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.

June Update

 This months update is a few days early as this is the last time I'll log on before we go on holiday for 10 days. Can't wait to get a bit of time off with the family! My current position:

My current worth is 907.7Bn ISK. This is an increase on the end of May of 28.9Bn ISK. Averaged out over 26 days that's 1.11Bn ISK/day. Slightly less than last month, and I suspect there's a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, there's always a bit of a lul in activity into summer as people go away on holiday and spend more time outside like I have. I've definitely noticed a drop in activity across the hubs. Secondly, I'm suffering a little from the effects of some of my gambles investments. A couple of days ago my net worth sat a couple of billion higher, but a slight drop in the hypercore price and a severe drop in golem police skins have hit my net worth as things stand. I'm still very confident both will recover, and some of my salvage materials and PLEX have increased in recent days, to the point I'm considering selling some when I get back to invest elsewhere.

Two things I'm very please about this month though. I've brought my ISK in wallets down to 40Bn from 94Bn the month before, which means I have less sitting around doing nothing for me. I've also kicked off a manufacturing run of a raitaru on my building character. This cost me about 540mil in materials, 15 mil in courier to where I build, about 15mil for the components construction, and 30mil for the build itself. All that comes to about 600mil, and raitarus are selling in Rens (4 jumps from where I build) for about 700mil atm. Not a massive earner but a start and something I'm definitely going to look to expand going forwards.

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

Rens Seller

117Bn in sell orders and revenue of just 27Bn. Disappointing, but I think that's going to be a theme.

Manufacturing character

I've kicked off a run! It won't complete until I'm actually away, but I'll sell it when I get back and kick off another run.

Amarr Seller

My biggest performer, he has sell orders of 167Bn and has made sales amounting to 46Bn ISK this month.

Hek Seller

Has 60Bn 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 110Bn sell orders and income of 24Bn.

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 3.4Bn profit this month. Money is his own. This character is starting to see a build up in ISK in wallet, so I need to find more items to trade. I'm also starting to dabble in PLEX trading as the margins are good in null.

Jita Buyer

My main Jita buyer, and hold my investments and attempts to sell them. Continued to monitor markets here, and put some more money into PLEX and hypercores whilst selling off some other items for a profit. Given my lower revenues across the board this character and the investments have supplemented the profits a little, but can swing by several billion day to day. Need to keep the long term in mind with this one and keep refining my strategy.

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 0.2Bn ISK profit this month with very little input. That doesn't feel right and has sales of 10Bn, but it is what my spreadsheet says. A bit of a mystery but I'll work on it.

Jita station trader

Acts as a buyer for my Amarr seller, and also does some station trading in Jita. Has made 4Bn in sales this month. Not a top performer but is vital as a buyer and has good standings (1.21% broker fee) so worth it even just to act as a buyer/seller for my investments. I'm also training this guy to run level 4 missions to improve my standings and therefore reduce broker fees further.

Sobaseki Seller

Ticking along nicely. Made 7Bn in sales this month, my only character with an increase versus last month. One to keep chipping away at and growing.

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 - Failed, main focus next month
• try and get at least 1 manufacturing run done - 1 run in progress! More to come.

In addition to the above, I need to update my orders more, as I think this has been a significant hit to my revenues even though I attribute some of the lack of progress to summer. If I can get tash-murkon turned around and update more often (once I'm back from holiday) I should be in for a better month, and the final push for the big T. 

I also need to properly consider what to do next when I hit my milestone. I have some ideas and a bit of time to formulate them but it's finally within sight.