February Update

I've managed a little more playtime this month, and crucially I've put a little bit of effort into my station trading, particularly trying to get my Amarr trader off the ground again. It's been a refreshing change and I've made a bit of progress, on top of my usual runs. My current position:

I currently have 595.3Bn ISK. That's an increase of 28.8Bn on last month. Exactly the same as December! I was on track to beat 1Bn a day until the last week when things slowed down massively. I suspect this is largely due to the ongoing DDOS and mitigation action related to that. Less player logging in, less market activity. I myself haven't been affected when I've logged in, but I understand a lot of people over in the US have.

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Skill Point Trader

 Still grinding, a long way to go before this guy really gets going. I've completed the Caldari careers missions, and 1 of the 3 sets of Gallente. A long way to go here. This one really underlines how little time I get to play!

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 83Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~158 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 118 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 123 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 80Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 12.6 Billion. I've done a bit of trading on this character this month finally, and it feels like I'm making progress at long last.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.5% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump.

Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 66.7 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. He also farms SP and sells injectors on the market.

Horde Station Trader

Station trading in the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 6.3Bn.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

A different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 6.4Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably. I haven't touched this character at all this month. Another thing to correct. So much to do, so little time!

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Also has 9 structure component BPs in research, they were at ME7, and are on a final run of research to get them to ME8. This one step is taking 51 days! At that point I definitely just want to get started producing. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in.

End of Year 2019

Another year, another summary!

This year marks a change in that I've actually managed a blog every month, which I think is indicative of greater engagement in what I'm doing, and I think that's reflected in the trade numbers. Even though I have several projects that are still ramping up.

I have been away for the last 2 weeks, doing family things, so it's been a short month of updates, but still a decent earner. But that's my explanation for so much ISK sitting in wallets. Excuses out of the way, my current position:

I have 566.5Bn ISK. That's an increase of 28.8Bn on last month, which considering I didn't play for 2 weeks is pretty damn good. A large amount of that, 131Bn is sat in ISK. That sounds great, but ISK in wallets isn't earning me anything. I'm going to add a lot of new items to my selling list over the next couple of days to try and utilise that, as well as look at some investments and work on my standings for my future SP trader. All time dependant really.

Lets have a look at this time last year:

I had 270.4Bn and was using 8 characters. So I've increased my wealth by 296.1Bn ISK in the last year, a little over doubling my wealth! Last year I nearly tripled my worth though, which demonstrates the difficulty of scaling increases. Can't keep doubling forever doing the same things!

As far as next year goes, I think I should easily be able to top 300Bn for the year, just doing what I'm doing. With the extra projects to come online, and if I re-assess some of my investments I should be able to increase that. So I'm going to take a punt and say that on 01/01/2021 I'll have 900Bn. I'd love to say I'll be a Trillionaire by then, but I think that's possibly a bit of a stretch. It could happen though right?

Also like all players I was sent my own "year in EVE video, here it is:

https://www.eveonline.com/my-year-in-eve?id=3507/88375/7436454d497642e494835727914de1b97fd94c26bf1b444eac9d9ec47810c1bd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=endofyear2019&utm_content=cta

A little silly perhaps, but I enjoyed it. It proves that I do (occasionally!) PVP, and throws up that I've made over 43,000 market transactions, putting me in the top 1% of players. This surprised me a little, though perhaps it shouldn't. Also my most traded item was Fernite Carbide, and 25 million units. Not sure what that says TBH. I liked how it grouped all your characters together across accounts, and I think it's fairly well made. I like these little stats about your life in EVE. I'd like to see this more in future, maybe with a little more info besides. CCPls?

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Skill Point Trader

My newest character! I've started a brand new character, who I'm going to get a very high reputation with all the main empires and the corporations who own the trade hubs, for the purpose of trading skill injectors and other high value high turnover items. Still grinding, a long way to go before this guy really gets going.

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 83Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~128 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 82 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has 98.3 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 55.3Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 11.3 Billion. This character hasn't achieved much in ages. I need to go through everything and put a bit of effort into what's going on here and how I can start making money again.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.5% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump.

Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 64 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. He also farms SP and sells injectors on the market.

Horde Station Trader

Station trading in the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 5.3Bn.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

A different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 5.5Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably. I haven't touched this character at all this month. Another thing to correct. So much to do, so little time!

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Finished research on 5 structure rig blueprints and has done 2 runs on each of them, with the produce up for sale in Rens and Hek. I haven't accounted for this very well, but I bought materials for the run for about 2.1Bn and put them up for sale in the region of 3.4Bn. Pretty good return if they sell. Also has 9 structure component BPs in research, they were at ME7, and are on a final run of research to get them to ME8. This one step is taking 51 days! At that point I definitely just want to get started producing. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in.

Free Market release

I don't normally do posts on individual releases to the game, but this was one I had high hopes for, that came up a bit short.

By that I don't mean I'm disappointed with the release, I have my gripes, but more that I thought this would represent an opportunity I could throw money at and get a lot richer fast. I planned to exploit the PLEX to Hypercore conversion rate to buy PLEX, convert it to hypercores, and sell them for a huge markup on release, hoping that people wouldn't bother to do the maths on what they are actually worth, and keep doing it until it was no longer profitable.

For this I used the formula:

PLEX price x PLEX per core x 1.06 (broker fee + taxes at Jita)

which come out to (currently)

3,360,800 * 0.1 * 1.06 = 356,244.80 per hypercore. 

Hypercores currently sell in Jita for 354,000. Disappointing.

I did get in on release day, for about 25 mins, when the margin after everything was about 10%, and I made about 2 billion in that time, which is pretty good for half an hours work! Unfortunately real life intervened and that was all I managed. Maybe next time.

I'm thinking of trying out hosting my own raffles, to see what the margins are like, but I'm not doing that now, and I'm certainly not playing any.

The other part of the release that relate to the market are splitting out the "Market Orders" into a separate window. Not a fan, but you can snap it to the same window as the market so the effect is basically the same as previous. The only downside is you have to click the "market orders" button every time you log in. More clicks for the same functionality. I guess you could argue there's more flexibility if you have the screen real estate. Which I now do! I've finally upgraded my monitors to 24" 1080p ones, so the EVE UI scales a lot better than it did previously! You'll see from my next update that I can actually fit almost my entire spreadsheet in a single screenshot, which is a great improvement.

The other major change is to the wallet. Big, colour coded buttons for ISK, PLEX and loyalty points respectively. This seems like it's scaled to tablets, which is an odd choice. The functionality of the wallet is broken down on the left now, with much bigger clickable areas for a more modern feel. A small improvement I feel.

Lastly, the overview. This has changed to include a circle chart of your income or expenses over the month, and is colour coded, with a breakdown on the right, ISK amounts if you hover. I like this, it's nice looking, and covers a little bit of the functionality you get in your overview on EVE Mogul. It doesn't provide a huge amount of use, but if this is the start of some useful reporting I'm all for it.

In other news, the month is going pretty well earnings wise, and I continue to grind standings on my new character. I should be quite ahead of my end of year target, which is great! Watch this space.

December Update

This month has been a real return to form, with a much higher turnover and profit, things are feeling back on track. My current position:

I have 537.7Bn ISK. That's an increase of 29.9Bn over last month. I don't really know what lead to the large jump in turnover this month, I've had a bit more time to play, and I've tried a few different things, but it seems that market activity is back to normal after the end of the Chaos Era fundamentally. The introduction of the Korean client probably helps boost activity a bit as well.

I was aiming for 540Bn by the end of the year, so I've basically got a whole month to get ahead on next year which is great! I've got blueprints in research for the components required for a Raitaru, which I'm looking forward to starting producing soon. I've also started another character to dedicate entirely for Large Skill Injectors, but more on that in a future post.

I last did a trade run on Saturday, which is why I have, er 75Bn ISK lying around. Most of this will be thrown back into my usual trading when I next get chance, but I'm also going to throw my weight behind hosting some raffles when the HyperNet Relay releases on the 10th of September. Again, more on that in another post, but I reckon there'll be some serious money to be made there.

I have 4 accounts, with 11 characters dedicated to trading:

Skill Point Trader

My newest character! I've started a brand new character, who I'm going to get a very high reputation with all the main empires and the corporations who own the trade hubs, for the purpose of trading skill injectors and other high value high turnover items. I've trained Social V, and started the rep grind, but it'll take a while, doing career and then distribution missions. A slow burn character.

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 74.7Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~140 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 80 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has  108.3 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 68.3Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 11.2 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.5% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump.

Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 60.5 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously. He also farms SP and sells injectors on the market.

Horde Seller

I've changed this character this month. Rather than shipping items from Jita I've switched to station trading in the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. I've found it much easier to keep this character updated as a result, a good change. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 4.7Bn.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

A different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 5.5Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Finished research on 5 structure rig blueprints and has done 2 runs on each of them, with the produce up for sale in Rens and Hek. I haven't accounted for this very well, but I bought materials for the run for about 2.1Bn and put them up for sale in the region of 3.4Bn. Pretty good return if they sell. Also has 9 structure component BPs in research. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in. I'm planning to put more time and work into this character this month to work out a process.

Manufacturing next steps

So I've not abandoned manufacturing, but there hasn't been too much to report.

I've done 2 runs of the citadel rigs, and put them up for sale in Hek and Rens. These are selling slowly, but I should end up with about 2Bn profit from it if they all sell. Pretty good really! I've not done proper accounting, just ballpark figures for input mats purchased and the sell prices I put them up for.

More importantly, I've bought a set of structure component blueprints, specifically the 9 components required to build a Raitaru, and put them in to research ME:

I had been hoping to get the BPOs to ME 10, but to do that with these would take about 500 days! Obviously not practical. The most I can put them in for from fresh is ME6, which takes about 15 days. I'll probably aim for a final ME of 7 or 8, and go from there. It'll take a while to get going, but it's nice to have something to work towards, and building up a BPO library is always going to be useful.

Skill Point Farming

So, I have an account containing my Jita station traders, my Amarr station trader, and my Tash-Murkon region trader. All of these characters have all of their trade skills at V, so I consider them "finished" from a skills point of view.

As such, any skill points I train are wasted from a trading point of view. CCP decided to allow skill point trading a while ago though, so I'm going to take advantage of it on my Jita station trader for a little supplementary income. Some people optimise this so that accounts pay for their own PLEX plus turn a profit, but I pay for this account in cash, so the money will simply go towards the Trillion.

On my Jita trader, I have the following skill mapping:

This is the default that every character starts with. I also have a set of +3 training implants plugged in. Currently my skill queue looks like this:

Advanced mass production has 6 days 19 hours left to train to 5. It has a primary attribute of Memory, and a secondary attribute of Intelligence. I'm going to remap to focus on those two, and buy +5 implants for those 2 attributes:

Down to 5 days 9 hours. A huge increase in training speed. I'm going to keep extracting skill points from this skill and advanced industry, and sell the injectors on the market as a supplementary income. I should be able to sell 3 or 4 injectors a month for around 440mil profit each at current prices. Decent bit of income for next to no work.

November Update

A very sow start to the month, but picked up towards the end. Still not quite at the velocity I saw in June/July, but getting bacon track. My current position:

I have 507.8Bn ISK, an increase of 16.9Bn. This is, all things considered, a pretty poor month, I suspect partly cause by upheaval in my life (moved house) and partly by the tail end of the "Chaos Era" changes that saw a dip in nullsec activity. My life should start looking a bit more settled now for the foreseeable future, s I'm hoping to start getting a bit more playtime in going forwards.

I've been keeping to 1sh trade run a week, and even managed the odd evening to update orders. I was very pleased when I logged in yesterday to find over 50Bn ISK across my main characters to buy more stuff. In the end I carried ~34Bn of items out of Jita for sale elsewhere. I have an issue with one of the numbers on my spreadsheet, and that is "ISK in wallet: 36.9Bn". That is way too much ISK lying around doing nothing for me. I have plans for that though, I'm going to buy some structure blueprints and put some money into manufacturing, and I'm going to plow the rest into my trading/investments.

I have 4 accounts, with 10 characters dedicated to trading:

Jita Buyer

This is a character that sits in Jita and contracts items to my other characters. This character has little training, and mostly buys from sell orders and contracts the items to my other characters. I tend to have this character logged in to act as a real time price comparison whilst checking my other characters orders. This character also manages my long term investments, though that doesn't take much work. I am putting excess ISK into this venture, and watch delonewolf's EVE Talk to get ideas for things to invest in. Currently holding about 74.7Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~155.8 Billion in active sell orders at the time of writing. Takes implants and faction/deadspace modules delivered by my Rens character and sells them in Amarr.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar to the Amarr seller, he sits in Dodixie, takes receipt of items, then set up sell orders. Currently has 86.9 Billion in sell orders. No news with this character.

Rens seller/Hauler

Like the other characters, this character takes items bought in Jita and sells them in Rens. Currently has  108.4 Billion ISK in active sells. He also hauls my goods from Jita to the other trade hubs in a Crane. There's a jump in sell orders here, as he's listed 5 structure rigs build by my manufacturing characters, and some skill injectors bought in Jita.

Hek Seller

Like the other high sec seller characters, he sits in a trade hub in Hek and sells items brought to him by the Rens seller. Currently on 55.8Bn in sell orders. Needs to pay for his own PLEX every month, which isn't too difficult.

Amarr station trader

Sits in a player owned Fortizar in Ashab, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a range of 1 Jump to cover Amarr. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 1 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 12.3 Billion.

Jita station trader

My more serious station trader. I have a character in Perimeter in a player owned Keepstar, with 0.3% broker fee that sits in one station, buys from buy orders and sells through sell orders with a reach of 1 jump.

Most of my items are bought and sold in the Jita 4-4 station. This character trades completely different items to the rest of my characters. I gave this character 10 Billion to start with, and he's currently on 57 Billion. I spent the time to get faction and corp standing up with this character, and this is my attempt to take station trading seriously.

I'm also going to start SP farming/extracting on this character, as the characters on this account are "finished" from a trading point of view. This could cover the cost of PLEXing account 4 potentially. More on this in another post.

Horde Seller

In a very similar way to the other selling characters, he takes items bought by the Jita Buyer, then contracts the items to "Valhalla Deliveries" (a delivery service for Pandemic Horde) to transport the items to the Horde Keepstar in R10-GN. He then sells them there for a profit. He trades primarily T2 modules, drones and scan probes. I set him up with 1Bn and he's currently at 3.4 Bn in sell orders.

I've done very little with this character this month again.

Tash-Murkon Region trader

A different strategy altogether. This character sits in a player owned Fortizar in Tash-Murkon prime, and set up regional buy orders for modules, implants and drones. When a lot of orders have been filled I fly around and collect it all to sell in Tash-Murkon Prime. I set this character up with 100mil to buy his own skills and get started, after skills he had 70mil to buy items. Currently at 5Bn. Can fly a Crane, which speeds up my collections immeasurably.

Manufacturing Character

My latest character, pretty new. Currently has 11 building slot and 10 lab slots. Finished research on 5 structure rig blueprints and has done 1 run on each of them, with the produce up for sale in Rens. I haven't accounted for this very well, but I bought materials for the run for about 2.1Bn and put them up for sale in the region of 3.4Bn. Pretty good return if they sell. New plan is to buy structure component blueprints to research, and do more runs on the BPs I have. The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in. I'm planning to put more time and work into this character this month to work out a process.