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.