A new Industry Creator

 I've recently started watching a new EVE industry content creator on youtube, EVE Compass 

He has done an industry podcast with a couple of guests, the most recent one being Ardel Corvalon, CEO of ARDCO, who I've loaned 5Bn to support his industry buyback program. 

The new podcast takes more of a conversational tone, going into why the guest got into what they're doing, challenges they've faced and how they overcame them, as well as things like burnout. A really good listen.

He's also started his own progression series, From Rocks to Riches, where he started with an alpha character and is making a go of industry. Only 1 episode so far but I'll be keeping track with interest.

It's nice to see some recent additions to the industry content creation game. I've said this before but I think we're in a really good place for this sort of content and there's a lot more than there used to be a few years ago, which is great. Gives me stuff to watch on the train into London!

Deflation and reduced economic activity

 So, at the moment we're in a period of arguable deflation within EVE. Oz has done an analysis in greater detail that I could here: Feb MER analysis

But essentially, ISK velocity is down, mining is up, destruction is down, prices continue to fall.

As to why, I think we're really feeling the effects of Pandemic Horde's collapse. Both them and Goons were gearing up for a big war, which would have meant large amounts of destruction, requiring replacement ships/modules/deadspace kit and pushing up the ISK velocity. 

Instead what we have is a place where the 3 big blocs, Goons, INIT and Frat, are all in full "stockpile" mode, where they are mining/building like crazy and not destroying much. This pushes prices down due to a flood of minerals and salvage, and demand down due to not needing to replace anything at scale.

What this means for me, personally, is it's becoming harder and harder to make money. My core regional trade business is suffering as the demand for deadspace/faction items is dropping so my overall income is down. In my industry side things are worse as I'm having to drop prices to keep pace with where things are and get some liquidity, which I'm using to keep slots busy for smaller margins. And since I'm essentially just adding to the flood of the market I either push my prices down to get liquidity, or I keep them where they are and just build up sell orders that are never going to go anywhere. It feels like I'm running just to stand still.

These phases happen in EVE, and if it continues too much CCP will step in or eventually a significant conflict will kick off, but right now it's hitting my motivation as it just feels like I'm not achieving much right now.

I'm still waiting for skills to train to get some alts into producing T2 hulls so I can switch to higher margin items as well, which is again frustrating but at least gives me something to look towards.

February Update - Industry

 An even worse month than trading this one. My current position:

And the graph:

My current net worth is 61.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 500mil, or 18mil/ISK/day.

Truly dreadful, so why?

Well, likewise I only played half the month as you can clearly see on the graph. I have also been fighting to try and improve my main issue, which is revenue. 

Without revenue, I don't have the money for materials to build things, so I need to improve that. Currently I struggle to keep my slots all busy. Therefore I've been much more aggressive than usual in updating sell orders for my wares. The problem is, salvage is falling in value due to peace time well and truly setting in, so rigs are also falling. 

I'll keep fighting like this until things stabilise, but I also need to branch out. I've been saying for a long time that I want to give low sec industry a go, and I've finally started moving in that direction.

I have 1 character who was building t2 haulers while the margins were good, but that has completely evaporated in high sec now, and has been like that for a while. However, looking at EVEGuru the margins if you do your own reactions and build t2 components in lowsec are very good. As a result I've moved this character to Aunur, to the lowsec foundry run by EVEGuru, and I'm training skills for this new venture. These include things like Mass Reactions and the Advanced form, but also Advanced small ship construction (I'm thinking or starting out doing Sabres) and other skills needed for the t2 components that go into ships. Step 2 will be to buy the blueprints I need, ship them down and start researching them, then ship in materials and do a couple of exploratory runs.

I'm excited for where this goes. I'm also working on a "building rigs in high sec" guide as well, which I hope to publish this month so that people can tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to improve my process. Interesting times ahead!

February Update - Trading

 Not an amazing month this one, I hardly played for the first 2 weeks and it showed. Still, here are the numbers:

And the full breakdown:

My current net worth is 1.161Tn ISK. That's an increase of 8Bn, or 285mil/ISK/day.

So that's pretty poor, why so bad?

Well, as explained, I basically didn't play for the first 2 weeks, but additionally, when I was updating my "investments" towards the end of the month I realised I had 100 extra master-at-arms cerebral accelerators listed on my sheet than I actually had in my inventory. This wasn't a new mistake and was listed on my last sheet, so I could go back and adjust my accounting there, but that could get messy so I'm just updating it here. So operating profit wise I'm probably about 6Bn better than that.

Additionally, I've not really been doing anything new with my money. What I am starting to prep for is seeding a market to branch out. I've chosen the "PleniMart" in Kihtalid for this experiment. It ranks in the top 40 markets galaxy wide and is being operated by Thanak of the Building my Industrial empire series. Well worth a watch. What started out as one man trying to get into industry has turned into an alliance encompassing high sec and null sec, and has pulled in the likes of ARDCO into its ranks. 

This planned seeding will be using different items to my normal regional trading, likely more common items to get greater turnover. I will also be competing with Croda, who has recently started seeding this station. We'll see how this goes. I suspect my item choices might be slightly different from his, but greater supply can only help further cement PleniMart as a real secondary trade hub.

This should also help me hit one of my other goals I've had for a while to hit 1Tn in sell orders, which I'm also there at right now.