November Update - Industry

 This month was a record breaker, a lot has happened. I'll give the numbers then go into the detail:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 49.6Bn ISK. That's an increase of 11.8Bn ISK, or 393mil/day.

That's massive, and a new record by some margin (previous being about 7Bn), so what happened?

The main thing is that the market changed. When Horde collapsed, the price of salvage started to climb pretty dramatically. Logic Circuits in particular are worth double what they were a month ago and they're used in most of the rigs I build. I already built Medium CCC II rigs regularly, as even when the margins aren't great they still sell incredibly well and reliably, they're very like Mobile Depots in that sense, only higher value and easily transportable in a Crane. Those rigs in particular jumped from selling around 6.5mil each to 15mil each! I threw everything I had into producing them, and you can really see this take off in terms of revenue and profit.

Additionally, I had 2 characters that were null sec based and 2 that were training, so 5 characters building in high sec at the start of the month. I have since moved the null characters to high (selling what I had to my null trader to remove that liability) and brought the 2 trainers online, meaning 9 characters pumping items out in high sec.

Not all these are making CCC rigs, I also mix up with some large versions and some shield rigs as well, to insulate me against market movements. These have also done very well. My CEO character also builds things like mercenary dens and auto-integrity response drones, smart bombs etc. and I have a character doing nothing but building Cranes (I want to train a few more characters into T2 ships as I think they could be a long term way of doing things and keeping my slots busy easier, but I digress) and 1 character faithfully pumping out mobile depots.

Having all of these characters operating out of 1 corp office in a NPC station 4 jumps from Jita has meant that my way of playing actually scales really well. The extra characters just add a few clicks to set off the jobs. All the product collection, transporting and selling is done on my CEO character, so no additional work there. This also means that when I want to add extra characters I can do so in the same place and it shouldn't affect my workload much, which is fantastic for someone time poor such as myself. I have stale characters from my trade venture that I might "recruit" for exactly this purpose but I want to see how salvage/rigs level out first before throwing more characters onto the pile.

Another aspect of all this is my sell orders have dropped dramatically as prices have risen pretty much across the board of what I sell, so a bunch of older orders have sold leading to the massive spike in wallet balance you can see in dark blue on the graph. I have 21Bn ISK in cash while sell orders have dropped to 10Bn for the first time since June. This is great, but that big pile of cash isn't actually making me any money right now, which is bad. 

What it does enable me to do is to try and procure pretty much all of my input materials from buy orders, as having the ISK tied up is not an issue any more. This pushes my profit per item up which is great, though I don't currently always manage to fully stock up before I build so I am buying from sell orders as well. I will have to look at building a "stockpile" sheet to make sure I have enough input materials in stock at any given time and manage buy orders appropriately. EVEGuru has it on their road map but as it's not there currently I may have to build it myself in a spreadsheet. We'll see if my laziness or impatience wins first on that one.

The low sec experiment is on hold for now, I'm doing so well with my current setup that I'm going to ride this gravy train for a bit, and maybe look at low sec again when I start to look at bigger projects like jump freighters or Black Ops battleships. 

Here's hoping for an even better month in December!

November Update - Trading

 Not a bad month this one, though I was hoping for slightly better. The upheaval of Hordes collapse has hit my potential profits, as has hypercores falling back slightly right at the end of the month. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My net worth is 1.189Tn ISK. That's an increase of 36Bn ISK, or 1.2Bn ISK/day.

All things considered not bad, but as you can see from the breakdown I have 65Bn worth of stuff sat in asset safety, waiting for me to claim it and move it to a trade hub for sale. I haven't full decided where to take it but I'm thinking Dodixie as a good middle ground of price versus volume. I could have taken it out on the 28th, but I didn't head down there yet as I imagine the station and system will be camped heavily as lots of players in the same situation look to get their stuff out. I'll try in a couple of weeks probably once the heat has died down.

Hypercores have levelled out in the high 380s, so I've switched to using the sell value for them. Given how PLEX has fallen to 4.7mil on the buy side though they are not that far from PLEX parity. I think I'll start selling them off soon, particularly as PLEX doesn't seem to be reversing trends any time soon.

Aside from this there isn't a great deal to talk about. My trading is very much in maintenance mode while I focus on scaling my industry operation out (there has been a lot of change and expansion there) but my trading is doing its job of taking me a couple of hours a week to update the 4 hubs, do 1 trade run each, and pay for PLEX for all 7 of my accounts. 

On that, I may even start moving characters that I no longer trade with from this venture to my other one, for no additionaly PLEX cost. Would be a cheap and easy way to expand my operations without opening more accounts. We'll see.

EVE Content I consume

 So I've been meaning to compile this list for a while, but I'm going to list the blogs and youtube channels I consume related to EVE if you're looking for recommendations.

• https://marketsforisk.blogspot.com/ Market blog, the one that inspired me to take on my own regional challenge a decade ago, and still going strong. Written by Croda.
  
• https://evehermit.wordpress.com/ General EVE blog (and some other games such as X4), One I've dipped in and out of for a long time
  
• https://tellicorp.blogspot.com/ EVE Industry blog, relatively new
  
• https://alphatoomegawithregionaltrading.blogspot.com/ New player regional trading challenge blog, still in the early stages
  
• https://alwaysanoob.com/ General EVE blog
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@OZeve CSM and trader the OZ. I am also part of his discord which tends to have a lot of good chat on EVE economy and trading. Provides weekly analysis of the economy. Croda a frequent guest here.
  
• https://declarationsofwar.com/ General EVE Online podcast. I was invited to be a part of episode 299 and got to talk to CCP Okami and CCP Kestrel about the Equinox expansion and aims for the economy, a really cool experience! I haven't listened back  to it though as I hate the sound of my own voice recorded.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@strange_Net Dedicated EVE industry videos, somewhat inactive now
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@CEOPyrex Economy and industry focused channel, a lot of good guides and insight here, very active.
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@Gamingsincethe70s/videos Industry channel run by Thanak, charting his experience running his own personal industry, as well as a high sec corp and a null sec one! Gives a bit of insight and a peek behind the curtain at corp leadership
  
• https://www.youtube.com/@EVEARDCO/videos A new one, Ardel Corvallon charts his attempt to start a fuel block building empire in high sec, has a close association with Thanak and corp. He's recently invited me to join his "think tank" and provide whatever help and advice I can. Early days but hoping to see this enterprise flourish!
  

When I first started playing EVE there was a plethora of blogs and content related to all things EVE, then it felt like a few years ago there was a bit of a lul as some of the old guard dropped out, but in the last year or so things have picked up and there is an awful lot of great passionate people keen to share their experiences with this great game we all play. Long may it continue! If you have any good recommendations I haven't listed here I'd be keen to hear them.

Escaping R-AG7W

 So, Horde leadership has completely abandoned any attempt at mounting escape from the dying Keepstar, and Goons have relentlessly "hell-camped" the keep, which involves surrounding it with bubbles and caps like so:

The camp is so complete, that there is no way I can escape. I thought I could sneak my blockade runner next door to XU7 to grab my blueprints and escape to lowsec, but under these circumstances that's impossible.

So I only have 1 option, put all of my stuff in asset safety and then I can grab it from a lowsec station in 20 days for a fee of 15% of the value. In this case for my industry character everything comes to about 1Bn, so it'd be about 150mil.

For my other characters though I  will probably be hit with a bill of about 15Bn. Ouch.

I think what bothers me about this is the way that leadership has screwed up so much to the point of making escape impossible. I've done this sort of thing several times over the years and never been caught, with or without caps. I even escaped Catch when it was being beseiged by PL with a Thanatos before citadels, where I had to resort to safe spots and cloaks to get to lowsec. But this time the announcement was so sudden, so public, and there was absolutely no attempt to push goons off the undock that there is nothing I can do. Which annoys me. Your stuff is always at risk in EVE, but there is almost always counterplay. Almost.

Once I've got everything out I really don't think I'll stick with Horde. There doesn't seem to be a plan for the future, nevermind the next few days. There doesn't seem to be an excited successor to Gobbins, or anything to really get behind. This feels like the death of the Alliance in real time. I had grand plans to PANIC my Rorqual somewhere in tether to try and get a window to help a few people escape, but the capitulation has been so total that it's pointless. Which is really sad for an alliance of this size.

Anyway, I'll regroup my assets in lowsec, get my industry guy to highsec and look to the future. A future where I'm no longer in Pandemic Horde in any capacity.

Horde is leaving Horde

 So, Horde is moving again.

Not long after the last announced move to R-AG7W it's been announced that Horde is leaving the coalition it leads altogether and moving out of dronelands to join forces with Init instead. This also comes with a change of leadership. This is all fine and might make sense from a mixing things up and giving members fun things to do point of view. 

For myself though, it's extremely annoying. 

I have 3 characters in Horde at the moment. 

A "PVP main" (Stranathor) who isn't part of either of my money making challenges and who used to do things like pvp and carrier rat.

My Null sec seller, who also acts as my cyno character for Stranathor.

My null industrialist, who has been winding down operations and attempting to sell up.

Normally when these moves happen I simply move myself in my capitals (I have a Thanatos, Revelation and Rorqual) and between those 3 I can carry everything I own to new staging and set up again. Easy.

This time though new staging is cryptic, and multiple jumps from where we live now. This would be fine if I didn't have 64Bn in sell orders up on one character, 8.5Bn on another and just having had 6Bn more stuff imported. 

I was trying to decouple my null industrialist from Horde anyway, but by selling his own stuff. At this point I think the simplest thing to do is to sell my assets to my Horde seller and get him out to high sec with his blueprints.

For the Null seller, I think I'm going to evacuate him and Stranathor to lowsec for now. The shipping services are all shipping stuff to Otsasai, so I think I'll head there while I contemplate my next move. There are plans to offer services to jump assets from there to Jita in the future, which I will likely take advantage of. 

This plan should mean my industry character takes minimal losses from all this, with my trader taking a larger hit. I have done one of these sort of lowsec moves before when I was in and then subsequently leaving Brave a full 10 years ago now. So I know it's not the end of the world but I have a lot more stuff to think about this time.

This does feel like a good time to reconsider my membership of Horde. I've been in the alliance on and off for 10 years now, though it has been quite a while since I actually joined a fleet. I like the access to Null space and the option to use big toys but Horde has always been heavy on the rules for using them. I don't know if I'd stay and see how this all shakes out, go it alone for a bit or even switch sides and see if the grass is greener. For now I think I'll take my time, evac my assets and go from there. By the time I next have the chance to really have a proper play session I might have made a decision. 

October Update - Industry

 This was on track to be a very good month, until political considerations made me take a hit. I forgot to take a screenshot on the 31st so here's the graph:

My net worth at the end of the month was 37.8Bn ISK. That's an increase of 4.4Bn or 146mil/ISK/day.

In order to make it worth the PLEX I need to be at a point where I am earning 4.75Bn/month (the equivalent of 19Bn for a years Omega times 3). I've fallen just short of that this month, even though I was on track to be over 2Bn ahead of that.

That is primarily due to Horde moving staging, so I decided to wind down my operation there, and move all my sell orders to the new staging to try and liquidate them. This is going OK, though I had to take a big write down as some things are selling for less, I had to pay a lot in broker fees and I also came in from the pub after 6 pints on Friday and decided updating my null sell orders was a good idea. To all the people who got rigs for about half price, you're welcome!

I have moved one of my null characters to high and he's happily churning out rigs, which is great. I also have 2 characters that I'm training and I'm planning to put in a low sec sotiyo as an experiment, to see if that's a goer long term. I'm a bit skeptical about that but for the moment they're just training while being inactive. So my account setup is like this:

Account 1:

- CEO character, does my high sec hauling and builds things based on what EVEGuru reckons is most profitable

- Mobile Depot builder, very simple

- T2 rig builder, currently building large CCC II rigs

Account 2:

- null character, currently offloading to leave Horde

- T2 hauler builder, currently building Cranes alongside some mobile depots

- trainee, currently inactive

Account 3:

- T2 rig builder, currently doing large CCC II

- null builder turned high sec, currently build t2 rigs

- trainee, currently inactive

As you can see I'm starting to have a bit of a theme going, which makes things easier as I can setup buy orders for the limited pool of input materials and easily keep track of my slots etc. The more varied it gets the harder it is to keep track of. CCC rigs are great because the demand for them is huge, I rarely have any left for sale when I log back in after a day or 2 which is fantastic.

The downside is that each run of these blueprints is only measured in hours. So if I can only manage to properly sort my industry every few days then I'm having a lot of wasted slot hours. My CEO character is addressing that a bit by branching into things like industrial cores and mercenary dens but this might be something I need to optimise in the near future. An option is pivoting more heavily into deployables/cores and big ships. Things with long slot times. This could be more difficult to get the revenue for out of a high sec NPC facility but it would at least cut down on lost hours. Something to consider.

Plan for this month is to full extract from null, onlining 7 high sec characters properly, and then set up a low sec experiment and see how things go. If it's too difficult or the lead times won't work I'll just commit to high sec fully like SquadB does. It's working for me so far.

I've seen people suggesting in places like discord and reddit that it's basically impossible to make highsec industry work  profitably, I hope if nothing else I'm proving that wrong.

October Update - Trading

 A more successful month this one, though I only managed to update my orders 3 or 4 times the whole month while I concentrated on Industry and had my play time restricted. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.153Tn ISK. That's an increase of 19Bn ISK or 633mil/ISK/day.

That doesn't sound like an increase, but when you factor in that I spent 18.75Bn on a years Omega time for my second industry account it comes to a operating profit of nearly 38Bn. 

As I said earlier, I didn't log in very much to my trading characters. I'm concentrating on improving and expanding my industry setup mostly so my trading is in maintenance mode of roughly 1 trade run per week. My company have also issued a return to office order, meaning I have to commute to London 3 times a week now rather than once a week. This has been very unpopular and has also meant I can't sneak in half an hour here and there at lunch which is a shame.

The main story this month has been HyperCores. Someone (and judging by my transaction history and the market spike I think it is one person) bought out all HyperCores up to 444k, massively spiking the price. People then flooded in to try and liquidate long held stores and the price has fallen back. It has had a few days in the high 380s sell price now, and I suspect that is where it will stay for a while as people try and sell some of their stockpiles for a profit. As the price seems volatile I've listed the Jita Buy price on my investment section, so potentially undervaluing them a bit, but I'd rather do that than overvalue and then face doing write downs which are just depressing. If things stay stable or slowly increase I'll switch to using the Jita Sell like I do with everything else.

HyperCore insanity

 For a long time, HyperCores have been very steady price wise, creeping up very slowly over the last few weeks. This week has had a steeper climb up for about 347,000 by yesterday.

For a long time now, I've had a sell order up for 349,000 for about 27,000 of them, from the last time the price spiked to this level. I use an out of game tool eveos.space price checker to keep an eye on prices from my phone. Today I noticed that HyperCores have gone berserk.

Someone has spiked the price massively, leading to a sell price of 430,000 ISK! That's an increase of 24% overnight. The volume doesn't even look excessive though we'll have to wait for after downtime for firmer numbers. 

What's also surprising with this is that buy orders have jumped too, though not as much. Up from 330,000 to 353,000. Still nearly a 10% rise.

I suspect the price will fall back to somewhere in the 380,000 range as people trip over themselves to cash out, and tbh I might cash some of mine out as well. I will however wait a few days for prices to stabilise as i don't want to be left with a big sell order sitting there for months (again). Interesting times!

Horde staging moving again

 So for the second time this year, Horde staging is moving, as laid out here:

Horde Staging moving

I don't like the title of the thread but the content is true, Horde have announced they are moving to a new staging system, R-AG. This just so happens to be 1 jump from where I've been doing my industry in XU7, so in theory makes my life easier, but as outlined in my last post I'd already taken the decision to wind down my operations, and this really solidifies my decision. 

Not that moving is the end of the world, it's part and parcel of null sec life and I'm not complaining per se, but it adds to the inconvenience of industry in null and I think I just want to simplify at the moment. So the builds that are in progress will be my last. What I will probably do is cancel all my sell orders in E8- and then sell my wares to my null trader, since he's going to be moving over to new staging anyway, and take those funds to my high sec operation.

You could argue that this is cheating a bit and for the "true" experience I should stay and sell those myself or have them shipped to Jita and cash out that way. To that I say, you're right, but I think I'd rather just divest and get back to what I'm enjoying about this whole thing.

On a sort of related note, I watched this video recently:

SquadB Gaming's How to get started in Manufacturing

Where SquadB, an industrial Trillionaire, goes through his setup and offers advice to people getting into industry. I'd thoroughly recommend it to everyone. In it, he explains how he is based out of an NPC station a few jumps from Jita, just like me. He also had bad experiences with player run freeports and losing assets. I find it interesting that he came to the exact same conclusions as me, and I may just end up running a scaling manufacturing outfit like him in high sec out of an NPC station for the safety, security, easy logistics and certainty that nothing is likely to change, other players cannot scam you out of your assets or blow the place up.

The only things making me refrain from that decision permanently are that a low sec sotiyo could offer me reaction slots and the capacity to build capitals. Reactions are a potential good income stream on their own or profit multiplier, and capitals are just a goal of mine long term. 

For now though, I'll sit tight and see what sells over the next few days while I'm away, then move everything to new staging and my industrial character out of null, one way or the other.

Beginning to consolidate

 I've been thinking a lot about my setup the last few days. I've come to the conclusion that null is just not scalable for me right now. So I've decided to start winding that down.

Step 1 of this is to move my second Null industry character out to high sec and quit Horde. This character was criminally underutilised anyway so it should be a net win. He has 10 build and research slots and can already build T2 rigs, so should slot straight into my setup and be a net win easily.

I only had to sell a mining barge in E8- on this character, which I did in situ, then flew all the way to Akonoinen in his kestrel. This was entirely uneventful.

As I had a stock of materials I could immediately put him to work building Medium CCC IIs, which is nice. I also got him copying some blueprints immediately.

The other thing to consider is I've had a "return to office" order from work, which means I'm now commuting to London 3 days a week. This means much less lunch time run updating, and a lot more money spent on commuting. Not happy all round. The upshot of this for EVE is I might need to consider moving to a more 2 day run time for my slots, if possible.

Next step is to start to wind down my other null characters operations, and sell the assets I have/have them shipped out of null so I can slot him in with the rest of my characters. This will take a bit of time and I might even sell my outputs to my null sell character to get him moved quicker. That will have the advantage of having another character that can fly T2 haulers, so I can fly 2 DST loads at a time to/from Jita which will be great.

Then I need to start my low sec experiment. But I should end up with a much simpler, better utilised setup as a whole that can scale better.

All that may have to wait a little though, as tomorrow I'm in London and this weekend I have family down, so I'm probably not going to get to play the game again until middle of next week. Feeling happy about this line of decisions though.

Rounding out my 3 industry accounts

 For a while now my industry set up has been the following (in high sec unless specified):

Account 1:

- personal corp CEO, character who does my hauling in a DST or blockade runner, has the most well rounded industry skills

- Mobile Depot builder

- T2 rig building character

Account 2:

- Null builder/hauler, mostly doing T2 rigs 

- Highsec character, now skilled into building T2 haulers

Account 3:

- Spare null builder, underutilised

- T2 rig building character

Which leaves me with 1 spare slot on account 2 and 3. I Build out of a NPC station in Akonoinen in high sec, with a corp office there allowing for easy inventory management. This is 4 jumps from Jita. I like this set up as the logistics are easy, inventory management is easy, and the system cost index hovers around 4%, which is pretty nice for high sec.

In Null I basically only build on on e character, and build primarily with locally sourced salvage to sell on the local market. This keeps the logistics easy, though the revenue probably isn't as high as I could get in Jita. Inventory management between character though is fiddly, having to trade or contract blueprints, materials and output between characters, and trying to remember everything once I haul it to the raitarus in the industry park I use. I don't like this set up, and I may even pull out of this completely (nearly done so several times).

I've reached a point with my existing character training where I can fill those last 2 character slots, particularly as I am increasingly finding I have 5-6Bn ISK sitting in wallets. My first thought was to simply add 2 more characters to high sec and expand what I'm doing linearly, but I think I'll try something different.

EVEGuru have set up a couple of structures in the low sec system of Auner. That is 25 jumps from my current setup in Akonoinen, and the closest trade hub is Hek. This sounds inconvenient, and it is. But they've struck a deal with a courier service to offer hauling contracts to/from Jita for 25mil up to 1.5Bn collateral or 120mil up to 10Bn. This equates to about 1.6% and 1.2% respectively. They are also offering corp offices for 50mil/month, which is similar to the 35mil I pay in high sec.

The plus side is that it offers building in a sotiyo, with the EVEGuru profit margins estimating significantly more profit per hour, though part of that is the inbuilt speed bonuses of the structure. There is also a reactions structure also owned by them, allowing me to utilise more of my characters for potentially profitable reactions. I will also be able to build capitals down the line, which is a personal goal of mine.

The downsides are major, I won't have full control over my logistics (I'm not sure how long a hauling contract will take to complete) and I don't know if someone is going to destroy the structure. They have a contract with a local low sec entity to protect it, but we'll see how long that lasts in practice. Additionally, I'd have to keep a character in Jita to act as a market buyer/seller. I sort of do this with the CEO character now but he also builds his own stuff.

Bottom line, I'm going to create 2 new characters and give it a try, see how I get on. If it allows me to scale faster and boost my profits with reactions and I don't find the logistics too challenging I might move my entire operation there. If it proves incompatible with the way I play then I'll just up and move to high sec.

September Update - Industry

 A month of two halves this one, much improved second half of the month. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 33.4Bn ISK. That's an increase of 4.7Bn ISK, or 156mil/day.

That's not a record, but it is an improvement on the last few months. So what changed? 

Primarily, salvage prices have levelled out now that the new null exploration anomalies have hit the happy medium of what people are willing to run them for. Expect some ups and downs but I am no longer chasing rig prices down properly, which is great! You can see this change hit around the middle of the month as my profits suddenly spike.

Tied with that, one of my high sec alts has reached the point where he can invent and build medium and large T2 rigs, so I've just switched him over to that. At the moment it's primarily Medium Capacitor Control Circuit IIs. Why those? Well, they're consistently and healthily profitable, I currently build them for about 4mil each and sell them for about 7 mil. They also have the crucial revenue property that Mobile Depots have, that being I can put up as many as I can build in a day and be reasonably confident that by the time I log in again they'll all be sold. This applies to both high and null sec. 

This means I've moved that char away from depots, so some of the BPOs I have are getting some extra research. Pretty soon I'll be operating entirely from 10/16 BPOs for them, which will be nice. I've also just started up a couple of factory planets creating Guidance Systems feeding into Depots, bringing my input costs down further. It's pretty click intensive to set up but restocking is pretty easy and the new(ish) templates are a godsend, I can duplicate it to other planets really easily. I might just keep this up, it seems just on the right side of worth it for now.

I'm hoping over the next couple of months I can fill out my last 2 character slots on my second and third account, to bring me to 9 industry chars total. Initial thoughts would be to slot them into my highsec operation or use 1 as a test run for a lowsec freeport to check that side of things out...TBD on that one.

Hoping I can get further up the profitability this month, and all being well I should be able to have a record breaker. Fingers crossed!

September Update - Trading

 A steady and relatively uneventful month this one, my current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.134Tn ISK. That's an increase of 11Bn ISK, or 366mil/ISK/day. On the face of it that's pretty poor but during the month I spent 19.1Bn on a years PLEX for my first industry account so my operating profit for the month was a much healthier 30Bn.

Still nothing spectacular but a steady increase that I hope to build on in October. Though I have had a return to office order that may impact order updating and my playtime more generally, as I expect to get back from London late a few evenings a week which has knock on effects.

On the plus side my expansion of selling in Horde staging has been going well, with sometimes around 70Bn in sell orders and revenue comparable to dodixie, this is definitely worth keeping up with. Also I've managed to increase my sell orders to over 900Bn. The screenshots have been taken before trade runs so I have a lot of ISK in my wallet, but I am creeping towards the trillion in sell order target.

Plan for October is to increase my revenues, particularly in null, and push my sell orders higher towards the 1Tn mark. Probably still a few months away but steadily heading in the right direction.

Dipping my toe into PI

 On the OZ discord this week there has been some...lively debate around easy newbro income. One thing that sparked the most debate was a planetary interaction setup that yields about 2Bn a month in highsec across 3 characters on an account. The biggest controversy around this was the word "easy" that kept being inserted, as it requires max skills to pull off, along with ISK and significant in game knowledge. There was also discussion about using Pochven and a Deluge (t2 PI hauler) to haul the outputs to Jita to sell, which puts it way beyond the realm of new player. 

However, all this got me thinking. The claim is you bring in inputs once every 2 weeks, reset your factories and haul the outputs. I briefly tried PI when it first came out but I didn't particularly enjoy it so I dropped it and never came back. But if I can get a setup requiring such a small amount of interaction for a significant amount of income that's worth considering. Additionally, for Mobile Depots (my most produced item) 4 of the 7 input materials are PI. 3 of them I buy from buy orders but Guidance Systems the margins are so small in Jita I just buy from sell orders to make my depots. If I can use PI to bring the cost of those down then it will make my whole process more profitable.

So I am now researching what I need to know about PI, essentially from scratch. I think for a factory setup, i.e. one that does not extract materials from the planet but takes inputs and spits out outputs, I only need:

- Command Centre Upgrades - For increasing the amount of power the command centre generates, i.e. so I can place more factories

- Interplanetary Consolidation - each level gives and extra planet setup to play with

- Custom Code Expertise - to lower the tax paid on POCOs.

I think the most important one is command centre upgrades, which is unfortunately the longest train. It'll take me about 20 days to get this to V so I'm starting now. 

If I can make this work I will roll it out across my high sec characters. If not it'll be sent back to the "do not touch" pile. I'll update with my experiences once I understand it all better. 

UPDATE - I set up a single planet and the materials cost me 62 million, let's see what the outputs I'll end up with. Adam4EVE is saying it's basically not worth me doing this but if the setup seems good I'll buy from buy orders to bring down input costs and scale this up.

Salvage levelling out?

 In the last few months I have moved my industry operations to focus on rig production, particularly T2 rigs. On EVEGuru these things have consistently been high up on IKS per hour profitability whilst also having the advantage of being value dense and small in terms of volume, making for easy logistics particularly in highsec. 

However, CCP then released extra exploration upgrades for sov null to allow alliances to spawn more exploration sites, the main source of salvage. As such prices have been consistently falling and I've been chasing down the prices of my rigs to try and not get stuck with a bunch of overpriced stock. I've also started diversifying a bit more, dipping my toe into things like industrial cores etc.

This week though I have noticed that a lot of salvage has started levelling out, or even bouncing up a bit. A good example of this is armor plates:

Some of this uptick will be speculators deciding that now is a good time to buy (and it may be). It could also be SirSmashAlot messing with the market for funsies, which I can't account for. Or it could be an adjustment where below this explorers no longer believe it is worth their time to go and run relic/data sites and so the price levels out. If the latter then we will see rig markets adjust to a new normal, and my profits should start to improve again hopefully. 

Some rigs are still loss making, and this will likely bounce around a little over a few weeks if this is indeed to be new normal salvage prices, but we should hopefully get back to historic profitability, or at least consistent for now. But the last couple of days I've noticed some rigs with consistent profitability, not moving price much, which is great.

Separately I have also bought a Bustard, a deep space transport. This allows me to buy and transport 27 lines worth of mobile depot materials, or significant chunk of industrial core mats faster than numerous trips in a Crane. A nice quality of life improvement for 200mil. I haven't yet worked out a scalable approach to null industry yet though, despite furious googling, people keep their setups close to their chests. If I work something out I'll put out a "how to" to see if anyone can suggest improvements there. TBD.

August Update - Industry

 A bit late this one, though I took my screenshots at the same time as my trade ones so the data is good, here's my summary:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 28.7Bn ISK. that's a increase of 2Bn ISK or 68.9Mil ISK/day.

That's another challenging month, so what happened? Well it can partly be summed up by this image:

Large Trimark Armor Pump II fell from 120mil to 86mil during august, a drop in price of ~29%. This played out across my rigs, so I was chasing down my sell orders while trying to push profits in a very challenging way. This is demonstrated in the graph how it bounces up and down. I've essentially been sprinting on a treadmill to stand still. 

The prices of salvage have to bottom out somewhere but while they do my business model struggles. I have been inventing slightly different things to try and counter this, as well as building some more T1 stuff and pushing the mobile depots hard. Diversification is key. I've also started training one of my characters to invent T2 haulers. I can fly them and they get lost on a regular basis so I think this could be a potentially lucrative option, if a bit of a pain logistically until I get myself a freighter. 

Plan for this month is to get myself a DST for moving mobile depots and materials around. They are quite bulky so I'm regularly making 3-4 trips to and from Jita every day. I'd also like to build some industrial cores which are very bulky.

I also really need to work on my process in null to better utilise things there. The war seems to have stabilised so I should be able to work out a good system that scales. A problem I must solve if I ever want to get into capital production.

August Update - Trading

 I've been ever so slightly more active this month, despite the summer slump. Having said that work has still been insane and on top of that we've welcomed a new puppy into the house, which has meant I've not really been able to have my late evening gaming in the same way. With that preamble out of the way, my current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.123Tn ISK, that's an increase of 24.5Bn ISK or 742Mil ISK/day.

A good increase on last month, though still a long way short of where I'd like to be. Hoping in September most people will be back from holidays an activity will pick up, and I can get a bit more on in and continue my reforms to my setup.

In addition to my normal buying in Jita, paying someone to ship items to Rens/Hek/Amarr/Dodixie, I've also switched my null character to be a seller. Previously what I did with him was sit in Horde staging and trade PLEX. The margins were usually profitable, even if the volume was nowhere near what it was in Jita. This made steady money for not much input which I like. However the introduction of the global (should be galactic or cluster-wide really, but I digress) PLEX market killed this revenue stream dead. What I have started doing in the last week or so though is using a third party tool someone created to track items that need seeding and pick items from there to pay an alliance logistics service to import for me to null. The price of hauling is very cheap, usually coming out to about 1% of collateral, which is what I pay in high sec. I'm still building my quickbar here and only have imported about 25Bn so far, but I think this will be a good extra revenue stream for me. I also will be trading slightly different things here, more T2 modules and things like that. Though I don't think I'll be importing ships as they are simply too big to be economical to shift in that way.

I have also been slowly expanding the amount I sell in my highsec hubs. The above sheet is a snapshot when I logged in after a long weekend so I have a lot more in the wallets than usual, but I am well north of 800Bn in sell orders now, heading for my target of 1Tn in regular sells.

My "investments" continue to perform poorly, slightly dropping in value to depress my results by a few billion. Never take investment advice from me in any capacity, not that I'd be keen to give any out.

PLEX value continues to fall, with buys sitting at 5.35 million ISK at the time of writing. This justifies me selling my stockpile, and I'll buy more when I need it. I will need to buy a years worth of PLEX this month to PLEX my industry account, so expect a ~20Bn ISK hit next month.

Plans for this month are to continue with what I'm doing, keep expanding my day to day business and push for 1Tn in sells, and try and get more runs this month to get more revenue. I've been too lazy with this branch of the business for too long and it shows, time to change that!

Selling my PLEX and organising my accounts

 So, CCP a while ago said that they were trying to move away from a model of people hoarding PLEX as an investment towards one where people spend it as currency (somewhat ignoring he fact that people save real currency for various reasons). I didn't immediately see anything changing in that department, particularly as it would probably involve them changing their sales model which has proven successful for getting PLEX used and off their balance sheet, an important accounting step.

however, recently CCP has been adding bonus PLEX to their real money store packs, injecting more into the economy. This has caused persistent PLEX price falls in the market:

Normally this would simply present an opportunity, a temporary price to drop where you could pick up cheap PLEX and use them in the next NES sale. But there have been a few real money packs with bonus PLEX and no major NES sales since that announcement of a change of course, so I feel this approach may be what their plan is, at least in the mid term. I had been holding 24,000 PLEX for use in the next big NES sale or for game time, but with the value of that falling and no immediate end in sight I decided to simply sell it all for 5.75mil each. This represented an on paper loss of about 6Bn from where I bought it but it does give me a bit of stability, and when I need to PLEX my industry accounts I can just buy PLEX on the spot. I now have nearly 200Bn ISK sat in wallets (need to make trade runs) so I can use that money to try and refocus on the core fundamentals of my trading business.

Organising my characters

On the Industry side of things, the falling price of salvage due to the new exploration sites has meant I am basically undergoing a sisyphean task of trying to make money faster than the price of my goods falls. Salvage prices will hit an equilibrium at some point, but until then the prices of rigs falls, so my sell orders fall and I lose money. I am still able to produce on paper profits and my Mobile depots are still reliably producing 120-150mil banked profit per day though, so it's not all bad.

I've decided to write down what I'm using each character for, and what I'm aiming for as well. I'm pretty bad at fully utilising all my slots and I'm hoping having a reference sheet will aid me in getting a more focussed operation rather than starting to set something up and then forgetting what I was doing when I next log in.

Early days and very rough, but at least gives an idea of how I'm organising things at the moment. It also clearly flags gaps, i.e. that I need to address the training of my first account as it's a bit directionless at the moment and that I'm doing absolutely no reactions right now, missing out on a potential revenue stream.

Speaking of null, the new exploration sites have pushed the prices down but they have lead to an abundance of supply of salvage in null. Whereas previously I'd have to ship in extra from Jita if I wanted to use more than 3 slots for rigs, costing money and more importantly time, now I can go after rig production really easily right out of staging, which is nice.

change always offers opportunities, you just need to roll with the punches!

July Update - Industry

My industry was a worse month than my trading, if you can believe it. A lot worse. My current ISK values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 26.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 700Mil ISK or 22Mil/ISK/day.

That's essentially zero. So what happened?

Well similar to my trading I didn't play that much. Also the move of null staging led to me resetting my null setup completely, and I haven't really got it started back up again. 

Worse though is that I decided to focus on T2 rig production and started setting up my setup around that. Then CCP introduced exploration upgrades for null systems to increase the number and quality of exploration sites, where most salvage comes from. That lead to this:

Which has lead to the rig market looking like this:

So I've been chasing the prices down, which you can see in my net worth graph. I don't know where the floor will end up being with salvage and if CCP will tweak it again. They have been trying to push prices for ships down in order to encourage greater usage so I can't see this being changed any time soon, and we haven't hit the floor yet. As such I think I need to switch to producing other things until this all levels out. I really do have the worst timing.

I will therefore look to switch to either module or ship production, probably modules realistically for the coming month (well and mobile depots). The main plus this month is I've added 2 more characters to my high sec setup who have slotted in easily. I think my high sec setup is fairly easily scalable without much extra work which is really nice. Soon I'll be up to 50 production slots in high sec which should really allow me to push scale if I'm clever about it.

Oh one thing I almost forgot, I also got ganked for the first time with something in the cargo hold in high sec. I had about 100 mobile depots in a blockade runner and was docking at jita when a tornado killed me. I normally go to an insta dock when I have things in the cargo but I got complacent. Cost me about 400mil in ship+cargo, but it would have been a lot worse with rigs in the cargo. A good reminder to be careful in future.

July Update - Trading

 This month hasn't been anywhere near as active as I hoped. Real life was a lot busier than I thought it would be and I've played a lot less. Regardless, here's my current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.099Tn ISK. That's an increase of 17Bn ISK or 548Mil/ISK/day. 

That's not a great month, all things considered. I've not played a lot and the summer slump is real, but worst is I've not managed to increase my amount in sell orders at all. Something to remedy.

My profits have been depressed this month by a couple of things. One, there was a summer event where you get given Quafe zero for logging in. I've thrown a few billion  at this on the hope that they jump back up in value in a month or two. Typical for my investments though this hasn't happened yet.

More significantly though CCP seem to be taking action to address PLEX hoarding and have been offering 1500 PLEX with existing real money packs. This leads to a increase in PLEX being sold on the market and the price being lowered. As you will know, I recently bought 24,000 PLEX. So this has hit my net worth. My plan is to use this to PLEX my industry accounts and hold on to it on the off chance of a good offer. Because I'm doing this you can pretty much guarantee that there won't be any more good NES sales forthcoming, so you're welcome.

Next month is to stop new investments and focus solely on the day to day. I want to get back up to 50Bn/month, which should be doable given my resources.

Stress, illness, real life and EVE

 When I returned after my holiday I was full of confidence that this was going to be a real "knuckle down and get on" kind of month, where I would play near daily and really push how far I could take my industry. Then real life got in the way.

We are in the process of trying to sell our house, and after a few months of very little happening we received an offer while we were away which we accepted. This kickstarted a whole bunch of admin, selecting and instructing solicitors, filling in forms, trying to find things worth viewing and squeezing in said viewings. My evenings were suddenly full of admin, exciting as the prospect of a move is.

At the same time, I am dealing with a HR situation at work, one that I thought I would wrap up my first day back. Stressful but over and done with was the idea. Then HR caught up with Legal and it became a whole big drawn our process. There has been a lot of uncertainty, and even though it is clarified for me now it means I'm staring down the barrel of several more months of dealing with this. Not ideal.

On top of that I was ill most of last week. In classic fashion the kids had it for about a day and bounced back but it hit me and my wife for about a week. I struggled through work but it really took its toll. Also I'm 80% sure I broke my big toe playing football as well.

How this affects EVE

Why the big real life dump? I hear you ask. Well partly it's cathartic for me to put down what I've been dealing with, manageable though it all is, and partly it's to explain that I've actually played very little EVE since getting back. Indeed when I have had time and the inclination to play games I've mostly been playing a retro football manager save. Less cerebral than trying to work out how to expand my EVE business and come up with better processes.

Tonight though I have a clear run, so I've filled up my slots and taken stock of where I'm at. The high sec business continues to chug along, the process is easy and the profits are good. Null is a bit more complex though. Though I realised through Ansiblex gates I was actually only a few jumps from my old operating ground the Sotiyo I operated out of has been taken down. I have seen on the discord that there is a plan to add more industry structures near E8- but for the moment I think I need to be content to operate out of raitarus. Not a dream situation but one I'll put up with for now.

Also, those characters have kind of trained everything I need them too for now, and they're sort of aimlessly training skills further and getting mining skills up. So I've decided to utilise those accounts better and create new characters to put in my high sec venture. I will initially train them for slots and then beeline for rigs, though initially they'll probably be mobile depot factories. I would like to add more characters for Null but I don't feel like I have a good handle on material acquisition or even a semi permanent operating base, so they'll be better utilised in high for now.

Trading, or how to make the most of the login bonuses

The Solar Fest event is going on right now, so you get rewards on login. Mostly this is SKINR detritus but there are also crates containing quafe zero classic and green apple. These are boosters that give minor bonuses and are reasonably cheap most of the time. This is especially true at the moment:

As you can see the volume is up and the price is at a 52 week low. Green apple usually goes for 15-20mil and is currently sat around 13mil in Jita, and classic usually goes for 40-50mil and is currently 30.

CCP can and will reintroduce these, and the volume isn't enough to sink hundreds of billions into but I'm putting a few billion in buy orders up to snap some up in all 5 high sec trade hubs. If I hold onto these for a month or 2 I should make 30-40%, which would be nice.

Other big industry news is the SCC charge for researching blueprints has been halved. I haven't researched any high level blueprints but I gather the charges are excessive, and bringing these down should only be a good thing for newer industrialists (like me!)

Getting set up, and frustrated

 So. After a bit of chat in the alliance discord and studying maps of the area, I realised that the industry park that was 11 jumps away actually 2 jumps and an ansiblex away from new staging. Given that I used to jump 4 jumps each way this is actually pretty good, though from a risk point of view ansiblex's are more likely to be camped than gates are. The only downside really is that the park contains a bunch of raitarus not a sotiyo, so I need to spread my operation out a bit to make it work.

So I dutifully set up EVEGuru to factor in the new settings, moved my blueprints over, did a run of materials to build a few things, then as I docked in the manufacturing Raitaru I noticed something...

The ansiblex in that system takes me to Z-ENUD, which I used to pass through on my way to the sotiyo I did everything out of. New staging is actually about 5 jumps including ansiblex from where I used to be based! 

Leadership has made it clear that industry parks won't be moving for the time being, though there is the added risk that Goons are more likely to hit 7MC than where I have set up now. I'm enormously frustrated that I could have left my setup literally as it was. I guess this is the issue with not really knowing the space very well as I only undock to do short shuttle runs. I'm going to let my jobs run as they are, but tomorrow I may well move my setup back to the old sotiyo. It should just be blueprints and decryptors, so a single run which is at least easy. I feel a bit stupid for not having realised this tbh, but there we are.

Trying to work out new null logistics

 So today I've restarted my highsec industry properly, utilising all of my slots. I've had to take some write downs on sell orders to follow the market, particularly in Null.

Speaking of null...

I've been trying to work out where best to restart tings in Null after the move of staging to E8-432. I was hoping some industry park would have been put up by now but it seems not to be the case. An Azbel has been put up in the staging system but it only has facilities for manufacturing, so it's of limited use. 

There is an industry park with full rigged sotiyos 2 systems over, but the structures are not held by Horde but a blue corp (renters I think). I've been told in no uncertain terms not to use these structures, or any that are not owned by Horde themselves. This is fine in theory, but the nearest Horde industry park where I can do the full range of activities is 11 jumps away! The politics of this situation are not fun.

I don't particularly fancy moving 11 jumps any time I want to do anything. I'm not even sure that's doable in a single jump freighter jump. Honestly I'm a bit deflated about this altogether. I'm sorely tempted to add new characters to high sec and park Null activity until I can work out the logistics here. Maybe a move to lowsec is the way to avoid the politics of it all? 

In a separate note, the global PLEX market is now live. Instead of having PLEX located in a certain region all orders go into the "global region" so you can buy and sell from everywhere. This is a good change to the game, though it has taken away one of my income streams. 

My null station trade character had transitioned to exclusively trading in PLEX, as in Horde staging you could often flip it profitably, even with higher broker fees than perimeter (there were occasional arbitrage opportunities as well, though more infrequent). When the PLEX market went live they cancelled all existing orders so I'm sat on 9325 PLEX on that character, and at 6,300,000 I can't quite sell them profitably (picked them up for up to 6.1mil), so I'll transfer them to my character that holds my investments and mark them on my sheet accordingly for now.

June Update - Industry

 Similar to my trading, my play here was a little bit patchy. A strong first half of the month though. My current ISK values:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 26Bn ISK. That's an increase of 6.91Bn ISK or 203mil/day.

Another record month. As you can probably see before I went away my net worth was 26.4Bn but I seem to have lost 400mil in net worth without logging in. Maybe this is the price of assets dropping as the moves by the big blocs settle down. Not sure as I haven't actually logged in to my accounts yet.

The month started off very strong, and had I played the whole month I was on track for a 10Bn ISK month but life happens. I have moved one of my high sec characters into making t2 rigs, so now my split is 1 null and 2 high sec chars making t2 rigs, 1 highsec making mobile depots (they're just too reliably profitable) and 1 null sec char who makes random stuff from EVEGuru, and is frankly underutilised. I am training him for t2 rigs as well though.

A big thing is I have 6.2Bn in wallets to reinvest which is great, and I suspect by now a new industry park has been set up near Horde's new staging that I can look at utilising. I'm going to sort out a trade run before that though so I might not get to that today.

I met my target of 6Bn for the month, which I'm thrilled about. With a full month of play ahead of me though I think i can push myself and hit 10Bn profit this month. I might even need to start a couple of new characters to help scale. TBD.

June Update - Trading

 I was away the last week of the month, and had my sister in law over for a lot of this month so I didn't have as much time to play as usual and didn't log in at all on my trade characters for the last 2 weeks. Still a pretty good month though:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.083Tn ISK. That's an increase of 45Bn ISK, or 1.32Bn ISK/day.

That's a big increase on last month, though not quite a record. Considering how little I played I think this is a huge improvement. With 100Bn in wallets I've got a lot I need to rebuy, my sell orders have mostly sat around 800Bn this month which is good as I inch towards 1Tn sell orders. I'm going to try and push to 900Bn in sell orders in July.

There was a small bump in my investments as hypercores inched up in price, which is nice. Still going to be a while before I can cash out but good nonetheless.

I've also bought more PLEX, up to 12,000 now. The idea behind it is to build up a bit of a stockpile that I can use on any Omega + MCT sales to do a bit of skill farming on my trade accounts. The last sale like that happened in June last year while I was on holiday, so I missed it. There hasn't ben one yet this year, and there may not be. Worst case I use the PLEX to add omega time to my industry characters towards the end of the year.

In my drive to increase sell orders I've moved into buying more blueprints. I've tried to stick to blueprints worth more than 1Bn to be worth my time, and these are mostly ship blueprints. I'll probably expand this further, and look into structure and maybe structure rig blueprints as well.

Aim for July is to break the 50Bn ISK profit mark, while upping my sell orders to 900Bn. let's see how I do.

Another move, Null this time

 So, there's been a big announcement, Horde is moving it's staging from MJ-5F9 to E8-432 in Etherium Reach. This includes all war as well as peacetime assets, so i need to move as the market is moving with it. 

I've been able to safely ignore forward stagings for war up to this point as the market has remained where it is, but no longer. This is going to involve a significant logistical effort for me, as I have assets and ships in 7M4-4C and MJ- across 4 characters, including capitals, mining ships, materials, all sorts.

Step 1 is consolidating all my stuff in MJ-, which is what I'm going to try and do with my limited time tonight. Step 2 will be the move to Etherium reach. 

I've made these sort of moves before, and this one is all through "safe" space, so should be pretty easy, but a pain all the same. What's more though is it poses a big question for my industry effort. Do I work out where the closest industry park is to E8- and set up my industry there and hope Goons don't disrupt things too badly, or do I put things on hold/ move to high sec whole sale?

This is complicated by the fact we have my sister in law over on a once in a decade trip from across the world right now, and she is on and off staying in the spare room where my PC is, so EVE access is somewhat erratic. Also, I'm going on holiday for a week next week.

I think the sensible move is to consolidate in MJ-, then jump my assets to E8- and see where things are when I come back from holiday and make a call then. It's a shame as my null revenues were starting to outpace my highsec ones but this whole war is good for the game, and I'm sure worst case I can get set up again once this calms down, provided I don't lose all my blueprints in a fire along the way.

May Update - Industry

 A very strong month this month. I forgot to take screenshots of jEveAssets on the 31st, so I'm missing the values table for this month. However I have the graph, which I'll trim the latest data points off:

My net worth is 19.09Bn ISK, that's an increase of 6.34Bn or 204.5Mil ISK/day.

Nearly a 50% increase in profits on last month, which is a great improvement! Revenues of 53Bn ISK this month mean a profit margin after fees of 11.9%. This seems to be a good sustainable margin as it's been within 1% of that for the last 3 months.

I've been moving this month towards specialisation. As Lord Maldorer puts it in Clarion Call 4 (excellent watch, I'd watch the entire series if you haven't already) "If you build a ship to do 1 specific thing in EVE, it can do that thing very well". This applies to characters and setups as well. I've noticed that most of my profits come from t2 ship rigs, large and medium. Both my null characters can build them as can 1 of my high sec characters. I fell this is an area that ticks a lot of boxes for me:

1. it is "value-dense". Both the input and output materials are low m3 and can be quite expensive, meaning logistics are easy

2. The Margins tend to be consistently pretty good

3. The total market size is pretty large, so I am unlikely to be able to flood the market and thus keep my slots busy.

Therefore I intend to work my setup to be primarily focusing on that. What this means is training up my second and third high sec characters for t2 rig production (the easy part) and getting hold of some extra blueprints to expand my range of products within this basket. I also need to work out the best way of brining in material to null on a regular enough basis as the salvage market in MJ- already struggles to meet my needs with 1 character. The final step with null will be to work out how to balance selling locally vs shipping back to Jita. Alliance Jump Freighter services are cheap but it adds a time delay to everything, which isn't ideal until/if I decide to do my own logistics.

One way around this would be to fly my high sec character to the nearest low/null sec system in a blockade runner and dock in an NPC station, hand off the cargo to my null character who carries it to MJ- in another blockade runner, and the reverse with end product. This has the advantage of me being able to do it on my own time and not wait, but the disadvantage of it taking time and therefore probably not being scaleable. TBD on this.

On the subject of Alliance Logistics, Goons declared war on Horde and invaded a fringe region. This hasn't been disruptive in any way yet but it has given the market a bit of a kick. I came back to ~4Bn in my null wallet as people fit up ships and gear up for the war, which is great for the game and for me! Remains to be seen if goons will actually push into Horde homelands or whether they will get bored before that point (I suspect the latter, despite the reddit spam) but either way a conflict between blocks can only be good for the game as a whole.

On targets for the month I smashed my 5Bn target, though I did not keep my reaction slots busy. The local reactions market has been weird recently but I'm hoping things pick up and I can start utilising this better again. 

I'd be very happy if I can maintain 6Bn profit for next month as I'll be away for the last week of the month, but we'll see how things go.

May Update - Trading

 A better month this one, even though I had my parents staying with us for most of a week towards the end of the month so I didn't get as much playtime as I otherwise might. My current position:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.038Tn ISK. That's an increase of 31Bn ISK, or 1Bn ISK/day.

Being back at 1Bn a day is a good place to be, and it's been a while since that was true. There's very little to talk about terms of investment updates, which in some ways is nice. I've been trying to plunge as much money back into day to day region trading as I can, to get to the 1Tn in sell orders point. This screenshot was taken just after logging in after almost a week off which is why I had so much in wallets. I have now taken and reinvested this so it actually looks a bit better.

I did a little station trading in Amarr this month utilising the free trial of the EVEGuru module for station trading. In truth I only logged in to do some trading about 4 or 5 times, which underpins that that's not something I'm enjoying right now, and is reflected by the fact that I only made 500mil on that character. I won't be subscribing to that module and I think I'll probably mothball this character again. I can probably put that 20Bn to better use with my main traders. 

I did do a bit of station trading in Horde staging, almost entirely trading PLEX where I made 4Bn profit this month. I like this as it's only 1 or 2 items to watch and it's high value high liquidity, but low competition in null. I'll keep this up as it's very low input for the reward.

I smashed my target for the month of 20Bn, but I'm away for a week this month so I'm going to say the same target again for this month, if I can hit 1.06Tn I'll be pleased.

Moving away from public Raitarus

 So the public Raitaru I was researching out of in Hirtamon went low power, screwing me over for a third time in 7 months. This time all I was doing was researching ME on some blueprints in there, so all I lost is time and the job cost, but I'm not making this mistake again. The worst thing is I didn't have a character parked in there which means my assets had to go into asset safety, and I can't claim them for 5 days! This means I've lost access not only to some BPOs for that time, but all of my BPCs I was planning to invent from. 

I searched around for a nearby high sec NPC station to move to where I could do the full range of production, research, copying and invention from. There are a few, and Vellaine looked like a good option with good system cost indexes. However there are no available offices in that station so I've had to go 1 jump over to Akonoinen.

As you can see this offers the full range of activities and has a system build cost of 4.74%, which is fairly average for Caldari high sec.

All this does make me want to revisit the idea of putting up my own private raitaru somewhere to operate out of, but it still kind of feels like I'm not where I need to be to make that a profitable idea at the moment. I'll run the numbers and see if it's worthwhile.