Profit Report for Dec 2014

 Photo credit: Lending Memo

I've decided to be quite detailed about how I'm making money, not only to help others find a good trade, but to also attempt to ruin that trade and force me to find other stuff to trade :) You can read last month's report here.

Updated Jan 2nd 2015 to include all of December.

Eve Mentat shows me how much profit or loss I made for every transaction, so I grabbed the three thousand or so sales rows and dropped them into a spreadsheet to see which categories were best. Here are the results, and some discussion for each category that resulted in more than 100M ISK profit. My total profit this month is around 15B ISK, on revenue of 128.6B and costs of 111B, ending with 17B liquid cash, 4B in escrow plus 14B in stuff waiting to be sold. Also, I invested a 2B with a corpmate, bought a plex for 800M and sent 500M to The Angel Project.

Also worth noting is that these figures don't include tax and broker fees, which added up to, *gulp*, 3B ISK!

This is only data from my Jita trading alt. My main does some manufacturing and trading too, on a smaller scale.

Notable exception: The Small Rig Core category includes Small Ancillary Current Routers, which I screwed up and lost 380M on due to fat-fingering a sell order. I sold 800 of them for 80K instead of 800K. Had I not done that, there would be about 125M ISK profit in that category.

(Jeez, Blogger still doesn't have a simple table editor! Is this the past?)

1. Jump Freighter $6,627,993,972 
2. Mining Upgrade $3,004,757,304 
3. Advanced Commodities $773,508,387 
4. Outer $463,754,567 
5. Tattoos $386,712,236 
6. Rig Hybrid Weapon $382,623,450 
7. Rig Armor $353,975,001 
8. Tops $350,685,372 
9. Datacores $289,117,034 
10. Hybrid Charge $226,129,578 
11. Cyberimplant $223,360,486 
12. Capacitor Booster $174,297,518 
13. Shield Hardener Blueprint $160,999,968 
14. Hybrid Weapon $137,408,656 
15. Warp Scrambler $125,806,889 
16. Miscellaneous $117,160,041 
17. Heavy Assault Missile $114,586,289 
18. Super Weapon $111,897,864 

(Note: there a more posts on several of these topics in the archives, written as I was first doing that kind of trade, so please read older posts for more details.)

Jump Freighters are my new favorites. Since it costs 30M in fees/taxes to buy one, and a further 100M in fees/taxes to sell, I wait till there's about a 300M gap between the sell and buy orders, then try and acquire one with a buy order, in order to put up a sell order and flip it. It takes a couple of days for each step, though I did make one sale just a few hours after getting it. I did 29 transactions (ie flipped 14 or 15 ships, mostly Rheas and Arks), plus four Bowhead freighters (which don't show in the Eve Mentat data, for some reason.) On Dec 31st I bought a Nomad for 6.6B and sold it a few hours later for 7.7B. This price gap is still there, and I now have TWO more Nomads that I'm trying to sell!

Mining Upgrades - the lovely meta 4 Aeode has been so, so good to me! It consistently gives me a 300M profit on a 500M investment. That's the same profit I have to pay 6B for when trading jump freighters. I also bought/sold 13 or 14 of these.

Advanced Commodities are my P4 PI output: Broadcast Nodes, Self-Harmonizing Power Cores etc. Profit is high at the moment because I'm still using up the P3 supplies I bought when prices were lower. I only created and sold 640 units, all Self-Harmonizing Power Cores, which sold for up to 2.9M, a ridiculously good markup. Compare this with last month when I made almost 3000 units, with 860M profit, this month still did very well. This works particularly well for me because my corp, Aideron Robotics, has 0% taxes on our Customs Offices and a very cheap jump freighter service to Jita.

Outer/Tattoos/Tops: Clothing is a hard slog; the most expensive items trade very rarely.  There's a lot of 0.01'ing to do and my profits are actually being dragged down by me still getting through stock from before the price crash that hit some of the tattoos a few months back. But it still added up nicely! I've found that setting up region wide buy orders helps get new stock in, not just restricting my buying to Jita. I use public couriers to get the items to me.

Rig Hybrid Weapon: There's money to be made in T1 Small Hybrid Burst/Ambit/Collision/Locus rigs, if the stars align. They all cost 15-25K to make, and this month they all spiked in price to 100-300K each! That added up, as you can see, to significant profit, and I bought the ingredients, made the item, and sold them at Jita; never undocked for any of it, except to research some extra blueprints at Sobaseki next door.

Rig Armor profit is mostly from Small Transverse Bulkheads, which I wrote about earlier. They cost under 100K to make now, but the price spiked to 500K for several days, and came down quite slowly.

Datacores - I own mostly Gallente-flavored cores, which haven't been spiking to 150K like they used to. Still, it happened once so I sold about 15000 of various types at 130-150K each, some from my stockpiles and some newly acquired. I'm experimenting with buying and selling these at Jita when there's at least a 20K profit per item. I've noticed that they can be bought in bulk quite quickly compared to other items, and sold just as fast.

Hybrid Charge/H.A.M  I have written before about trading Caldari faction ammo, and this month I added some of their, and also Guristas, Scourge missiles to the roster. The supplies come in at a steady pace. Sales take a little longer, but are also reliable.

Cyberimplant Low grade spur gamma and delta implants keep showing up in the list of most efficient LP to ISK conversions, earning 4K ISK per LP, or higher if the price spikes (which is rare). I don't earn LP very often (sad face), so this is a good way to burn up my meager points. They sell very slowly, with the occasional bulk buyer helping move the piles.

Capacitor Boosters are an oddity in this list. I traded Micro Capacitor Booster I, buying at 6M and selling at 20-35M. I read up on them and they're collectors item only. Hard to get, but a very nice profit rate.

Blueprint/Warp Scrambler I found a steady and reliable trade in a blueprint that sells several copies a day for about 2M profit each time. Very little competition...don't know why. There are probably a lot of possible trades like this at Jita. You buy the BPOs from nearby systems from NPCs, then sell at Jita. The Warp Scramblers are meta 4 Faint Epsilons, which I acquire from region-wide buy orders in other regions at less than 2M each, then public courier into piles, and eventually to Jita. A fun trade if you like setting up pipelines of goods.

Super Weapon?! Yeah, when I was looking for items to trade, I saw that the four Titan doomsday weapons had a good markup, and very slow sales; about the same rate as some of the clothing I trade in. Why not try it? Well, I finally got a "Judgement" after about 2 weeks wait, and it took another  week for a public courier to move it to Jita from low sec, then 2 more weeks to sell. Fun once, but I'm not doing that again.

That's it for this month, I hope this post helps you find some good trades too. Take mine, I won't mind :)

Battalyst Fleet Part Two

Hendrik has posted this excellent video of our fearsome Battalyst fleet in action, with the highlight being the last fight, in which they tear apart all comers.

If you want to be in such fleets, apply to Aideron Robotics.

The Kindness of Strangers

Oh, that stung.

I thought I'd outdone myself last week when I blew 500M ISK into dust by selling a pile of stuff for 79K each instead of 799K each, but I made what will hopefully be my biggest and last mistake by evaporating 3B ISK.

I bought an jump freighter for 9.9B instead of 6.9B isk. Nobody to blame but myself; I was placing a new order, not modifying an existing one, and got the first digit wrong by typing a 9 instead of a 6. I've gotten used to typing these numbers out without checking too closely and bam, 3B ISK got spent. Pro Tip: When spending billions of isk in a single transaction, check your digits!

Next day, on Christmas, the story of the Very Shiny Jump Freighter continued to unfold. I had written to the seller asking, if he/she was so inclined, to give me a partial refund since that was a pretty big mistake on my part. I tried to sound non-whiny and assured them that it would be ok if they kept the money. They were very gracious and gave almost all of it back, for which I was very grateful!

The incident reminded me that a couple of days before I'd been the beneficiary of a similar error by someone else. They'd sold me a 300M item for just 300,000 ISK, to my top buy order of 145M. At the time I decided not to alert them, but felt slightly guilty about it. The generosity of the jump freighter seller spurred me into contacting the other guy and letting him know of his mistake, plus giving him 140M. A few hours later he wrote back and that was very nice of me, and that he hadn't noticed his error, and he gave me back 200M ISK!

Well, I can't even give the stuff away!

I reflected on my good luck, and the good nature of these two Eve players, and sent a donation of 500M ISK to Sindel Pellion's Angel Project. Hopefully the rolling ball of good karma will continue to pass to other capsuleers.

The End of the Aoede Mining Laser Upgrade? No.

CCP just announced the latest set of modules to be swept up in the module tiericide project. Unfortunately it includes th'lovely meta 4 MLU, the Aoede, which I regularly buy for about 500M and sell for 800M to 1B (a quick look at EveMon says I've bought/sold 10 of them in 12 days). The previous round of tiericide saw modules get merged together, so I suspect it's possible that the Aoede may no longer exist when the January 2015 release is done.

I owned six of them when the announcement was made, and was trying to sell them for about 950M. I lowered my price to about 880M, and thought for a minute....then decided to sell three of them directly to buy orders for 501M each. I basically got my money back on those, and left three on the market for 880M, hoping someone might buy them anyway, despite the uncertainty.  Luckily for me, a buyer picked up all three in one transaction!

Bullet dodged.
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Edit from one hour later: CCP Terminus responded to a comment I made in the official forums.

Those are become faction modules with the same drop rate as before. Mining Laser Upgrades are not changing as much as some of the other module types when it comes to merging named modules. There will be more info out about the changes very soon.

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Other Stuff

I'm using the free 20 days of multi-character training to buff my Jita alt's ability to fly a PvE Drake, and also buff her ability to research her own blueprints. Flipping Jump Freighters continues to be the most amazing thing I've seen in station trading :) I wait till there is at least a 300M gap between the buy/sell orders, since it costs me 130M to complete a buy/sell cycle.