1 Trillion

 I've finally done it! 1 Trillion ISK. 1,000,000,000,000. In assets anyway, not in liquid ISK. To say this has taken a while would be an understatement.

Here is my current position:

And a more condensed version:

And here is a bonus JEveAssets graph of worth since my return from hiatus in April:

As you can see, JEveAssets says I have 1.103Tn, but this is because I take a provision of 20% against sell orders to allow for reducing the price to sell. Since I aim for about a 20% profit margin this works well. JEveAssets doesn't account for this though and treats my sell orders as though they are all going to sell for that price, which would be great if it was true.

One thing that's clear from this graph is I could really do with upping the amount I sell in other hubs. It's been hovering at about 600Bn since April, and I've earned more than 200Bn in that time so I could do to look at this and see if I can up my revenue even further.

It's taken a almost 9 years to get here, with some big gaps along the way!

There's this post: Distribution of player wealth (reddit) of a screenshot from a talk at fanfest 2023 talking about the wealth distribution amongst players. According to this if you have 495Bn across your accounts (in terms of assets) you're in the top 1% of players. To get into the top 0.1% you'd need 1.9Tn. I'm somewhere in the middle there, so top 0.7% or so probably, which is quite cool! Based on analysis of that on reddit and elsewhere people estimate that there are 20-30 players with more than 10Tn, which is just insane.

How it started

My first EVE character was born in April 2009, not long before my final exams at university (perhaps not the best decision I've made). I didn't really commit to this character and forgot the login, creating a new account in August after I'd graduated. That first character was Stranathor, the alias I use mostly online, who would later become my "nullsec main" and thus is actually not included in the characters for this challenge. 

The second character though is included. I started a highsec mining corporation with my siblings and a few friends, and we would chat and make great plans together. I would also buy the minerals at a set price and build things with them to sell. We even collectively joined a group of nullsec renters briefly, eyeing up the nullsec ores and expecting to make our fortune. This didn't work, so back to highsec and our corp we went.

After a while doing this, Brave took off and offered anyone an entry into null (before this you needed vouches/a certain amount of skill points to be accepted into any null sec corp basically) and I signed up to experience that side of the game. From low to null and even a month in their wormhole corp, I had a great time, but they got ground down and kicked out of Catch by Pandemic Legion, the high SP big boys of the time. They then started their own newbie corp, Pandemic Horde. After a while of being on the "losing" side with Brave I decided to switch and join Horde, where I have a couple of characters to this day.

Through all of this I never made much ISK in the grand scheme of things, and I had begun reading a lot of ISK making blogs such as Gevlon Goblin, Eve-fail, and most influencially for me, MarketsForIsk.

In particular, Croda's method of buying in Jita, shipping to Amarr/Rens/Dodixie etc. seemed straightforward enough to follow, and I thought I could replicate that. So that's exactly what I did.

Starting the trade journey

On 17/11/2015 I created this blog and started my journey, with 3 characters across 2 accounts, and 3.1Bn ISK: it begins...

It took a little bit of time to ramp up to use all those funds, but once I did I started in earnest. I did however have my first break from the game and from trading in April 2016, returning in August of that year. At that point I had 25Bn ISK and I didn't write another post for almost 2 years, returning to the platform in July 2018 with 171Bn ISK and ending the year on 270Bn End of year 2018. Not a bad ramp up from a break!

2019 was a good year for me, I played and blogged consistently, added more characters, got into manufacturing, and made 296Bn, more than doubling my wealth in a year and breaking well past the half way point: End of year 2019

2020 was a bit more mixed for me (as I'm sure it was for everyone!). Lockdown provided much greater opportunities to play games, so this should have been a bumper year for me. But I was beginning to feel the burnout, and my monthly increases ranged from 2.6Bn to 43Bn depending on how motivated I was feeling and how much of other games I was playing. However I kept up the blogging and ended the year on 782Bn, an increase of 216Bn. Worse than the year before, but still I thought I was on track for the Trillion in 2021.... End of year 2020

I did not become a Trillionaire in 2021, which I'm sure is obvious as this post goes up on the 4th September 2024. Indeed, I did not make another blog post until April of this year, over 3 years without a post! This was for multiple reasons, burnout primarily, but I also got really into WoW Classic TBC and Wrath. I had a great time reliving my youth playing those games and achieved a lot more than I did when I was a teenager, whilst playing with some really cool people along the way. Interestingly the average age of my guilds seemed to be about 40, how times have changed!

Recent changes

Since returning to EVE though I've been feeling motivated and refreshed. I've taken stock of how my trading works and optimised it a little. In particular switching from doing all my own hauling to using public courier contracts. A full run around for my traders used to take me about 2 hours including updating orders, buying new stock and flying it to be sold. It was also kind of an all or nothing deal as I used to do it with my Rens seller character, not a short hop to Jita. This meant if I didn't feel like dedicating 2 hours of play time it wasn't really worth it. 

That's a big commitment on a near daily basis, and the main benefit now is that I don't have to do it like this. I can assess where each character is, updating one set of orders at a time and when they're done I can either log on to the next one or log off completely for a few hours and wait for a delivery.

Another big change I've made was to PLEX all my accounts. Previously I'd been paying for 3 with real money, and funding the other (ish) through selling skillpoints. The idea behind this was to keep RL money and in game money separate, but CCP have put the subscription up and it would be the best part of £50 a month to do it that way, so I made the switch to PLEX. 

The final big change only came about in the last month or so. Whilst I was away I was aware of changes to broker fees to make updating orders more costly. The formula is complex but it mostly works out to about 25% of your initial broker fee to change an order now. I had been leaving my orders to sit rather than pay this, but for August I went hard updating orders to stay on top as much as made sense, and my revenue shot up by 4 or 5 times and lead to record profits, more than double July!

All in all I've got things in a good place now, where I can do my day to day trading without much time commitment, and put any excess into either PLEXing accounts or longer term investments to scale with ISK rather than clicks.

What's next?

Initially, I had planned that when I hit 1Tn I would continue trading, sending half my profits each month to my null sec character and use the money to do whatever my heart desires. I may still do a bit of this, but this isn't my primary plan any more. 

I've also thought about funding smaller corps to do fun stuff, and planned to do this for a guildmate from WoW who was giving EVE a go. Alas, he has since stopped playing so I'm not really looking at this right now.

I actually intend to start a new challenge in the same vein, this time centred around manufacturing. I need to work out how to make a filter or split so that I can have both trading and industry covered by this blog but split if you're only interested in one or the other. It might sounds silly to immediately start a new challenge after finishing one that's taken me the best part of 9 years (on and off) but the great thing about EVE as I see it is having the freedom to make these big goals and go after them. Something very few games can offer. More on this soon. 

If you been reading this up to this point, thanks! I started this blog for me as it's the sort of thing I enjoy reading, and I hope you've got something out of it too. It doesn't end here though!

August Update

 I almost didn't write this update. It's been an incredible month and I am so close to the trillion now that I almost left it a week to just do that post (which I've started writing), but I'll keep going with the monthly updates anyway. As I've got so close to the finish line with this challenge I've been really motivated and been updating orders near daily, and the revenue has shot up as a result. My current position:

My current worth is 990Bn ISK. That is an increase over the last month of 56.7Bn ISK, or an increase of 1.89Bn ISK/day. That is more than double last month and a record month for by far! My previous record was my first month back where I earned 43Bn. This is an amazing result, and my investments haven't contributed to this much. Hypercores are up by 5%, which is nice, but skill extractors have not changed in price due to back to back to back sales by CCP. 

Another thing I have dabbled in is a bit more manufacturing. I've been watching a lot of videos by Strange Net especially around manufacturing in sub-optimal setups. The point he made was that it was possible to make a profit by sitting in Jita, trawling through BPC contracts, eye-balling the profitability, buying the materials from sell orders, building in Jita, and then selling in Jita.

I tried this myself on my manufacturing character who has absolutely no accounting skills, so paying max broker fees, max sales tax, 21% install fees, BPC costs. And I was able to turn 82mil into 95mil in about 7 or 8 build runs. 

That might not sound impressive, but if you instead had actual trade skills, and did your manufacturing in a raitaru outside of Jita, you could knock about 15% off the cost of those builds easily and make a lot more. I actually found this really refreshing, and will be expanding in this area, watch this space.

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

Rens Seller

129Bn in sell orders and revenue of 78.2Bn. 5 times the revenue of last month!

Manufacturing character

As explained above, did some building in Jita from BPCs here, and turned a bit of profit. A useful and fun experiment.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 144Bn and revenue of 137Bn. Almost 4 times last month.

Hek Seller

Has 54Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 55Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business. The biggest revenue increase (by percentage) or any character in this list, really happy here.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 106Bn sell orders and income of 109Bn!

Nullsec station trader

Sits in Pandemic Horde's home system and station trades common items (ammo, filaments, minerals etc) and needs surprisingly little babysitting. Money is his own. This character made a slightly disappointing 1.8Bn this month. I think this is mainly due to making some mistakes chasing PLEX spikes, which I then had to take a loss on.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold some investments. I've taken to buying/selling on my Jita trader character instead as his broker fees are better sitting in a Perimeter. So very little activity here other than buying and then contracting to my other hub sellers.

Tash-Murkon Seller

Currently 97Bn sell orders and 4.1Bn revenue this month. Very little activity here. I actually considered shutting up shop on this character and moving him to being a null sec seed character. TBD

Amarr station trader

Made 0.7Bn this month, Not a lot of love this month.

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita.  I have moved into buying and selling my investments with this character as well. Main contribution is buying/selling investments, I don't keep on top of the station trading much.

Sobaseki Seller

Has sell orders of 25Bn and revenue of 6.5Bn. Not amazing but I gave him very little love.

So looking at last months plans:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day - Smashed
• Generate a monthly profit of 33.25Bn (Half what I need to hit the Trillion) - Smashed
• Expand Tash-Murkon/Sobaseki - Failed, though this has fallen down my priority list
• Investigate Alliance seeding in null. - I did 1 order from Jita to seed and made decent money, I think this is feasible if I dedicate a character to it, alliance hauling contracts are surprisingly cheap for low volume stuff anyway

Targets for this month:

• Hit 1 Trillion.

I reckon it will take me until a week on Monday at worst to hit the Trillion. Then I can talk about my plans for the future, which are looking increasingly firm and I'm quite excited about. More than anything I am really enthusiastic about the game!

July Update

 This month has been an interesting one. The Equinox expansion has provided me with some opportunities in terms of investments but has hit my BAU inter-region trading because more people are running DEDspace sites now so DED modules (which I trade in quite heavily) have fallen in value across the board. This has meant every time I got update my orders I have to mark these down, often quite dramatically. Anyway, my current position:

My current worth is 933.5Bn ISK. This is an increase over the last month of 25.8Bn ISK, or an increase of 737Mil/day. This is quite a step down on last month, though I was away from my PC for the first 11 days and as I say, Equinox has been a very mixed bag in terms of my business. 

Taking advantage of the skill extractor sale has lead to a reshuffle in terms of my investments held, and I continue to keep an eye on things like salvage materials. A lot have dropped in price recently but I was able to cash out on some intact armor plates for a healthy profit, if they swing down again I'll definitely snap more up.

I'm hoping that in game activity will start to improve towards the end of the month as people finish their holidays and that we should start to see a bottoming out of DED module prices and alliances flip over to the new Sov structures and things settle. I don't see a need to panic and massively rework my items I'm trading just yet.

One thing I have dabbled with quite a bit this month is PLEX trading and arbitrage (well not really, but sort of). I have a separate section in my spreadsheet now which given a buy price with give me the break even point for flipping PLEX and derivatives in Perimeter, Ashab, MJ-, Rens/Dodixie and for moving them between those hubs. I was able to take advantage of this a bit as some PLEX could be bought in MJ- and transported to Jita for sale for a profit, and vice versa. I've also been regularly trading PLEX in situ in MJ- as the margins are consistently profitable, even if the volume is pretty tiny comparatively.

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

Rens Seller

115Bn in sell orders and revenue of just 15Bn. Disappointing, but I think that's going to be a theme.

Manufacturing character

A little bit done here, but not a vast amount. Might expand my blueprint collection to vary this up a bit and make it more interesting.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 167Bn and has made sales amounting to 35Bn ISK this month.

Hek Seller

Has 57Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 9Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business. Still on the list to give this one more love.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 116Bn sell orders and income of 22Bn.

Nullsec station trader

Sits in Pandemic Horde's home system and station trades common items (ammo, filaments, minerals etc) and needs surprisingly little babysitting. Money is his own. This character has made a barnstorming 11Bn this month! The PLEX trading amongst other things has really allowed this character to take off, and I've invested a lot of time here (too much probably).

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold my investments. I've taken to buying/selling on my Jita trader character instead as his broker fees are better sitting in a Perimeter. So very little activity here other than buying and then contracting to my other hub sellers.

Tash-Murkon Seller

Currently 94Bn sell orders and 4.6Bn revenue this month. Doesn't sound like much of an improvement on last month but I'm actually pleased as a lot of the revenue has come from modules/ammo etc. that I've started shipping in on the cheaper end similar to Sobaseki. A bit more love and I should be able to improve this dramatically.

Amarr station trader

Difficult to say what this character made this month as I raided his wallet to fund some of my moves into skill extractors. 10Bn in revenue is OK though, i assume some money was made (probably around 2Bn).

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita.  I have moved into buying and selling my investements with this character as well, so his makeup looks a lot different this month. Not least of which is sales totalling 145Bn! Buys of 174Bn shows the other side of that, and given his business buying for other character it's impossible to work out how much I made from station trading, but I suspect it's not much. Still, this is a critical character in my expansion to leverage ISK rather than time/characters.

Sobaseki Seller

Ticking along nicely. Made 7Bn in sales this month, same as last month. A bit more love and this should scale fairly well.

So looking at last months plans:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day - failed
• Try to come up with a better strategy for my tash-murkon - I'd say this was successful on a small scale, I'll try and increase the number of lower value items to sell here and see if I can improve things
• try and get at least 1 manufacturing run done - Done a few more, I want to vary this up a bit

Targets for this month:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day
• Generate a monthly profit of 33.25Bn (Half what I need to hit the Trillion)
• Expand Tash-Murkon/Sobaseki
• Investigate Alliance seeding in null.

If I can achieve these I should be on track to hit a Trillion in September, and talk about what to do next.

Sales Tax reduction

 So the patch notes yesterday included a fairly large Sales tax reduction across the board, with no explanation or fanfare. Reducing Sales tax from 8% to 4.5%. After skills this looks like this:

This is a pretty huge reduction! Apparently it's the second half of changes that were put in a while ago to up the fees around industry to rebalance things a bit and encourage a bit more specialisation in construction rather than essentially forced vertical integration. I can see the logic here.

Crucially though for me it means greatly reduced sales taxes for my "BAU" business of buying in Jita and selling elsewhere. For items like PLEX the margin has already shrunk to accommodate the new normal so no change in how those markets operate.

A big gamble

 So I decided to pull the trigger. I sold all my 15,000 PLEX holding for 5,400,000 each, and threw that ISK into 158 skill extractors at 500,000,000 each. A part of me wonders if I pulled the trigger too soon as PLEX is currently selling for nearly 5.5 mil each. Still, I got in on the bottom price for skill extractors, the buy is currently sitting at 505mil with sells at 520. 

At current prices that means I'm currently about 1.5Bn up this afternoon. Doesn't sound like much for a move on that scale but every 10mil the price of extractors goes up is an extra 1.58Bn I can cash out for, which is pretty good. Especially since the skill extractor history looks like this:

Based on this if I hold these for 2 months or so I should be able to cash out for a healthy profit before another sale hits. Assuming CCP doesn't do any extra sales, which they might.

A tough month so far, an attempt at something else, and a sale

 This has been a tough month so far. When I came back from my holiday I had to relist everything in Tash-Murkon for a sensible price, which ended up being 10Bn below where it was when I first listed it all. Ouch. 

Then a week or so later I decided to do something I don't do much and update my Amarr traders sell orders to match the going rate. Deadspace modules seem to have dropped quite a bit across the board, and this exercise lead to another 10Bn markdown. 

A few days ago I was updating all my characters and somehow I was 3Bn down on the day before. This one baffled me. Non of my investments had moved significantly, and the money appeared to disappear from my Jita station trader. I searched for underpriced orders and misplaced assets but found nothing. Even JEveAssets showed the drop. No idea what happened but I must have messed up somewhere or lost something. 

All that is to say I'm currently only a few billion up on the start of the month, when there should be an extra 23Bn or so. Annoying, but that's life sometimes I guess.

PLEX and PLEX accessories

As part of my current obsession with thinking of ways to scale with ISK rather than just time/accounts, I've started looking at trading PLEX, Skill Extractors and Injectors. I've added some rough maths to my spreadsheet that gives me the break even for these items in the various stations/structures I trade in as well as some arbitrage between them. 

In particular interest here is PLEX itself. When you buy or accept a contract for PLEX, it goes straight in your PLEX vault, no matter where your character is. This means I could (and have) buy PLEX in Jita using a buy order, contract it to my null character and have it instantly teleport for sale in null where the margins are better. Completely risk free. I do have to be careful as the broker fees are worse in null, as is the volume traded, but it's something I'm doing on a small scale to see how viable it is.

Skill Extractor Sale

I've kept my trading in Skill Extractors quite light so as not to get caught too badly in the next sale, and it's now arrived. A 20% sale on skill extractors for PLEX in the NES. The price of skill extractors instantly dropped in Jita and PLEX has spiked a bit. Not too significant but I'm hoping I can take advantage.

A missed opportunity and dealing with expiry

 So while I was away there was a brief sale in the NES that allowed you to get a years multi character training for free with a years PLEX. This made skill farming suddenly very profitable, and a number of people jumped on it. Alas, I was hundreds of miles from my PC so I missed out.

What I can take advantage of though is the effects of this on the market. As a lot of people bought PLEX to buy this deal the price of PLEX has spiked a bit. I was about to sell all my holdings for 5.4mil but it'd fallen back a little by the time I got online. I'll hold off and keep a close eye on this for now. I'd expect the price to fall back a bit as a lot of big spenders have made their PLEX purchases for a while so demand should drop a bit. If buys drop to 5mil or below I'll probably snap some more up and sell if it hits 5.4 again.

The other effects of this are on extractors/injectors. As more people are skill farming now the demand for extractors has skyrocketed, and the price has to boot. I don't want to pile in here as I'd expect CCP to drop a real money sale on extractors sooner than later to counteract the skyrocketing price, but I've put a buy order up for 10 to see if I can make a quick flip on them. 

Large skill injectors however I'd expect to steadily fall in price over the near/mid term at least. With that in mind I've sold mine off for 910 mil and will look to pick some more up when I feel it's bottoming out. Not a massive profit on those but better to cash in and put that capital elsewhere than hold for potentially months for a larger profit.

Order Expiry

So, I've been back in the game for a little over 3 months now. Part of my attempt not to burn out, and also because adjusting sell orders is costly, is that I tend to put up sell orders at sensible prices and leave them. This means that across my accounts today I've had a few items per character expiry and I've had to relist them. Next time I'll try to remember to adjust them with a few days to go as this is cheaper than relisting. There is one notable exception however, Tash-Murkon:

 Oh dear.

It actually worse than 46Bn but that's the in game valuation. Tash-murkon has been terrible since I rejoined, but I wonder if the market has simply changed in my absence. I almost contracted this all to my amarr seller for him to cash out with these items, but I think what I will do instead is take a leaf out of my sobaseki playbook. I'm going to relist these items and in addition I'm going to ship over some lower end items, modules, learning implants, rigs etc. and see if building a more well rounded market will attract customers. We will see.