume items. This means I can fit everything for all 3 characters in a single Blockade runner, which with its current fit has about 50k EHP, and can warp cloaked. For highsec this is basically invincible, so I'm happy hauling like this, for now.

Amarr station trader

I've branched out slightly into station trading. I have a character in Amarr that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 3.14 Billion.

PLEX Holding

For a while, I was finding that I was having a lot of ISK lying around, not really doing anything. ISK in wallets can't make you money, so it's a bit of a waste of time having. In order to try and make some money with it I made several purchases of PLEX, most recently last August. For a while this was a nice little earner, consistently increasing, but it's been plateaued for a while now. It might be time to look at better long term investments.

Other investments

I'm increasingly finding that I can't re-invest all of my money after every trade run. Therefore I've started looking into mid term investments to make some money on price swings. My first foray into this was buying a bunch of Leopards just after the price inexplicably tanked. This hasn't produced much in the way of value yet, but I'm holding them for the near term. I think I need to do more careful research into my speculations in future, maybe look at the faction warfare swings.