Broker Relations D-Day

Today the March update was released, with the new Broker Relations changes dropping. The full patch notes can be found here:

https://www.eveonline.com/article/q6z2qy/patch-notes-for-march-2020-release

I've also been working from home today, and managed to use the time I would normally be commuting to finally get a little bit of EVE in. I decided priority number one was to update my sell orders before the patch dropped, allowing me to do this for 100ISK rather than 1-2%. I managed to get 2.5 characters out of 4 done this way, as well as both my station traders. Not too bad. Having the rest to do allowed me to see the new mechanics in action, and make my first mistake very early in the new patch. 

The mistake I made is related to the 4 significant digits rule. I had a sell order for (I think) 149,999,999.98 ISK. There was an order below me on 149,999,999.97 ISK. I did my usual right click -> modify -> use the scroll wheel to bring the cents down, and hit enter. I expected this to put me at 149,900,000 ISK. Instead, it rounded up to 150,000,000 ISK, and charged me about 8 million for to the privilege. Whoops. Although I think that the final window should tell you what it's going to round your order to, rather than doing it afterwards. Bad UI design CCP.

I finally remembered to log in and set "Advanced Broker Relations" to 5 on as many traders as possible as well. I already had it to 5 on a couple of characters, 4 on a couple more, and 0 on everyone else. Could have been more prepared there. 

The formula for working out the relist charge is as follows:

• BR is the character's effective Broker Fee rate at the station/structure (factoring in skills/standing/settings as appropriate)
• RD is the character's Relist Discount rate (factoring in Advanced Broker Relations skill)
• Fee to create a new order at price P (this is unchanged):
• Fee = BR * price
• Fee to modify an existing order, changing price from P1 to P2:
• Fee = max(0, BR (P2 - P1)) + (1 - RD) BR * P2

CCP have given the following examples:

Example #1:

• Character has Broker Rate of 3% (from skills/standings) and has a Relist Discount of 60% (from Advanced Broker Relations skill)
• Character creates a sell order for 2,000,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 60,000 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR * 2,000,000 = 60,000
• Character then drops the price to 1,950,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 23,400 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • 0 + (1-RD) BR 1,950,000 = 23,400
    • (In this case, the delta is negative, so the first part of the fee is 0)
• Character then drops the price again to 1,900,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 22,800 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • 0 + (1-RD) BR 1,900,000 = 22,800
• These two modifications cost them a total of 46,200 ISK

Example #2:

• Character has Broker Fee of 3% (from skills/standings) and has a Relist Discount of 60% (from Advanced Broker Relations skill)
• Character creates a buy order for 2,000,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 60,000 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR * 2,000,000 = 60,000
• Character then raises the price to 2,050,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 26,100 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR (2,050,000 - 2,000,000) + (1-RD) BR * 2,050,000 = 1,500 + 24,600 = 26,100
• Character then raises the price again to 2,100,000 ISK. They are charged a fee of 26,700 ISK, calculated as follows:
  • BR (2,100,000 - 2,050,000) + (1-RD) BR * 2,100,000 = 1,500 + 25,200 = 26,700
• These two modifications cost them a total of 52,800 ISK

I tried to input my own values for a change, but couldn't come up with the same fee CCP is charging. I think it stems from not knowing my "BR", but when I change an order from 58,700,000 to 58,900,000 I get charged 895,500 ISK for the pleasure. That works out at just over 1.5% by the way. When I can work through an example clearly I will on here. 

What I can say from all this is that I don't think station trading is dead. Moving stuff from hub A to B and selling is definitely not dead, I just have to be careful about order updating. I may up my acceptable margins to accommodate a few price adjustments. What I may do is change the plan for my character I was meant to be grinding standings for. The plan was to trade high volume, low margin items like skill injectors within and across hubs. This looks like it'll be even more challenging with these changes, so I may get him into blockade runners and use him to region trade in Lonetrek in a similar way to how I'm doing in Tash-Murkon. We shall see.

Interesting times to be sure, really not sure how this will shake out.

March Update

This has been a month where I've managed very little in game, which is a shame because there's a lot of changes coming to EVE - and especially the market - that deserve writing about and that if I had been clever I could have used for some speculation. This post is not about that though, though I intend to jot down some thoughts and predictions at some point. This is just a monthly update though.

Storms have been ravaging the UK, and as I live in a fairly rural area we've been hit with a few instances of power issues. This was most annoying for storm Ciara, as I had all the time in the world that weekend but couldn't reliably keep my computer on or have reliable internet access. As such I managed a single trade run this month, with the odd bit of station trading. I'm strongly considering re-evaluating doing my own hauling in order to save myself the time. I've had a bit of success with public contracts between the hubs, but I haven't tried any for 10s of Billions yet. Might be worth an experiment. Anyway, rambling excuses out of the way, my current position:

I currently have 615.4Bn ISK. This is 20.1Bn more than last month. ISK per hour at the keyboard this is really good, but as a month to month it's pretty bad, and reflects that I basically didn't play at all this month. On my single trade run I was transporting over 84Bn ISK in a single blockade runner - an extraordinarily risky prospect! Fortunately there were no issues and no-one so much as targetted me.

All this means though that my other plans haven't been touched. I haven't done any rep grinding on my proposed skill-injector trading character, although with the broker relations changes that have been announced I need to rethink my plan for him anyway. My structure parts blueprints have finished researching, but I haven't touched them yet. That's an evening all its own. I'd love to spend more time playing, but we'll see if that happens.

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 75Bn in orders and investments.

Amarr Seller

My main money maker, with ~154 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 116 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 152 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 75Bn 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 15.4 Billion. Thinks are starting to move on this character, which is great! Feeling a lot more positive about this.

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 66.2 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 6.7Bn.

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 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. Finished the research of component blueprints to ME8. Time to finally buy a raitaru blueprint and build a citadel! The plan will be to sell the items produced by this character in the 5 trade hubs I sell in.

Broker Relations Changes

I was going to write a blog about how with a combination of storms Ciara and Dennis and real life disruption I've managed my first trade run in 3 weeks today (hauling a terrifying 84Bn ISK in a single cargo!) and that I'm not expecting much from this month as result.

CCP has also announced massive (if possibly temporary) reductions in the amount of resources in asteroid fields and anomalies across the game, which will likely drive the price of everything up.

All of that is interesting, and there is a lot I could say about it, but when I logged on the EVE reddit I saw this bombshell:

https://www.eveonline.com/article/q67fqo/broker-relations

This is, with no exaggeration, the biggest changes to the market since I started playing in 2009.

The cliff notes:

- Introducing tick size - a limit on price precision when creating/updating an order. An order's price can only be specified with a maximum precision of 4 significant figures.
- In Upwell structures, the minimum broker fee that can be configured by the structure owner increases from 0% to 1%, adding an ISK sink to these market fees by paying half of this incoming fee to an NPC.
- Increase the ISK fees that are charged when modifying an order. The fee includes a new additional component, the Relist Charge. This is in addition to the regular Broker Charge that covers the increase between old and new order value.
- Change the benefits (and name) of the Margin Trading skill - it becomes the Advanced Broker Relations skill. This will now give a reduction in the Relist Charge. The skill's old ability to create a Want-To-Buy order with only partial ISK escrow is removed, so all WTB orders will require 100% escrow to be paid up front.

I'll take that one at a time.

Tick size

You will now not be able to adjust an order by 0.01ISK, but to 4 significant figures. This means that for Tritanium, you will still be able to adjust by 0.01, but for something costing 1 million you can adjust by a minimum of 1000.

Upwell minimum broker fee

At the moment, if you create your own trade citadel the minimum broker fee is 0%. Most high sec trade hubs are about 0.5%. All of this goes to the citadel owner. After this change the minimum will be 1%, with half of that going to the SSC - an NPC corp, essentially disappearing, providing another ISK sink to the game.

Increase the ISK fees that are charged when modifying an order

Currently, when you modify an order it costs a base of 100ISK, The actual number is so small that I don't know what it is. Someone has done some Maths on Reddit, and worked out that after the change it'll be int he region of 1% to modify an order. For razor thin margin items like PLEX this is massive. Game changing.

Advanced Broker Relations skill

Probably the most controversial change. Margin Trading is going away to be replaced by a skill that gives a reduction in the amount you pay when modifying an order. This just went from a skill you'd only buy if you were station trading to make your ISK go further to a skill you'll want at V on every character that interacts with the market. Looks like my traders aren't finished any more!

Predicted affects

It is extremely difficult to predict how the market will look after this. The aim is to make it difficult for bots to sit there, updating orders by 0.01 every 5 minutes ad infitum. I suspect this effect will be achieved, at least until bot behaviour becomes much more intelligent. Hopefully most will be lazy and their bots will update orders until they're bankrupt! High volume thin margin item flipping will likely look radically different. I suspect people will utilise more smaller orders, rather than placing single large stack orders in future to try and circumvent the relist charge.

For my type of trading, buying from Jita, shipping elsewhere, putting up sell orders and adjusting once or twice a week, things will likely not change much. I'll have to pay more in taxes - sure, but my behaviour won't change much. My station traders I'm less sure.

Overall I'm predicting larger spreads on most items, and probably slightly lower trade activity overall. Hopefully we'll see more ISK leaving the game too. Makes me richer compared to everyone else!

A very interesting time, I'm actually looking forward to this!

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.