The power of buy orders

 As my revenue has increased, I find I've sometimes got a little bit of ISK to play with after putting most of my slots to use. I'm also finding a bit of a pattern with certain items coming up time and again for building. I've been experimenting with combining these 2 things to get buy orders up to try and get cheaper input materials to enhance my profits. 

A good example is Medium Ancillary Current Router II. I tend to invent BPCs that are 3 run and take the following input materials:

As you can see buying from sell orders costs me 64mil to build 3. I can put these up for sale for ~67mil, which makes them barely profitable currently (the margin for these is usually better, but I've been sucking up salvage available in MJ- recently and pushed some prices up inadvertently). 

If I were to get my input materials from buy orders though it looks like the following:

Power circuit - 39 * 200,000 = 7,800,000

Logic Circuit - 39 * 600,000 = 23,400,000

Power Conduit - 9 * 1,920,000 = 17,280,000

All told that's 48,480,000 in materials, a saving of 13.5mil.

This isn't the best example as it's barely profitable to build these currently (actually I don't think it is at all buying from sell orders) but the principle works for other things. Large Trimark Amor Pump II are a better example as the margin is much larger currently. 118mil buy orders vs 140mil sell currently, selling for 172mil.

The downside of this method are that you need to know what you want to build in a couple of days time in order to collect the materials from buy orders. This is risky as profit margins can move and then you need to find something else to build with the materials or have them tied up. It also requires tying up ISK in buy orders rather than buying inputs to use immediately. 

At the moment I'm not really able to utilise this excessively, but as I grow and get into more dependable runs this is a great way to extract more profit from your build slots than you would otherwise. Though you could argue I'm piling trading profits into industry ones. I don't mind that in this case though as the items are profitable regardless of how I acquire the inputs.