May Update

 A slightly more stable month this one. I kept my playtime pretty casual, in part so as not to go overboard and burn myself out, and also due tot eh launch of Cata Classic, which I'd be lying if I said I threw too much playtime into but definitely more than I would normally versus EVE. Still, my current position:

My current net worth is 878.8Bn ISK. That's an increase on April of 37.2Bn, which is a daily average of 1.2Bn ISK/day. On a day by day basis that's quite a bit less than last month, but the first month was always likely to look good as I found bits and pieces lying around and put things up after a long hiatus. I'm pretty happy with this month all things considered.

One major difference this month is that I put some serious cash into "swing trading", which I have also called "investments" previously. Essentially buying things in bulk hoping the price increases. One good item that was pointed out by Oz_Eve was that Hypercores were still a very low price after a half price sale. I bought in in 2 stages, once at 310,000 and again at 365,000 when they usually go for just over 500,000. If they hit that price again I stand to make about 43Bn. Given that there is a direct conversion of 10 hypercores for 1 PLEX in the NES store under normal circumstances, and PLEX is currently trading around 5.3mil, this means the "natural" price of hypercores should be about 530,00ISK. So barring extra sales this is about as safe a bet as it gets.

This all plays into an idea I'm exploring of how to scale my profits by ISK rather than by logged in time. It's an experiment, and by definition a gamble, but if it pays off it's something I can keep doing with minimal clicks (but I might need to start doing greater research, and be more up to date with patch notes).

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

Rens Seller

I've done less on this character this month and it shows. 103Bn in sell orders and revenue of just 35Bn. Something to improve next month.

Manufacturing character

Once again done almost nothing here. I have however checked in game that my manufacturing sheets are still accurate, and Raitarus are profitable even with public hauling contracts, so I'll get at least 1 run done this month.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 153Bn and has made sales amounting to 99.3Bn ISK this month. If I have a limited time to restock this is the character I go for, as it's such a consistent winner.

Hek Seller

Not a huge amount done on this one. Has 46Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 16Bn. 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 111Bn sell orders and income of 36Bn.

Nullsec station trader

Sits in Pandemic Horde's home system and station trades common items (ammo, filaments, minerals etc) and needs surprisingly little babysitting. Made 4Bn profit this month. Money is his own. I'm really pleased with the performance of this character and will look to giving him some more love going forwards.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold my investments and attempts to sell them. Swithced up my items quite dramatically here this month. I managed to offload all the ships I was holding and swap it for Hypercores, skill extractors/injectors, salvage materials and SoCT ships handed out for capsuleer day. I've already seen some of these increase in value so I think this character could play a key part of my strategy going forwards.

Tash-Murkon Seller

A similar story to last month, just 3.9Bn in sales from 95Bn in sell orders. Dreadful. I need to get around to having another look at this one as it's simply not paying its way anymore.

Amarr station trader

Made 1.4Bn ISK profit this month with very little input. I think this one has real potential so I'm going to keep it going and see if I can give it some more love versus some of the better performers (such as the null trader).

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita. Has made 12Bn in sales this month. Not a top performer but is vital as a buyer and has goo standings (1.21% broker fee) so worth it even just to act as a buyer/seller for my investments.

Sobaseki Seller

This one I have made progress on! I've gone back to my old quickbar for this character, in addition to some more common items to sell there. Mae 6.1Bn in sales versus virtually 0 last month. A little more effort and I think this character will be earning his keep.

So looking at last months plans:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day - tick
• Try to come up with a better strategy for my tash-murkon and sobaseki characters - Success for sobaseki, tash-murkon still needs work
• try and get at least 1 manufacturing run done - Failed, but I have checked my sheets are valid.

I think I will keep to the same targets next month. I have family coming down for a few days so my playtime will be a bit less than usual, and I have a clearer idea of the state of play now, so investing more time in certain areas will be easier. Onwards and upwards!

jEveAssets and swing trading

In an effort to improve the way I do things I've been investigating tooling. One tool that I've always been aware of but never used for reasons I'm unsure of is jEveAssets. It is a desktop application written in Java that pulls your characters info and provides a whole bunch of information on market prices over time, your assets etc. I wrote  a post about a month ago where I was talking about a tool that would collect my info and essentially fill in my spreadsheet for me. Well jEveAssets has a tab that essentially does just that:

The numbers here include stations and assets that I do not include in my spreadsheet, such as transport ships I used to haul my goods in and assets in stations that I do not use in trading (mission running/mining ships, rewards from career agents, stuff like that). These numbers also do not include the 20% provision I take against sell orders to account for potentially having to drop my sell order prices in order to make a sale. So even though this screen says I'm almost a trillionaire according to my accounting I'm 140Bn away.

There is also a tracker screen, which I've filtered by system:

With so few data points it is difficult to see much here, but over time this should provide a nice graph of my assets. I wish I'd started using this sooner.

As this has a lot of the functionality that I was looking for, and it is written in Java, I think it makes sense for me to fork this repo and make any changes to it myself rather than re-inventing the wheel. So I'll probably do that going forwards. I am really impressed with this though.

Swing Trading

I've been thinking about how to scale my trading with ISK rather than with time as my value increases. Up until now my profits have largely been driven by how many items I am able to buy in Jita and sell in other hubs. This is fine, and generates a reliable 1Bn or more a day, but I feel like I'm plateauing a bit. I'm not fully utilising all of my trade hubs again yet, largely relying on the big ones of Amarr, Dodixie, Rens and Hek. But adding more will really only scale linearly with the number of clicks I make, and will contribute to burnout which I am desperate to avoid. 

I have been consuming quite a bit of EVE trade media recently, in particular Oz_Eve's youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@OZeve He has a lot of really useful insights on a range of trade topics, but he primarily does what he calls Swing Trading himself. This is where you buy items and wait for the price to swing upwards significantly before selling, rather than flipping instantly to get the margin to the current sell orders as profit. 

I have dabbled in this a little over the years. I have this listed on my spreadsheet under "investments". Which is essentially the same thing. However I am now putting a bit more thought and effort into this in the hope that this can drive greater profits going forwards for a not so massive time investment.

In terms of this I have every now and again invested in PLEX, on the general rule that "PLEX price always goes up long term" and before I took my break I also bought some battleships, freighters, jump freighters and capitals as there was a rework coming that should have pushed the price of those up significantly. For the capitals it did, but my other ships were approximately the same price as when I left. I could have held onto these in the hopes that prices will one day rise, but given that CCP have recently said they think battleships are too expensive and the industry changes coming in the next expansion I've decided to sell off as much of these as possible. I've liquidated most of the ships, but I still have a few to go.

On the flip side of that I caught in one of Oz's videos that Hypercores were still very depressed price wise from a sale a while ago. Sure enough when I checked they had a historic price of about 500,000ISK and were currently sitting at  about 310,000. I bought up 200,000 and the price has since started to rise again. At the time of writing sell orders in Jita are at 355,000, down a bit from about 385,000 at the weekend. If they return to their historic value I stand to profit by almost 40Bn, but I will probably sell slightly below that in order to bank the profit and reinvest it elsewhere.

I am going to look for more of these opportunities to subsidise my day to day activities, but I am excited at the potential to really scale my profits with ISK invested rather than simple with the number of orders I have outstanding

 

April Update

 First one of these in a little while! Feels good to have come back to the game, and I'm enjoying my time without going too deep into it. Not a full month as I only came back to the game on the 5th, but here's my position as of 30th April:

I currently have a total of 841.6Bn ISK. That's an increase from the 5th of 43.5Bn ISK. Considering I've been back in the game for 26 days that means a daily average of 1.67Bn ISK/day. That's a really good result and far exceeds what I was expecting to achieve in my first month back. In fact, that might be the best monthly update I've had! That said there are a couple of caveats.

When going through all my characters, a lot of things came out of the woodwork. Most of which has been accounted for, but I also found 2 dreadnaughts on my nullsec character (a character I don't use for trading) which I had bought for investments that I decided to sell and include in my trading. Which may sound like cheating, but you could reduce 8Bn ISK from my total if you wanted to consider this a pure challenge. however, I feel this is mitigated by the worst mistake I have ever made in trading:

Yes, that is a 6.7Bn ISK broker fee, for a 451Bn ISK sell order. I honestly don't know how I did this. I was putting a implant up for sale, and clearly didn't clear the box with the default value out properly, or read the values correctly. I also frustratedly dismissed the warning box several times to force it through, so I only have myself to blame. So if you put my "extra" dreads and this mistake together that puts me ahead 1.3Bn ISK of where I should be. So I'm calling it a wash.

One major change I've made is I no longer do my own hauling. For each seller now I buy the items, contract it to my remote sellers, then create a public contract to deliver it to my sell hubs. I've been putting up a 1% reward, and over collatoralising by 10-15% and almost all of them have been delivered within a few hours. This has saved me so much time and probably has lead to improved profits counterintuitively. This is because instead of spending my time mindlessly flying around in space I can use that time to consider new items to buy or new ways to go about things. 

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

Rens Seller

This has always been one of my top performers, and so it is proving again. I no longer haul using this character, but he's performing well. Currently 127Bn ISK in sell orders, and he's made sales of 58Bn ISK this month. Given that I aim for a margin of around 20% this probably amounts to profits before fees of about 12Bn, which is pretty nice.

Manufacturing character

I've done nothing at all on this character. Something I want to look at over the next month.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 131Bn and has made sales amounting to 112Bn ISK this month! Seems that even with the change of geography making Amarr harder to get to from Jita it is still a great place to do business.

Hek Seller

A little disappointing this one. Has 52Bn ISK in sell order and has made sales of 31Bn. Essentially half the size of my Rens business. I need to take a look at what I'm selling here and maybe add or mix up some items.

Dodixie Seller

Very similar in scale to my Rens business this. Currently 99.5Bn sell orders and income of 56Bn. Given that Dodixie is a bigger hub than Rens it should probably be reflected in the numbers, so I clearly need to look at what I'm dealing in here. Still not a bad performance.

Nullsec station trader

This one is a little more interesting. I moved this alt with my "nullsec main" to PHs home of MJ-5F9, which is fortunately within 1 capital jump of the old home of R10-GN. As this character is trained in cynos I used him to cyno and my main to jump all my capitals and ships to the new home, and put a bunch of "investments" up for sale. Mainly carriers I bought anticipating a material change to increase their value, which I'm honestly not sure of the scale of. I then set about station trading, and had some success, making 3Bn profit since the 17th. I can tell exactly with this character going forwards as he doesn't need to send money to corp wallet, so his money is his own.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold my investments and attempts to sell them. Currently trying to offload 29Bn in investments.

Tash-Murkon Seller

This is one I think I need to make drastic changes for. Has only made 1.8Bn ISK in sales from 96Bn in sell orders. Tash-Murkon used to be a nice little earner, but now I have a lot of items where I am the only seller, selling at similar prices to the rest of the region, but I'm getting virtually no traffic. I don't know whether it's the items I'm selling or the system itself has fallen off, but this is a high priority for a re-evaluation.

Amarr station trader

Also a bit disappointing this one. I admittedly don't watch this character closely but having only made in the region of 7Bn of buys and sells he's not making vast sums. I will keep this going for another month or so and then evaluate my options here.

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita. Has made a respectable 40Bn in sales this month, so one to keep plugging away with, though the exact profit is a little difficult to discern here.

Sobaseki Seller

Another one requiring a real rethink. I decided to try and sell more "standard" items, t2 modules, rigs, drones etc rather than my usual high end items list, as sobaseki is not a main trade hub. This has however lead to virtually no sales. So I need to either invest more or rethink my entire strategy here.

For next month then my plans are:

• Maintain over 1Bn profit per day
• Try to come up with a better strategy for my tash-murkon and sobaseki characters
• try and get at least 1 manufacturing run done

I'm enjoying my time back in game, and hoping to approach it in a way that should avoid the burnout I've experienced previously. It's good to be back!

Examining tooling

 I've recently been reading back over my own blogs to get a better idea of what I was doing, as well as consuming a bit of EVE trade media to work out what other people are doing (notably Croda and Oz_eve on youtube) and what has struck me most about what I was doing was the sheer inefficiency of it all.

I have my trade spreadsheet in OpenOffice which I create and update manually by logging into each character, and typing out their buy/sell order totals and wallet balance. 

I haul my own goods.

I do not use market analysis tools much to select what items to trade.

I do not accurately track what is selling well in order to weed out what isn't.

The list goes on really. All of this contributes to my trading time taking much much longer than I would like it to, which in turn contributes to burnout.

On my commutes and downtime I've been thinking about what I would like to do or change about my current setup, and this is the list I've come up with so far:

• Use a tool to pull my assets and populate my sheet for me
• check out manufacturing
• start paying hauliers to haul my goods for me
• look at getting back into tash-murkon
• investigate other hubs e.g. frarn, stacmon
• Use a tool to tell me what I've sold and where

I've a software developer by trade, have been for a number of years now. Specifically a backend developer. So while there are some excellent tools out there to help with some of this, I think for the sheet population and accounting I can create something that will cater to my exact specs, and allow me to collate all my info with a click of a button.

Last time I was playing, I did make a start on a desktop app written in Java. Java is my speciality so doing the data manipulation in Java is easier for me, and as I don't current plan to host anything a desktop UI is fine for now. All I managed at that time was to get a basic app going that would log you in to EVE and get basic character info. Fancy.

Last night though I revisited this and added a tiny bit more, adding a button to print out a characters market transactions and another to test if I can get auth for several characters at once working, which I could. So I can print out the character info for several characters at once both on the same account and on separate accounts. This means I should be able to do all my top level sheet data collection with a click of a single button, which is very nice. 

The one remaining thing is to work out and test the auth token refresh mechanism. Auth tokens only last 20 minutes and I don't want to have to login with every character every time I want to get my info, so I'd like to see if I can utilise local storage and keep the auth tokens and just refresh them when I want to retrieve data to save all the logins. If I can I should have a neat little local tool that saves me a ton of time and removes human error from the equation.

Here is the sexy UI at the moment:

You can tell I'm a backend developer!

A cool new visual

 A bit of a small detail that's changed while I've been away, but one of the sort of details that I really appreciate about EVE is that when you're in a Keepstar now (and maybe other citadels, I haven't checked) you can see your other ships in other docking bays if you scan around, not just your active one.

You can see my Ferox as active, and in the background a Gila and Machariel. the same goes for all subcaps as far as I can tell, though Capitals seem to exist in their own instance somewhere. Minor but I think really cool.

On the finances point, I realised in my original accounting I had forgotten to update the spreadsheet with my Dodixie seller, who I'd taken 30Bn from to pay for my PLEX. But I also found some freighters in Rens that weren't anywhere on my sheet and some asset safety in Ashab from a discontinued Upwell hub. So I've got a slightly more up to date and accurate total for my assets:

You might also notice that I've only got 176Bn in cash now, as I did a buy run for my Amarr, Rens and Dodixie sellers. For now I just went down my old quickbars and bought everything, but when things sell I'm planning on adding them to a "seller" folder and phasing out the ones that don't sell over a couple of months from my quickbar to make room for more lucrative opportunities. This will take place over a month or two and not something I'm rushing but seems like a reasonable step as I feel like my quickbars are very bloated at the moment.

A Brief Accounting

So, I've managed to go through all my characters and have a quick look at where they are, collect a few errant bits, and put some expired sell orders back up. At the moment I've just blindly put things up for sale, and put up very few buy orders. I want to get things a little cleaned up and then assess what I was trading and see if it still makes sense or if there are other items I can be looking at.

There were also a couple of characters who were operating out of upwell structures (such as the Tranquility Trade Tower) that no longer exist. When this happens you get a Asset safety container appear in your assets containing the items that were in that structure, and you have to pay a small fee to retrieve them. I think I paid about 30mil for 6Bn in goods.

I also assessed my long term investments and a few were up a lot, such as Orcas going from about 1.2Bn to almost 2Bn. So I put some of these assets up for sale.

After all that, this is my current position to the best I can see:

That 17Bn in items to sell is some capitals and other items in a PH Keepstar. I need to re-apply and see if I can sell my goods there, thought I suspect I may have to firesale and start again in null trading depending on the political landscape. There were 6 PH members in the station with me so it's definitely not Hordes capital anymore.

All told then that's a net worth of 778Bn ISK. Considering I just bought and used 65Bn ISK in PLEX, I'd say that's a great position. For reference, my last update before my break I had 782Bn, and if I had used real money rather than spending that ISK on PLEX I'd have 843Bn. Frankly that is a lot better than I was expecting, and I'm looking forward to what can be achieved with fresh eyes for this.

It'll take a few days before I get all my skill queues worked out and decide what to start buying again, but this is a great starting position, and 313Bn ISK in cash is a lot to work with.

 

Cost to PLEX

 So, This has been my thoughts on how to go about adding Omega time to my accounts.

The old way

Up until my break from the game in 2021 I funded my game time as follows:

- 3x accounts paid for with real money, month on month at £15.99 each

- 1 account paid for by 500 PLEX, month on month

so a total of £47.97 and 500 PLEX. This seems like quite a lot written down, and not something I really want to do going forwards. so I considered the following options

Month by Month PLEX

With 4 accounts, the maths on this is fairly simple. PLEX currently stands at 5.34M ISK each, and normally to PLEX month on month costs 500 PLEX per account. So that would be 2000 x 5,342,000 = 10.7Bn ISK.

There is however currently a 15% discount on Omega with PLEX that brings the cost to 425 PLEX/account or 9.08Bn ISK. This offer will eventually run out though and revert to the original 500/acc/mo.

Annual PLEX

This isn't an option I've ever really considered before, even at the height of my EVE addiction, but buying 12 months of Omega at once almost halves the costs of PLEXing an account, assuming you're going to play for all those 12 months. With the current 15% discount this would cost 3060 PLEX per account for 12 months, or 255 PLEX per account per month. that would mean a total cost of 65.38Bn ISK for all 4 accounts for a year. 

That sounds like a lot, but when you break it down it actually means 1.36Bn ISK per account per month, or 5.45Bn ISK total for all 4 accounts. This is significantly less and thus will impact my profits less, whilst also totally alleviating the real life money cost.

The Choice

With everything written down like that, it really is a bit of a no brainer for me. The monthly total PLEX cost is not vast amounts more than I would have normally paid to PLEX a single account under the old system. I could factor this huge purchase into my assets and slowly write it down over the course of a year to give a proper accounting, but since this is a (relatively) clean start and I never did truly proper accounting like that anyway I think it's easier for me to just take the hit and note down my true assets as they stand. 

As such I bit the bullet, moved the cash around the corp wallet and bought and redeemed it all.

I'm back!