A failed contract and expansion moves

 The other day I had my first ever failed delivery contract, and it really underlined why contracting out your hauling is a good idea. 

I set up a hauling contract for 1.6Bn of goods to go from Jita to Hek, on public contract. I set collateral at 2Bn and the reward to 20mil (1% of the collateral value is my going rate and these are usually completed in a few hours). It's 19 jumps so just over 1 mil a jump. Pretty paltry but a lot of people enjoy that kind of play.

I then logged in a couple of hours later hoping to list those items to find the contract had failed. When I looked up the character who had accepted the contract on zKillboard I was surprised to find the kill there. Not only had this player accepted the contract on the character he intended to haul with (considered bad practice in the hauling community as it makes it obvious you're carrying something of value) but they had also taken their blockade runner through lowsec. Blockade runners in lowsec isn't the worst idea in the world, the window for someone to point you is actually very small if you activate cloak on the same tick your ship starts aligning, but still not something I'd do to save a few jumps. 

I'm not going to share the kill in order not to shame this person but they lost 2.4Bn (including ship and fittings) for a potential return of 20mil. Less than a 1% ROI. 

Now, in the past I have run a blockade runner around highsec several times with over 80Bn in the hold. This is phenomenally stupid as something like this could easily lead to being set back a couple of months progress. So I'm really glad I made the decision to start using public haulers. 

In this case, I pocketed the 2Bn, then immediately bought the same items to haul to Hek, with 400mil banked profit going forwards.

Equinox movements

So the equinox expansion released, along with a sale on PLEX. The new SKINR ship skinning technology requires PLEX to use and trade, driving the price up mid-long term but saw a short term dip in the price of PLEX. As such I snapped up 2000 more at just under 5 mil before the price jumped to nearly 5.3mil. I haven't banked this profit yet but it was definitely a timely time to get in. I funded this by cashing in my skill extractors for 545mil, when I'd bought them for 460mil. A very tidy profit.

I also pooled some money from across my characters and bought more hypercores, now at 389,000 each. This is a bit over-exposing me, but I'm still very confident they're going to go up at least another 20% in the mid to long term. Though it means I'm exposed to the tune of 170Bn ISK now, which is nearly 20% of my net worth. If CCP puts out another half price sale on them I'm screwed, but the payoffs are potentially enormous.

When is a Trillion not a Trillion?

So according to JEveAssets I'm a Trillionaire! Thanks for reading, bye bye!

However. By my accounting I have 901Bn. The reason for this is I take a 20% provision against my sell orders to account for how much I might have to drop them to liquidate quickly, and the fact that the profit isn't realised yet. I tend to look for about 20% profit margin so this seems like a reasonable number to consider. JEveAssets doesn't do this, just takes my sell orders as gospel, and says I have a total net worth of 1,006Bn. My sheet shows a provision of 114Bn ISK, so without that it'd be 1,105Bn ISK.

The likely reasoning for this discrepancy is my prices I take the current sell order value for my investments, which likely differs from how JEveAssets values inventory, but it's close enough.

Still, 100Bn left to go before I can consider one of my EVE bucket list items well and truly ticked. If you'd like to contribute to this by buying up hypercores to push the price up I'd be very appreciative.