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.