20% off Omega means another account!

 So right now there's a 20% off Omega time in the NES until 24th December. I was planning on creating another industry account so I can get more slots in null anyway, though I was going to wait until after Christmas. Guess it's time to take advantage!

The Sale means 1 year of Omega is currently 2880 PLEX instead of 3600, which is a pretty good deal. I bought 2880 for up to 6,659,000, which cost me a total of 19,160,602,000 ISK. 

This takes my total for PLEXing my industry accounts up to 58,461,120,000 ISK.

I gave my new character 100mil from my industry profits to buy skills and applied for Pandemic Horde, bought some production skills and added them to jEveAssets and EVEGuru. I should be able to get this guy to doing t2 rig/module production fairly quickly and then fill up the other 2 slots. My main null character is busy training spaceship command skills (I want a Blockade Runner and eventually a Jump Freighter) and trade skills so I can't really free up his skill queue for other characters on that account.

Issues in Ikuchi

 So today I've learned of the perils of doing industry out of public upwell structures. Pretty much since the beginning of my industry journey I've been operating out of a Raitaru in Ikuchi, one jump from Jita. This has the advantages of Raitaru bonuses, so 1% ME on everything essentially, as well as taking advantage of the lower cost index of the system (~6%) and a generous 0% tax from the owner.

This afternoon I logged in and all was well. I set off a few jobs, did a quick run to and from Jita, then logged off.

This evening though when I logged in and checked the industry window it looked like this:

Thinking this was a weird graphical glitch or something I logged out and in, but presented with the same thing. Odd. I noticed my EVE Mail blinking and found I had one telling me my corp jobs were paused. I thought maybe the structure is being reinforced, so I tried to undock and check, and was presented with this:

I promptly cancelled out of this as I don't want to be separated from my assets. I thought it was pretty unlikely that the owner of a public structure has taken against me personally, so I checked the corp for the CEO to ping him a message, maybe he was taking the structures down? being extorted out of business?

After a bit of digging I noticed that the founder of the owning corp left 44 days ago, and transferred ownership to another character (interestingly, a former Horde member). I sent him an EVE Mail asking about the status of the structure though I'm not expecting a response. I wonder if this is a malicious takedown? not entirely sure but it looks suspicious.

I also logged in my Jita trade alt and *gasp* undocked! to go see what was up. I had to D-scan the structure to warp to it as it's stopped showing up on overview, but when I did warp to it I was presented with this:

Now it could just be that the new owned has forgotten to refuel it, but I doubt it. I suspect my days operating out of this structure are over. This presents 2 major questions. The first being what happens to all my stuff? From my research it seems I can stop my jobs, in which case I lose my materials and ISK but keep the BP (ouch) though I only have 4 production runs going currently so this could be worse. If the structure gets taken down everything ends up in asset safety and I have to pay money to get it back.

The second is where do I go next? I could operate out of Jita itself. I'd have to deal with the monstrous ~20% system cost index. 

I could move to the other public raitaru in Ikuchi, but I run the risk of this happening again. 

I could move to a different NPC station - Ikuchi has one with manufacturing but no research or copying. Veisto has one with everything, and a system cost index of ~6% for production and ~7% for research. Could be a real winner that one.

Or I could put up my own private structure. I don't really have the funds for that at the moment but it's an option.

TBH I don't know yet. Being as it's quite late at night I'll probably defer this decision as it has fairly far reaching consequences. Either way I've lost ISK but my blueprints should be safe. This is a very annoying setback.

Throughput struggles with Tech 2

 On my Null character I'm pretty well invested into tech 2 production. What I've been doing is taking the list of seeded rigs/modules from the alliance and bought blueprints for them, some of them anyway. Then I've got a bit of a production line going where I invent/produce Tech 2 items from them. 

These have the advantage of moving selling faster than tech 1 stuff, as people burn through them doing normal PVP/PVE activities, but I've run into a throughput problem.

Small/medium rigs and drones have a production time of a couple of hours at most:

The issue with this is that I can't log on every 2 hours to start up new jobs. For the medium rigs like this I can add a decryptor that tanks the success chance but ups each to 10 runs which helps keep my slots busy, but it's something I'm trying to work a balance out for it. I think I'll probably settle on a system where I do short runs when I know I'll be around again in a few hours and larger items/longer runs at other times.

I also think I need more slots in null, but my existing character is doing a lot of training to do with selling/flying better hauling ships etc. so I think I'll probably start up another account this month to get myself additional slots.

Also I subscribed to EVEGuru, costing me 200mil. This means I can utilise all my characters in there and get more accurate estimates for my null character, as his skills are different to my highsec guy who can't yet do tech2. I'm hoping they come through with the roadmap item to get sell prices from player owned structures, as that will make it infinitely more useful for planning out my null operations.

November Update - Industry

 A big uptick in terms of profit here, and a few changes! I haven't added any new characters this month but I have upskilled and begun tech 2 production, and started making use of the EVEGuru tool (highly recommend by the way). My current totals:

And here is my jEveAssets graph:

My current new worth is 3.045Bn ISK. That is an increase of 2.191Bn or 73mil ISK/day. 

That's a lot better than last month, for the same few characters. You can probably notice a sharp uptick in the graph from the 12th onwards. This is when I started using EVEGuru. It's an 3rd party desktop app that at its simplest will trawl all the items in the game that you give it parameters for (so for me mostly t1 stuff, modules and rigs) and spit out all of the profitability at Jita sell prices in a sortable list. As well as giving you breakdowns on how to build, create shopping lists etc. 

I initially looked at this and took some of the higher profit items, bought BPOs and merrily went to build. This led to a very sudden and sharp increase in my worth as jEveAssets thinks I just turned (e.g.) 100mil of minerals into 200 or 300mil of items. This is great in principle but most of those items are actually artificially inflated so to actually sell them you have to either undercut or chase the sell price down. This has lead to the effect you see in the graph, where the manufactured amount is not increasing much (or at all really) but the sell orders is spiking. I am selling stuff, just not as fast as I'd like.

This is an important lesson in interpreting data like this. What I really need is turnover. An item can be up for sale for 1Bn but it's meaningless if it takes me a month to sell when I can sell an item for 150mil 10 times in the same period.

My nullsec character has skilled into (some ) tech 2 construction. I've started building a few things, drones and rigs mostly. I'm enjoying the process, and the turnover is much better than a lot of the tech1 items I build which is great. There's an awful lot of refining of the process to do however. 

I have hopes for EVEGuru again for this though. They are working on getting pricing data for player owned structures which would be huge for me as my main null market is a Keepstar. Also when I upgrade to a paid version I'll be able to utilise all of my characters so I can properly make use of the production ledger to plan t2 production projects. Currently I'm on the trial version which gets you 1 character in the app, the paid version being 200mil per month. Something I'm definitely going to do especially if the pace of development stays anywhere close to what it is now.

So, how am I doing versus my overall targets?

• Invent a t2 item Success!
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original - Success!
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions - One done and another in progress. I might start including these in vertical integration of tech2 production. TBD
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

Another item ticked off which is nice.

Last month's targets:

• Earn 1 Billion - Smashed
• Build a T2 rig - done
• Invent a T2 item - done
• Do more reactions - done, sort of

Pretty good versus my targets actually

Targets for next month:

• Earn 3 Billion
• Skill a highsec character into tech2 production
• Add another null character
• Do more reactions

Early steps into tech2 have been fruitful, so I want to expand that. I also need to work out a process for managing it better as the multiple steps make it harder to track expected profits. I'm going to be relying on tooling for this I think. Trying to avoid having to create my own spreadsheets if I can.

November Update - Trading

 This month I have scaled back the amount of time I spend trading, basically doing 1 update/shipment on Mondays and Fridays to catch and then react to weekends where most of my revenue comes. I've done this mainly so I can concentrate on my Industry. However, some investment price moves make this month a record breaker, my current position:

My current net worth is 1.059Tn ISK, an increase of 76.2Bn ISK. That works out at 2.54Bn ISK/day.

That is record breaking! My previous highest month was 56.7Bn, so this is well above that. Also the first time I've managed over 2Bn a day! So how have I managed that whilst keeping my time played low?

First, I've focussed entirely on buying in Jita and selling in Rens, Hek, Dodixie and Amarr, and a little station trading in MJ-. The other characters I have not touched. They add very little to my business at the moment so I don't see it as being worth my time right now. In fact I intend to funnel some of their assets to the main group.

Second, my investments have been good this month. I was able to cash out of capacitor control circuits and power circuits for good margins, and HyperCores have finally shot up a bit. To the point that I've started cashing some of them out that were bought at a very low price. I have no intention of being caught short by a CCP sale a second time! I have put some of that money into other investments, namely Skill Extractors and Large Skill Injectors but I am intending to expand my main group this month as well.

Compared to the last couple of updates I haven't had any significant PLEX outlay either, though I am expecting more down the road so TBC in December.

So looking at last months plans:

Hit 1 Trillion. Again. Tick

Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments. Sort of, want to lean into this more though

Move the majority of my stock from Tash-Murkon to Amarr to liquidate and repurpose this character. Tash-Murkon frequently has expiries, and it's just not working out. I need a wholesale rethink here. Failed. I didn't log into that character once. Will do in December though

Targets for this month:

• Move Tash-Murkon's stock and liquidate it
• Make 50Bn operating profit (discounting any extra PLEXing I do to support industry)
• Continue to expand the amount of money invested with my main group of traders

Similar to last month the cadence works well for me, though with Christmas upcoming this month might be a little lower in terms of when I can log on.

Ganked

 So, had my first setback being ganked. I was hauling about 100mil worth of stuff from the industry park to MJ and I wasn't checking intel. Jumped a gate and saw a neutral orthrus sitting waiting for me. Not much I could do but attempt to burn back to gate, which failed:

Even after this setback I'm still 50mil up for the day, so could be worse. Still, will teach me to be more careful in future. I can't wait to get to a point where I'm using jump freighters, then I'll be 100% safe going from structure to structure!

First invention runs

 My Null sec character has finally got to the point where he has the skills to begin t2 invention and production. There are more of these than you'd think, as you can see from this afterburner BPC:

I've created max run copies of 5 different items, and will use those as my "learn by doing" blueprints. These are not strictly the most profitable, but they're small and in good demand and should each be individually profitable, hopefully.

EVE Guru works out the decryptors you should need to get the best result. For these items it's none, but I checked with other items and they do get worked out, I guess the maths just doesn't make sense here:

Invention runs are slightly more time consuming than I thought, so I'm doing a couple of runs of each. Not ideal given the success chance is around 35-37% depending on item but it'll give me a chance to check them later and look to actually build some:

I have, however, run out of lab slots to invent them all, I guess this is why people have copy alts and invention alts! It'll take a bit of working out to get a systems I'm happy with set up for this. But I feel learning by doing is important for me to work out where the kinks are and where I can start to streamline. 

Reactions profit calculator

 In my ongoing search for a way to do reactions profitably as an in and out simple production line I've come across this tool: https://reactions.coalition.space/

It presents, in simple terms, the profitability of each type of reaction based on Jita prices. This is exactly what I was looking for, and after having a little poke around I decided to do a Carbon Fiber run:

Reactions do take a long time, which explains why Sir SmashAlot has so many accounts dedicated just to reactions. A lot of people do reactions as part of vertical integration for tech 2 production, but my initial plan here is to export the result to Jita and sell it. Hopefully the profit margins hold up by the time it comes out!

An Interview with one of EVE's biggest industrialists

 I recently watched a video on OZ's channel where he interviews Sir SmashAlot, an extremely large player in the T2 ship and structure rig markets, who has scaled to a point where he apparently pays 6% of the universes install fees alone! And has revenue of 7.5 Trillion a month!

That is just...staggering. Inspiring, but staggering. It's a great interview where he talks about his setup, how he got where he is and what it's like to play at that level. 

Interview with Sir SmashAlot

As someone who is currently struggling to get tech 2 production straight in my head, and grappling with scaling I think this is something I'll come back to to gain some insight and motivation. He describes null industry as having lumpy demand, which is definitely something I've experienced even at a small scale and become frustrated with. I have been tempted to simply revert to primarily highsec for a while but I think that what I'm facing is clearly surmountable, I just need to work things out properly to get there. 

I highly recommend this if you're looking to scale industry seriously, and would be fascinated to find anything similar or how other people have done it as I haven't cracked it myself yet.

EVE Guru

 A while ago I was able to catch a stream of Oz_EVE where Fern Kitsuen was showing off an industry tool they've been working on called EVE Guru. Details of it can be found in this thread on the forums:

https://forums.eveonline.com/t/software-eve-guru-a-best-in-breed-manufacturing-planning-tool/464297

I don't use much in the way of tooling, I've downloaded ISK per Hour but haven't really set it up, and I use JEveAssets but that's about it. This tool though aims to combine a lot of information and functionality from other tools and present them in a easily consumable way, as easy as anything to do with EVE industry is consumed anyway.

The run through looked impressive, and a feature I particularly like is you can add a bunch of filters for items you want to build, T1, 2 etc. small, medium, large, rigs, component, whatever. You can then set a minimum demand (average daily trade), profit margins and other stuff, hit update and it will search all the items in EVE that meet your criteria, work out the build cost, taxes, profit, profit per hour or m3 and present it in a big sortable list, where you can drill down and work out what you needs and build shopping lists etc.

I've used settings like this to look for items to build, and, well, here are the results in my jEVEAssets:

That terrible squiggly line shows when I installed and started using EVE Guru. I've gone from making ~40mil a day to well over 100mil a day! And most of it is highsec based.

One thing to bear in mind with this is you get a free trial for 30 days and then it's 200mil a month for unlimited characters and all the features. They're adding more on a near daily basis and have quite a roadmap of stuff to add. If I keep making money like this then 200mil a month seems like the deal of a lifetime for this much productivity!

Free week of Omega with Revenant

 Quick one this, for the release of Revenant CCP has put more login rewards in and also given people a free 10 PLEX and a 1 time offer of 1 week of Omega time for 10 PLEX in the NES. It's also reminded me to collect on the weekly 15,000 SP you get for going into the NES which I often forget. Especially as I'm skilling up for T2 production these are very valuable right now. So log in and claim your free stuff!

Corp Industry management

So in order to scale my industry effectively, in highsec at least, I've been exploring how to have assets accessible by anyone in the corp so that I don't have to make a bunch of item exchange contracts to move assets between characters on the same account. it seems what I wanted to do is possible, if a little unintuitive.

First, you need a corp, obviously. Then, in your station or upwell structure you need to rent an office. I am operating out of a Raitaru in Ikuchi that is not owned by my corp, but I am able to rent a corp office there for 10,000ISK a month. I just need to remember to have that amount in my corp wallet. This should give you a bunch of corp hangers to use:

In order to rename these (like I have done) go to the corporation window as the CEO and select the "Divisions" button:

You can then rename these as you wish. Then you can put items/blueprints into the hangars, and when doing industry jobs you can select the input/output hangars for blueprints owned by corp:

And that's it! With this I can just have the one character do the buying/selling in Jita and transporting, while having full view of all my available blueprints and stockpiles and my other characters remain in situ and operate out of what gets brought in. No contracts required!

October Update - Industry

My second Industry Update. I've done a bit of scaling here, and started out in Null. Enjoying it so far even though there is a lot that I need to learn! My current totals:

And here is my jEveAssets graph:

My current net worth is 854.6 Million ISK. That is an increase of 630.8 Mil, or 20.3Mil ISK/day. That's OK but slightly disappointing if I'm honest. I had really hoped to break the Billion, and 20 mil/day across what is now 3 characters is not amazing, though it has started spiking  recently as the graph shows. I was also away for 4 days towards the end of the month. I suspect if I had been here for those I would have broken the Billion mark, so maybe not as bad as I think.

I have made several advancements this month though. First I created a new account and moved a character to null. The way things are done is definitely different in null. I have to do my industry 3 jumps away from Horde's main staging to take advantage of the Sotiyo for manufacturing and other structures for research/reactions, so I'm currently hauling in a Tayra. This isn't ideal, but it's working at the moment. There are alliance hauling services which I've primarily used to move things to or from Jita but they also do moves within null. I don't really feel I'm at the place where I want to utilise that yet though. My hauls are too small to warrant it. Also the hauling takes a day or so to go to/from Jita, which is slow enough. I'm not at the scale yet where I can wait that long for every job.

Secondly I have made another highsec character to get more job slots, and created a corp to share funds etc. I still need to work out how best to store Blueprints for corp use and pool the outcomes so I don't have to make item exchange contracts to get the stuff to/from my Jita seller. Very much a work in progress here but vital to get right if I'm going to scale this at all.

Early on with T1 manufacturing I have noticed a pattern emerging though. A gap of high profitability opens on an item, it can be ridden to fast profits for a while, then people realise and flood the market and the profitability drops off again. First month it was Cap Boosters that I got a lot out of, this month it was Mobile Depots. For almost the entire month I was able to build them for 1.6mil each from an unresearched BPO, 1.5mil researched, and sell them for 1.9mil. They would also fly off the shelves. I could put up 100 and within an hour they would all be gone. This was great and I scaled this to at one point 12 production lines, but the price has dropped to about 1.75mil. Still profitable with researched BPOs but not worth going crazy about. I've started exploring rigs as an alternative but I think this is going to be the nature of the beast with production.

So, how am I doing versus my overall targets?

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original - Success!
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions - I've completed 1, I still need to research this as I haven't even sold the result of my first one yet.
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

I wasn't expecting to do much more than this this month, but nice to get something ticked off early.

Last month's targets:

• Reach 1 Billion - Failed, but close
• start up an extra account - done
• Move a character to Null - done
• Build something in Null - done
• Add an extra high sec character - done

Pretty good versus my targets actually

Targets for next month:

• Earn 1 Billion
• Build a T2 rig
• Invent a T2 item
• Do more reactions

As you can see, this month targets revolve around getting into tech 2 to work that out. I keep hearing this is where the money is, so let's find out!

October Update - Trading

 Another interesting month for a couple of reasons, though I maintain it has been a good one. My current position:

My current net worth is 982.7Bn ISK, an increase of 31.5Bn ISK, or 1.01Bn ISK/day. 

This is at least positive, but well below where I was, so why do I think this was a good month? 2 main reasons. 1, I started a new industry account, paying 20.2Bn for 1 years PLEX. I have now spent a total of 39.3Bn ISK starting up industry accounts. If I hadn't done this then my monthly profits would be 51.5Bn ISK, which is actually pretty good. 

The second reason is, against all odds the price of HyperCores have come down this month. I am honestly baffled by this one. The 2 for 1 sale ended, and PLEX has been spiking, so the true price for a HyperCore should be about 580,000ISK now, but it's going for 292,000 at the time of writing. I know a lot more people bought a lot more this time, so the stores people have are huge and some people will gladly cash out for a couple of % profit but the fact it's dropped by 5,000 in a month is insane. If it had just held level I'd be 3Bn ISK better off.

On the flip side of this I have cashed out several of my investments for a profits, Logic circuits in particular have done well for me, so it's not all bad. Considering I have hardly touched any characters other than my big 4 sellers (Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek) and my null trader a bit, I'd call this a successful month.

I'm enjoying my Industry and the minute, so I think I'm going to continue to focus on these characters primarily and consolidate my trading to keep the required time down to a minimum. If I can continue to maintain 50Bn a month for this level of effort I'll be pretty happy as it allows me plenty of time for other things.

So looking at last months plans:

• Hit 1 Trillion - Nope, though I would be if I didn't start another account. Will do definitely this month.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments. - Sort of, I still have 246Bn in investments, but my money for BAU trading has increased a little. I think this'll be an ongoing thing really.

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion. Again.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments.
• Move the majority of my stock from Tash-Murkon to Amarr to liquidate and repurpose this character. Tash-Murkon frequently has expiries, and it's just not working out. I need a wholesale rethink here.

Similar to last month overall, but a rhythm I'm mostly happy with given the time investment involved.

A Corp and a second highsec character

 So I'm at a point where my first highsec character is OK skills wise, and is chewing his way through Advanced Broker Relations V. I also seem to be generating a surplus of ISK with what I'm producing, and could use some more slots.

So I've done 2 things. One is to create a corp for my highsec characters. I will use this to transfer money around easily, and I think I can set blueprints to be corp owned and used by my characters. If I can that'd be a huge usability win. TBD on that one.

The second is to create a new character. I've injected mass production and begun production and research in Ikuchi alongside my initial character. This takes my total industry characters to 3. The items I'm producing now sell like hot cakes and so I think I can up my production lines without even changing items and take advantage. It's not the best idea to put so much in one basket but the initial BPO is 1 mil each and each day I'm producing about 2 mil profit per line per day, so even if the margin collapses tomorrow and I have to switch wholesale then I've already paid the BPO costs off many times over. 

I had hoped to get to this point sooner but I've been away for a few days with family. I still have more to look into with this and plenty more to explore to optimise my null character, but it's nice to begin scaling to more production lines.

My first Reaction

 One thing I've never done in EVE is reactions. I knew they are used to turn moon goo into tech 2 stuff, and that they're complicated and not doable in high sec, but that's it. I've heard they can be lucrative though so I've been keen to check them out since starting this challenge.

A few things I've learned since researching them:

• Reactions are done using formulae, which are seeded by NPCs all over the place (for 10, 15 or 20mil depending on the "tier")
• These formulae cannot be researched like blueprints, but are infinite runs
• they mostly have 4 inputs, fuel blocks and 3 other ingredients.

MJ- has a reactions structure in system, but apparently different structures only support certain types of reactions. Therefore I've had to head over to the industry park to find a suitable structure. I'm beginning to understand why it's named that. 

Also, when I was looking for a reaction to run I was struggling to find one that was profitable at all. I eventually worked out that while they are run in low/null/wormholes it seems most people must either buy their mats in bulk or import from Jita, and that's where the market for the outputs is.

I was surprised, as I was hoping to run reactions and sell the outputs in null, but it seems there's almost no market for that. I was also surprised at how little money most reactions make from browsing using Jita prices and a null structure. Either I'm missing something or most people are reacting to do vertically integrated t2 production and not selling the intermediates. I am hoping to use my reaction slots similarly to my manufacturing ones, i.e. put in mats get out items to sell.

I did eventually manage to find something with good margins and had them contracted to null:

which looks something like this in the industry window:

This is only a very small run, but my budget is pretty small at this point. My plan is to run this and then export the results back to Jita to sell. 

I feel there's a lot I don't know here, but it's good to get started at least.

Getting set up in Null

 After a little wait (36 hours) my alt was accepted into Pandemic Horde and I was able to start the setup in null. First things first, set my home station to the nullsec staging (where the market is) and self destructing my pod to teleport out there. 

Next is to set up my Overview etc. so I can travel around safely.

After all that is done I can start looking at the industry. There are more complications to it than in highsec. For one thing, the BPC market is essentially non-existent and limited primarily to capital parts and metenox moon drills. Not something I'm interested in. So I think I'll have to operate from BPOs out here. 

Looking at the maps, there are Azbels/Raitarus with rigs available for anything you can think of, which is nice. I have a couple of choices when it comes to where to set up. There is a basic Azbel for ship building in system, which I use in the industry window to determine profitability, and there are also rigged structures in an "industry park" in another region, in the old home of R10-. I will probably operate out of here long term, it is in another region but with Ansiblex jump gates it's only a couple of jumps so not a big deal logistically. In addition to a greater range of rigged structures this "industry park" also has a lower system cost index by virtue of being ever so slightly inconvenient. 

Initially though I think I'll operate out of MJ while I get things set up.

I looked through a few old favourites to determine profitability. Mobile Depots look more profitable here though the volume is a lot lower. Something to bear in mind. There were a couple of drones and a rig that look good to me as well. So I bought 2 of each BPO, one to use and one to research at the same time. 

I then encountered the other complication with working out here, I have to use a alliance logistics service to transport my items from Jita. In this case it's a few low cost BPOs so the cost is trivial, but I have no guarantee how long it will take to arrive. I guess I'll just have to wait and in the meantime I can buy a Venture and get some mining done and get the lay of the land. Excited to see how this scales versus high  sec!

A second industry account

 So about a month into this new journey I feel I've hit the point where I need more characters. 

My initial character has 10 production slots and 8 research slots which I am mostly utilising, and I have north of 400mil net worth now. I'm starting to see a build up in ISK in my wallet at times so a second character could be usefully utilised, but I don't want to stop skill training on this account. I've been training trade skills including advanced broker relations (the adjusting fees are killing me!) and also improving my piloting and fitting skills to reduce the chance of being ganked going to and from Jita.

Another aspect in this decision is I'd like to start in null and see what that is like. Also my trading is going well this month with me rapidly heading back towards a trillion. 

So I repeated the same process as last time, using a refer a friend link to create a new account and get a free 1 million skillpoints. This time though I skipped the tutorial and career agents and instead headed for Jita and put in an application to Pandemic Horde. Applications can take a couple of days to go through.

I also transferred 50 million from my other industry character to this new one to set himself up and buy starting things he needs. After buying a years Omega time using my trade characters (for slightly over 20Bn, ouch!) I bought a few skills, set up a skill queue and used my 1 mil SP. This got me to 6 manufacturing jobs, 5 science and 5 reactions. In addition to a few other supporting skills. 

I plan to do a few build runs in high sec with this guy while I wait for my app to null to be accepted, at which point I'll jump straight into null and scope out the new world of industry down there!

September Update - Industry

 My first one of these for my new challenge! I've been really enjoying this, it makes a refreshing change. I'm also nearly at the point where I can start scaling this with more characters. My current position:

And here is the the JEveAssets graph:

I currently have 223.8Million ISK, or an increase of 10.2Mil ISK/day. Seems strange to be talking in millions rather than billions! Still, I'm pleased with how this has started. From a 8 million ISK starting point, things began quite slowly as I was severely limited in terms of ISK, slot and skill points. Taxes were high and I was doing a little mining to supplement my industry. I was also initially operating on BPOs, which I've already completely divested from.

Things really started taking off on the 24th September when Cap Booster 400s were going for over 100% margin, and I sold hundreds before the price has come back down. They are still profitable, but I've eased off on producing them now. I've moved more into mobile depots, as they are decently profitable (~15-20%) and they fly off the shelves allowing me to recycle my ISK faster. This has really allowed me to double my ISK in a week, and I'm currently limited by ISK not slots, which is actually pretty surprising and nice. I'd expected to need another character by now.

My character has 9 build slots and 5 research, with 5 builds currently running and 0 research. I put up another 2 researched BPOS on contract today, and I've sold 4 BPOs so far with another 7 outstanding. This is a bit of a slow burner but as I get more ISK I should be able to research higher value BPOs that take longer to research, and so I should be able to offload them before the next ones come out of the cooker.

In 18 hours I'll finish training Advanced Mass Production 4 and then in 5 days I'll finish Accounting V. Once I have that this character can arguably be considered "finished" from a T1 manufacturing point of view, and I could create a new one on this account to get some extra build slots, which I may do.

So, how am I doing versus my overall targets?

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original - Success!
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

I wasn't expecting to do much more than this this month, but nice to get something ticked off early.

Targets for next month:

• Reach 1 Billion
• start up an extra account
• Move a character to Null
• Build something in Null
• Add an extra high sec character

September Update - Trading

 So, this should be an interesting write up. My current position:

My current net worth is 951.2Bn ISK,  or an increase of -38.8Bn ISK. That works out at -1.29Bn ISK/day.

How the hell has that happened? Weren't you a Trillionaire a few weeks ago? I hear you ask. Well, here's a picture that sums up a lot of it:

The sensible thing to do would have been to try and cash out my HyperCores before the end of quarter in case CCP did another sale. I, however, didn't do that, and as HyperCores are now worth 297,100 ISK and I had 470,000 of them, this sale has hit my net worth to the tune of 69.5Bn ISK. I have since bought more at this new price, and will look to cash out at a much lower value this time. Others have done the same thing, and in a trading Discord I frequent there were others talking about being caught in a similar position to me (I think even Oz failed to cash his out in time). Still I should make this back, I'll just have to be less greedy in future.

In addition to that I used trading funds to buy a years worth of PLEX for my new industry account, which cost me 19.1Bn ISK. So in reality my BAU trading after factoring these two losses amounting to 88.6Bn ISK I come out to having made a regular trading profit of 49.7Bn ISK. This is actually a pretty good month, almost 50Bn profit would make it my second best month ever, so my underlying trade performance is still good. What this whole incident has taught me though is that I should focus on expanding the amount my hub sellers are selling as a priority rather than throwing more money into investments that might blow up in my face.

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Rens Seller

128Bn in sell orders and revenue of 41.8Bn. 

Manufacturing character

Did nothing this month, been focussing on my other industry challenge. Not sure what to do with this guys going forwards. Maybe move him to horde and be a market seeder?

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 128Bn and revenue of 86Bn.

Hek Seller

Has 49Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 37.5Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business but surprisingly close in revenue terms. I think I need to expand the amount of ISK this character is playing with.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 106.5Bn sell orders and income of 70Bn!

Nullsec station trader

Sits in Pandemic Horde's home system and station trades common items (ammo, filaments, minerals etc) and needs surprisingly little babysitting. Money is his own. This character made 3.1Bn this month. Mainly been playing with PLEX trading when profitable, could use a bit more love.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold some investments. I've taken to buying/selling on my Jita trader character instead as his broker fees are better sitting in a Perimeter. So very little activity here other than buying and then contracting to my other hub sellers.

Tash-Murkon Seller

Currently 94Bn sell orders and 301Bn revenue this month. I haven't touched this character after i hit the Trillion. Seems essentially a waste of a character at the moment.

Amarr station trader

Made 1.3Bn this month, Not a lot of love this month.

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita.  I have moved into buying and selling my investments with this character as well. Main contribution is cashing out of Gnosis's, which I've almost done.

Sobaseki Seller

Has sell orders of 19Bn and revenue of 6.2Bn. Not amazing but I gave him very little love.

So looking at last months plans:

• Hit 1 Trillion - Achieved, though I'll need to do some work to get back there.

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion. Again.
• Increase the amount invested in my BAU trading rather than investments.

A disappointing end to the month, but I think I'll get back there soon enough. I'll probably also take another hit to open another industry account this month, so it might take an extra month to get back tot he Trillion, depending how HyperCores bounce back after the sale ends (probably tomorrow).

Oh no.

 The day I've been hoping would be a little while has finally arrived:

I had been waiting for hypercores to push towards 490k before cashing out, so as the buy orders disappeared and the price crashed I'm down 30Bn in about an hour. Ouch.

On the flip side skill extractors have spiked slightly, so I'm trying to cash those out to buy more hypercores at a very cheap level.

This might seem like throwing good money after bad but provided I'm more sensible about cashing out it should still be good. And I can use some of the money in more diverse investments as well.

The worst part about all of this is I'm technically no longer a Trillionaire, though that will be corrected soon enough as before this point (and starting my industry character) I was well over 40Bn up for the month so day to day trading is still good.

My first hundred million

So yesterday I passed the first real milestone of this journey, turning 8 million starting ISK into 100mil. According to JEveAssets it was actually 115mil and today I'm up to 146mil. 

That's quite a spike in the last few days, so what's happened?

There's a couple of components to this. First, I achieved a milestone in the opportunities program that awarded 8million ISK and 5 PLEX. I have been accepting these small rewards as they're part of the new player experience these days and they'll soon become inconsequential. I sold the PLEX to fund my Advanced Mass production skillbook, so now I have 9 build slots, rising to 10 in a few days. Once I achieve this I might spin up a new character on this account to get more slots.

The next aspect is I've sold 2 more of my researched BPOs, for 7.5 and 10mil respectively. JEveAssets counts BPOs at NPC value until the contract is accepted, so I only see the profit when I actually sell it. This is quite neat from an accounting point of view. 

Another major part of it, and a large contributor to me logging in with 84mil in the wallet this morning was cap booster 400s. Jita has been almost cleaned out of these over the last few days so I was able to build and sell some for over 100% profit margin! I've got more in build to try and take advantage of this.

One thing that's surprised me is how easy it has been to make money by skimming the first couple of pages of BPC contracts and building from them. I don't know how things will look when moving into null but for high sec industry I think the only reason I would buy BPOs is to research and sell them. Making money with BPCs is just too flexible and easy.

Making money from BPOs

 So as part of my switch to using BPCs to manufacture rather than BPOs, I've been looking to divest my current small BPO collection. As I've put ME research time into (almost) all of them I can't just sell them on the market. What I can do though is research from TE to make them 10/20 and sell them via contracts, which is exactly what I've started doing:

Not pictured is a Microwave S blueprint, which I bought for 20k, spent about another 20k researching, and then sold for 300k.

One thing to note with the contract UI though is there is no way to see at a glance what your total sell contracts are up for. This makes accounting for them quite annoying.

JEveAssets does total them for you, but it calculates the cost of the BPOs at NPC sell price, not at the price you put the contract up for:

That tiny yellow dot on the bottom right is 1.01million of BPOs up for sale, even though I've actually put them up for 31.5million. 

This leads on to a wider question of how I do my accounting for this challenge going forwards. Updating my spreadsheet manually as I have done throughout my trading will likely become too unwieldy with contracts and builds to consider (also not covered well my the UI). JEveAssets does cover items in build as well.

I am going to explore if the Excel addin can get this information, if it can't then I will almost certainly se JEveAssets for the accounting of this going forwards. So long as it's standardised and covers all my activities (which this does) it should be fine. 

Also, I'm finding that since transitioning away from the tiny BPOs to BPCs, I'm more limited by ISK than by manufacturing slots. This is kind of good as it means I can keep expending a little without imminently having to start up second characters/accounts or invest 26mil in advanced mass production. Though I want to do all of those things soon.

BPOs versus BPCs and an early mistake

 A while ago I did a post on an experiment manufacturing by sitting in Jita, buying BPCs on contract, building them in place and selling for profit. This demonstrated the profitability of doing things in the most cost inefficient way, and was something I intended to implement. It also showcased the other advantage of BPCs, that being flexibility. I could easily switch what I was manufacturing to what I found profitable, and wasn't limited to any blueprint library I happened to have.  

I then started this challenge and immediately forgot about all of that and bought a bunch of BPOs. Low value ones, and profitable even without research, but still. This has 2 problems. One; as mentioned, the limitations of flexibility, and two; All that money in BPOs is sat there doing nothing when those BPOs aren't being used. As the library grows I would effectively have a ever growing pile of assets sitting there doing nothing to grow my net worth. Also you have a break even point with BPOs, which isn't so bad for small ammo blueprints worth a few hundred thousand, but for bigger blueprints the BPO break even point could be several thousand runs, which I'm unlikely to ever do from a single blueprint.

I've started to correct that, and bought a couple of BPCs to use in the Raitaru in Ikuchi to build from. In doing so, I found a nice looking rig blueprint that looks nicely profitable, and would use up my last free slot and most of my available capital. Perfect.

You can't see the popup on hover over but it says "Activity requirement not met". Essentially I don't have the skills to use the blueprint. Damn. Injecting those skills cost me almost half a million and will take about 9 hours to learn. An annoying mistake but a relatively low cost learning point. Something to keep an eye on in the future!

Getting going with my first character

 So I've not had as much chance to play EVE as I'd have liked the last few days, but I have made a bit of progress on my industry journey. First off I have been training skills to get some industry slots, get my market fees down etc. I also applied my free 1,000,000 SP from refer a friend. My recent skills trained looks like this:

I also have Broker Relations V and Mass Production V. I haven't learned Advanced Mass Production as the skillbook costs 26mil to inject, and I don't have that!

I have done a few runs of manufacturing, will my sell orders currently looking like this:

Not pictured is some other ammo that has already sold.

I have also utilised my 5 research job runs to research ME 10 on some other blueprints, mainly rockets and light missiles. These have now finished so I've switched those to producing (they're mostly higher profit anyway) and put my ones I was building with into research to up the profit margins.

These are all OK, giving me anywhere from 10-50% profit each, though the absolute profit is obviously quite low. 

I've also mined about 100,000m3 of veldspar, which is very little.

I'm coming up against 2 barriers at the moment. The obvious one is ISK, I do not have enough ISK to even inject advanced mass production, which is leading to the other bottleneck of job runs. I am utilising them all profitably but I feel there's more I could be doing. I'm sure one will unlock the other, and once I have made enough with mining and manufacturing to get and utilise my max build and research slots then I will start additional characters on this account and another account, but I'm holding off just a little bit on that for now.

Starting out in Industry

 So I took the first step. I created a new account using a refer-a-friend link from myself for the free 1,000,000 skillpoints, created a new character and undertook the new tutorial.

I must say, the new tutorial is much better than previous. Your actions are extremely trimmed down, giving you a lot of focus. The HUD is hidden so as not to overwhelm new players. And the whole thing plays out like a playable set piece, with full voice acting and taking advantage of EVE's fantastic visuals in quite a neat little storyline to introduce you to the AIR corporation and to being a capsuleer. 

After that you're pointed in the direction of career agents (which haven't changed in years) and are given a bit of a nudge through them by Aura, before being left to it. 

I used this time to buy a years worth of PLEX from my trading accounts for ~19.1Bn ISK, contracted to my new account and applied it. I thought about recording this as a "loan" to be paid back, both to keep me still a Trillionaire and as a promise that I would to keep me motivated with my industry. In the end I opted against this, though I made a note in my spreadsheet and will for future accounts where I do this. This took my trading wealth down to 983Bn, though it is already back to almost 992Bn. 

Then I got really ill for 4 days and did essentially nothing. I wasted my weekend, barely ate for 3 days ( a bit of excess weight off is great, but not like this), had 2 days off work, and didn't log into EVE.

Today I was feeling better though and managed to get a trade run in and crucially did the career agent missions in Akiainavas. This had 2 uses: 1, get me some starting capital (I have 10mil atm) and 2, get me a slight broker fee improvement in Jita.

See, this character is planned to be based primarily in Jita, no matter where I end up taking my industry. I want at least 1 character there as it is the only place where you will find the full range of blueprints, original and copies, on contract. If I want to get some new prints out to null I don't want to fly a Horde character from Perrigan Falls to do it.

The fee improvement is minimal but my Jita boker fee sits at 1.47% now having trained broker relations V, which is not bad. What is bad is my sales tax. I've just bought and started training the accounting skill, but that set me back 5.2mil, leaving me with just 9.9 to start my industry. I've identified several BPOs that should be profitable though, so I'm going to give those a go.

Industry Challenge

 So, having made 1 Trillion ISK primarily through trading, I want to try something different. For some time now I've wanted to get into Industry more seriously, but half heartedly doing the odd production run on a single character simply doesn't compare to the ISK I was making with my trade characters. 

However, I am intrigued as to the ISK that can be made if I really commit to it and look to scale it, as well as expanding to other areas beyond t1 manufacturing. To that end I am going to start a whole new challenge. New characters, new accounts, no financial help from my trading accounts. The one exception to this is I will buy PLEX on my trading accounts to PLEX my Industry accounts, at least initially. I fear going 0 to PLEX using industry would be extremely limiting and time consuming, so I want to replicate what I initially did with my trading which was paying my subs with real money.

I want to focus on industry, so making money using:

• Manufacturing (t1 and t2)
• Blueprint research
• Blueprint copying
• Invention
• Mining (to a limited extent)
• Reactions
• Career missions to get a starting fund an some basic station standings

And that's about it. What I will not be doing is trying to replicate my trading. I also want to have certain milestones to hit to keep me on track and mark some progression. These are:

• Invent a t2 item
• sell a blueprint copy
• sell a researched blueprint original
• Build my own Upwell structure
• Complete some reactions
• Build a capital
• Build a Super
• Build a Titan
• Earn 1 Trillion

These are lofty goals, and primarily must be completed outside of highsec. Building Supers/Titans will also require being in a gated corp in Horde, as they don't let just anyone build supers (understandably). I've gone back and forth a lot on where to base myself, high or null. I think I'm going to settle on both. I'm going to have at least 1 character in high to take advantage of Jita and the blueprint market there, and most of my characters out in null to take advantage of the access to reactions, null bonuses and ores.

Also, I will be tagging all posts relating to this challenge with "Industry Challenge" and all my end of month trade updates with "Trading Challenge" so if you only want to see one or the other you can select the label on the right hand side of the blog.

With that said, off to create a new account!

1 Trillion

 I've finally done it! 1 Trillion ISK. 1,000,000,000,000. In assets anyway, not in liquid ISK. To say this has taken a while would be an understatement.

Here is my current position:

And a more condensed version:

And here is a bonus JEveAssets graph of worth since my return from hiatus in April:

As you can see, JEveAssets says I have 1.103Tn, but this is because I take a provision of 20% against sell orders to allow for reducing the price to sell. Since I aim for about a 20% profit margin this works well. JEveAssets doesn't account for this though and treats my sell orders as though they are all going to sell for that price, which would be great if it was true.

One thing that's clear from this graph is I could really do with upping the amount I sell in other hubs. It's been hovering at about 600Bn since April, and I've earned more than 200Bn in that time so I could do to look at this and see if I can up my revenue even further.

It's taken a almost 9 years to get here, with some big gaps along the way!

There's this post: Distribution of player wealth (reddit) of a screenshot from a talk at fanfest 2023 talking about the wealth distribution amongst players. According to this if you have 495Bn across your accounts (in terms of assets) you're in the top 1% of players. To get into the top 0.1% you'd need 1.9Tn. I'm somewhere in the middle there, so top 0.7% or so probably, which is quite cool! Based on analysis of that on reddit and elsewhere people estimate that there are 20-30 players with more than 10Tn, which is just insane.

How it started

My first EVE character was born in April 2009, not long before my final exams at university (perhaps not the best decision I've made). I didn't really commit to this character and forgot the login, creating a new account in August after I'd graduated. That first character was Stranathor, the alias I use mostly online, who would later become my "nullsec main" and thus is actually not included in the characters for this challenge. 

The second character though is included. I started a highsec mining corporation with my siblings and a few friends, and we would chat and make great plans together. I would also buy the minerals at a set price and build things with them to sell. We even collectively joined a group of nullsec renters briefly, eyeing up the nullsec ores and expecting to make our fortune. This didn't work, so back to highsec and our corp we went.

After a while doing this, Brave took off and offered anyone an entry into null (before this you needed vouches/a certain amount of skill points to be accepted into any null sec corp basically) and I signed up to experience that side of the game. From low to null and even a month in their wormhole corp, I had a great time, but they got ground down and kicked out of Catch by Pandemic Legion, the high SP big boys of the time. They then started their own newbie corp, Pandemic Horde. After a while of being on the "losing" side with Brave I decided to switch and join Horde, where I have a couple of characters to this day.

Through all of this I never made much ISK in the grand scheme of things, and I had begun reading a lot of ISK making blogs such as Gevlon Goblin, Eve-fail, and most influencially for me, MarketsForIsk.

In particular, Croda's method of buying in Jita, shipping to Amarr/Rens/Dodixie etc. seemed straightforward enough to follow, and I thought I could replicate that. So that's exactly what I did.

Starting the trade journey

On 17/11/2015 I created this blog and started my journey, with 3 characters across 2 accounts, and 3.1Bn ISK: it begins...

It took a little bit of time to ramp up to use all those funds, but once I did I started in earnest. I did however have my first break from the game and from trading in April 2016, returning in August of that year. At that point I had 25Bn ISK and I didn't write another post for almost 2 years, returning to the platform in July 2018 with 171Bn ISK and ending the year on 270Bn End of year 2018. Not a bad ramp up from a break!

2019 was a good year for me, I played and blogged consistently, added more characters, got into manufacturing, and made 296Bn, more than doubling my wealth in a year and breaking well past the half way point: End of year 2019

2020 was a bit more mixed for me (as I'm sure it was for everyone!). Lockdown provided much greater opportunities to play games, so this should have been a bumper year for me. But I was beginning to feel the burnout, and my monthly increases ranged from 2.6Bn to 43Bn depending on how motivated I was feeling and how much of other games I was playing. However I kept up the blogging and ended the year on 782Bn, an increase of 216Bn. Worse than the year before, but still I thought I was on track for the Trillion in 2021.... End of year 2020

I did not become a Trillionaire in 2021, which I'm sure is obvious as this post goes up on the 4th September 2024. Indeed, I did not make another blog post until April of this year, over 3 years without a post! This was for multiple reasons, burnout primarily, but I also got really into WoW Classic TBC and Wrath. I had a great time reliving my youth playing those games and achieved a lot more than I did when I was a teenager, whilst playing with some really cool people along the way. Interestingly the average age of my guilds seemed to be about 40, how times have changed!

Recent changes

Since returning to EVE though I've been feeling motivated and refreshed. I've taken stock of how my trading works and optimised it a little. In particular switching from doing all my own hauling to using public courier contracts. A full run around for my traders used to take me about 2 hours including updating orders, buying new stock and flying it to be sold. It was also kind of an all or nothing deal as I used to do it with my Rens seller character, not a short hop to Jita. This meant if I didn't feel like dedicating 2 hours of play time it wasn't really worth it. 

That's a big commitment on a near daily basis, and the main benefit now is that I don't have to do it like this. I can assess where each character is, updating one set of orders at a time and when they're done I can either log on to the next one or log off completely for a few hours and wait for a delivery.

Another big change I've made was to PLEX all my accounts. Previously I'd been paying for 3 with real money, and funding the other (ish) through selling skillpoints. The idea behind this was to keep RL money and in game money separate, but CCP have put the subscription up and it would be the best part of £50 a month to do it that way, so I made the switch to PLEX. 

The final big change only came about in the last month or so. Whilst I was away I was aware of changes to broker fees to make updating orders more costly. The formula is complex but it mostly works out to about 25% of your initial broker fee to change an order now. I had been leaving my orders to sit rather than pay this, but for August I went hard updating orders to stay on top as much as made sense, and my revenue shot up by 4 or 5 times and lead to record profits, more than double July!

All in all I've got things in a good place now, where I can do my day to day trading without much time commitment, and put any excess into either PLEXing accounts or longer term investments to scale with ISK rather than clicks.

What's next?

Initially, I had planned that when I hit 1Tn I would continue trading, sending half my profits each month to my null sec character and use the money to do whatever my heart desires. I may still do a bit of this, but this isn't my primary plan any more. 

I've also thought about funding smaller corps to do fun stuff, and planned to do this for a guildmate from WoW who was giving EVE a go. Alas, he has since stopped playing so I'm not really looking at this right now.

I actually intend to start a new challenge in the same vein, this time centred around manufacturing. I need to work out how to make a filter or split so that I can have both trading and industry covered by this blog but split if you're only interested in one or the other. It might sounds silly to immediately start a new challenge after finishing one that's taken me the best part of 9 years (on and off) but the great thing about EVE as I see it is having the freedom to make these big goals and go after them. Something very few games can offer. More on this soon. 

If you been reading this up to this point, thanks! I started this blog for me as it's the sort of thing I enjoy reading, and I hope you've got something out of it too. It doesn't end here though!

August Update

 I almost didn't write this update. It's been an incredible month and I am so close to the trillion now that I almost left it a week to just do that post (which I've started writing), but I'll keep going with the monthly updates anyway. As I've got so close to the finish line with this challenge I've been really motivated and been updating orders near daily, and the revenue has shot up as a result. My current position:

My current worth is 990Bn ISK. That is an increase over the last month of 56.7Bn ISK, or an increase of 1.89Bn ISK/day. That is more than double last month and a record month for by far! My previous record was my first month back where I earned 43Bn. This is an amazing result, and my investments haven't contributed to this much. Hypercores are up by 5%, which is nice, but skill extractors have not changed in price due to back to back to back sales by CCP. 

Another thing I have dabbled in is a bit more manufacturing. I've been watching a lot of videos by Strange Net especially around manufacturing in sub-optimal setups. The point he made was that it was possible to make a profit by sitting in Jita, trawling through BPC contracts, eye-balling the profitability, buying the materials from sell orders, building in Jita, and then selling in Jita.

I tried this myself on my manufacturing character who has absolutely no accounting skills, so paying max broker fees, max sales tax, 21% install fees, BPC costs. And I was able to turn 82mil into 95mil in about 7 or 8 build runs. 

That might not sound impressive, but if you instead had actual trade skills, and did your manufacturing in a raitaru outside of Jita, you could knock about 15% off the cost of those builds easily and make a lot more. I actually found this really refreshing, and will be expanding in this area, watch this space.

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Rens Seller

129Bn in sell orders and revenue of 78.2Bn. 5 times the revenue of last month!

Manufacturing character

As explained above, did some building in Jita from BPCs here, and turned a bit of profit. A useful and fun experiment.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 144Bn and revenue of 137Bn. Almost 4 times last month.

Hek Seller

Has 54Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 55Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business. The biggest revenue increase (by percentage) or any character in this list, really happy here.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 106Bn sell orders and income of 109Bn!

Nullsec station trader

Sits in Pandemic Horde's home system and station trades common items (ammo, filaments, minerals etc) and needs surprisingly little babysitting. Money is his own. This character made a slightly disappointing 1.8Bn this month. I think this is mainly due to making some mistakes chasing PLEX spikes, which I then had to take a loss on.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold some investments. I've taken to buying/selling on my Jita trader character instead as his broker fees are better sitting in a Perimeter. So very little activity here other than buying and then contracting to my other hub sellers.

Tash-Murkon Seller

Currently 97Bn sell orders and 4.1Bn revenue this month. Very little activity here. I actually considered shutting up shop on this character and moving him to being a null sec seed character. TBD

Amarr station trader

Made 0.7Bn this month, Not a lot of love this month.

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita.  I have moved into buying and selling my investments with this character as well. Main contribution is buying/selling investments, I don't keep on top of the station trading much.

Sobaseki Seller

Has sell orders of 25Bn and revenue of 6.5Bn. Not amazing but I gave him very little love.

So looking at last months plans:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day - Smashed
• Generate a monthly profit of 33.25Bn (Half what I need to hit the Trillion) - Smashed
• Expand Tash-Murkon/Sobaseki - Failed, though this has fallen down my priority list
• Investigate Alliance seeding in null. - I did 1 order from Jita to seed and made decent money, I think this is feasible if I dedicate a character to it, alliance hauling contracts are surprisingly cheap for low volume stuff anyway

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion.

I reckon it will take me until a week on Monday at worst to hit the Trillion. Then I can talk about my plans for the future, which are looking increasingly firm and I'm quite excited about. More than anything I am really enthusiastic about the game!