I haven't had much chance to undock and shoot spaceships, so once again my activity has been trading and manufacturing. Here's my trading profit report for the month of January, showing only my Jita trading character's work in categories that made more than 100M ISK during the month. The categories I didn't include added up to almost 600M ISK as a group. All this data comes out of Eve Mentat.
Overall Status
9.3B profit this month, 22B liquid isk, 10.7B in escrow, 16.5B of stuff in my trading hangar.Trading Commentary
- Jump Freighter $4,081,628,255.16
- Advanced Commodities $1,785,510,360.20
- Rig Armor $442,954,331.40
- Miscellaneous $368,094,098.98
- Capacitor Booster $330,191,965.23
- Rig Hybrid Weapon $274,777,660.61
- Mining Upgrade $246,659,592.89
- Outer $232,421,766.74
- Remote Armor Repairer $225,203,779.80
- Tattoos $221,325,396.59
- Datacores $192,406,120.04
- Hybrid Charge $131,253,168.81
- ECM $129,453,489.49
- Shield Hardener Blueprint $106,243,188.39
Jump Freighters: 4B profit was less than the 6.6B I pulled in last month, flipping 9 ships. The margins just got too close, for too long, and at one point I was holding three ships which took a long time to sell. Best trade was a Rhea for 800M profit (after taxes/fees), worst was a Nomad that I lost 20M on after taxes/fees. I still consider this trade easy money, though, especially if you buy the ships in the low 6B range. The prices swings often enough that, if you're patient, you'll be able to sell for a nice profit. I wait for a 300M gap, which nets me 170M profit after taxes/fees.
Advanced Commodities: I got my PI operations into action again, selling a total of 4680 Self-Harmonizing Power Cores, Sterile Conduits and Broadcast Nodes. I'm pretty sure my cost figures are close to correct on these, but the cost of the P3 inputs to these items varies widely. I try and buy as much as I can when costs are low, but if I just need one of the three inputs to get the factory started, I'll buy it from sellers, just to get things moving.
One example: for the Power Cores (avg sell price 1.53M), I paid 45.5K for the camera drones, 76.7K for the hermetic membranes and 73.5 for the nuclear reactors. 6 of each comes to a total input cost of 1.17M. So that's about 350K profit on each Power Core, of which I sold 1453, for a profit of 605M.
Imma keep doin' PI, which, I will state once again is utterly dependent on the juicy 0% tax rate I enjoy at our Aideron Robotics POCOs.
I have three factories in our home system and have also set up a fourth Advanced Commodity factory next door. I get to that one less often though.
Capacitor Booster: This little thing is amazing, though I'm running out of stock. Early this month I got 38 Micro Capacitor Booster Is (a pretty useless item) from just two transactions, plus several smaller deals, for about 6.8M each and they sell steadily for over 15M each. It adds up, especially when the price spike to 40-60M and sales actually increased!
Rig Armor: The Small Tranverse Bulkhead I rig is a license to print money. Cost 60K to build and I built and sold 3600 of them. The sell price stayed high this month, almost 200K, though its slipped in the last couple of days.
Mining Upgrade: Sadly, the Aoede Mining Laser Upgrade market totally dried up. A ton of buyers arrived, and though the price didn't move up much, the sales just stopped happening. I managed to buy and sell one, but took it off my list and actually haven't checked in again for a week or two. I'll check again, though, because this one has been very good to me.
Miscellaneous: The Gallente Beta Nexus chip is a quiet performer. Buy for ~2.7M, sell for ~3.5. I bought and sold about 500 of these this month. Trades are "chunky"; they move slowly in small amounts until someone comes along and trades a huge amount at once. I put up orders for at least 100 at a time, so I don't miss out on those Big Trades.
Rig Hybrid Weapon: I manufacture and sell these at Jita; they're the Small Hybrid Locus/Burst/Collision/Ambit rigs. Cost 25K to make, sell for 50K-80K most of the time. I'm actually training my Jita alt to be able to run more manufacturing lines so I can make more of these (and similar rigs) as I often find myself looking at a great sell price with no stock available to sell. More lines needed!
Outer and Tattoos: Various apparel items. This is where I started trading expensive items but honestly its getting a lot harder than it used to be. I have a ton of orders that hardly ever get filled, and the items take a long time to sell. I think I'm going to phase out of the apparel market. It's nice to make 100-200M profit on an item that cost about the same amount, but it now takes so long that I could've probably made the same amount faster with other items.
Remote Armor Repairer: Small Remote Armor Repairer IIs can be bought for under 1M and, if you're patient, sold for 2M-4M. There was such a spike this month and I sold a good amount into that, but actually the "non-spike" sell price of 1.25M is attractive too; it's very steady and I'm selling my remaining stock at those prices, since the spikes are pretty infrequent.
Datacores: I'm buying/selling datacores at Jita plus I've set up cheap buy orders at Federal Defense Union stations in Essence. A lot of these sales were from stocks I've held for months, waiting for spikes. They're too infrequent, so I'm lower my expectations from a 150K sale to 130K, and buying around 100K or less.
Hybrid Charges: Gallente Federal Navy small ammo sells slowly at Jita, but with excellent profit margins. I buy at 250 ISK and sell at 800-1000 ISK, when the volumes dry up enough to push the prices. Honestly, I think I'm benefiting from pilot's following their fits too closely: "It says 1000 Fed Navy iron, so that's what I'll buy!" when Caldari Navy ammo is IDENTICAL and costs half that.
ECM: I noticed that meta 4 jammers sell in high volumes at Jita and with good profit margins. The Minmatar "Enfeebling" did most of the work here, buying at 100K and selling around 180K. For fun, I included the Caldari BZ-5 in my region-wide buy orders in Essence when nobody wanted them, buying for just 2000 ISK. I'd round them up with the other valuable stuff and sell for 250K at Jita.
Shield Hardener BPO: This trade is on hold because the price dropped too far, but it's probably going to come back soon; it always does. I buy it a few jumps away from Jita and sell for double the cost.
Closing Comments
Overall it's been another good month of trading; nothing unusual really happened. Oh, except the one poor bastard who picked up my 800M collateral courier contract and tried to deliver it to Jita in an Iteron Mk V. It was his first ship loss...not sure where a noob would get 800M to drop on a single freight run, or why they'd start with such a big, expensive cargo?!I did learn a new trick this month, though. I bought a Bowhead (which Eve Mentat doesn't detect yet) for 1.7B when I saw that the cheapest sellers, at 1.8B were very few in number. I figured, correctly, that within a day or two, the sell price would go up to the high 1.9B range, where the next batch of sellers were positioned. I bought and sold the ship within a few days; a nice 200M profit.
However I tried the same thing with Jump Freighters and basically got stuck holding a white elephant. A new wave of sellers came in when Rheas were listed at 7.8B and quite quickly pushed the price down. It took a while to wait that one out and get a good price. The same opportunity came up again towards the end of the month and I deliberately avoided it.
I've looked at Eve ISK Per Hour to try and find new items to make and sell. There's some good candidates and I've started making/selling those. We'll see next month if it pans out.
