200B ISK reached, now I can start playing the game!

My account at evetrademaster.com says my net worth has reached 200B ISK and, notwithstanding errors in valuation, that's good enough for me. I'm pushing myself to undock and start learning PvP properly (here's a nice collection of videos about the Atron). Yes, I'm starting small, as should anyone, with cheap frigates. I may even fit some up using the piles of rat loot I have stored away, just to practice the mechanics of being in fights, which I expect to lose, without using up T2 equipment in the process.

My industry plan is to change my PI factories over to pure extraction so I can get away from the constant need to monitor buy orders at Jita, which is how I kept my costs down far enough to make consistent profit. I'm happy I did it, but having shown that I can do that I want to push myself into another area.

My three characters all have decent PI skills so I've come up with a plan to combine their efforts into one large extraction and, obviously, refining operation. It will produce less goods and profit than my current operation, but it will be entirely set'n'forget -- extract dirt, move the material around, refine to p4 and sell it. If days go by between having enough material to run a batch through, that's fine with me. I estimate it'll generate about 20M isk a day which really isn't much, but as a background task I'm interested to see if it works. I will probably train my main character to get a sixth planet too, to help this effort.

In the meantime I have agreed to become the PI organizer for our corp. We already have a number of pilots like myself happily doing our own PI operation and occasionally helping each other out. We're looking into how we can best organize ourselves and draw in our corpmates who aren't yet doing PI. I asked the /r/eve hivemind for their collective thoughts on how best to run such an operation.

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I had another go at a Besieged Covert Research site using a Dominix fit my friend had used successfully. I screwed up, though, by not bringing the right cap booster charges and my ship struggled to keep its two large armor reppers running. I barely made it through the first wave of 3 Mordu's Legion battleship and, KNOWING that the second wave of five battleships were going to arrive, did I do the right thing and run away in the precious few seconds between waves? No, I did not. I stayed, got pointed and killed like the idiot I am.

I friggin' had a plan too. I had that ship ready for at least a week and the plan was to only try it with my friends on standby to help me. But I was at home sick and there was a Besieged site and nobody in local but me...."Yeah let's try it, what could go wrong?" says my addled mind.

I've rebuilt the ship and added a reactive armor hardener to improve the tank a bit. I'm not taking it out with a friend ready to bail me out though :)

Market Manipulation

A couple of months ago I indulged in a little market manipulation. It stemmed from a need my corp had: we were producing a wave of cheap hull-tanked Catalysts to help in our conquest of the entire Gallente/Caldari warzone.  The key ingredient was the Small Transverse Bulkhead I rig, which, despite only costing 100K ISK to make,  cost about 500K at all the major trade hubs, thus making the ship more expensive than we'd like.

I offered to make them at cost for the corp, a nice way to help Aideron out after all the enjoyment and free jump freighter services I've been given. I bought 10 BPOs, bought the materials started churning out about 400-800 a day.

Why so many? I wanted to also see if I could reduce the price at Jita, and perhaps at the other trade hubs, although I wouldn't go to those directly. It's a really useful rig and hull-tanking is the flavor of the month, so I'd like to see if I can push the price down and get the existing sell orders, and new sell orders to come down to my level.

If I make my sell orders too cheap, and too small in number then people will just buy them and re-sell them at the prevailing higher price. My sell orders need to be too big to ignore and too big to casually buy out.

On the first day at Jita, with my 400 rigs in hand I'm looking at the market. There are two sell orders of 500-600 rigs each at 394K and several buy orders offering about 200K each for 100 or so rigs.  I decide to put up a few sell orders at 225-250K to see what happens. They're snapped up immediately...nice for my wallet, but I need the orders to stay around.

The next day I start higher, listing my rigs at 350K. One of the other big sell orders comes down from 394K to beat my price...got one! The market is moving!  I add more sell orders at 299 and 259, and also fill the the buy orders that were offering 200K. I add a buy order of my own at 100K. I'm trying to create the perception that the rig wants to cost between 100 and 200K, not 200-400K as it was.

Dawn comes and I list 160 rigs at under 179K. By this time, other sellers have been joining me at these levels. zKillboard lists the average market price at 299K. That evening I post another batch of 200 rigs at 138K...there are two good sell orders at 169K. I fill the remaining buy orders and, just to see what happens, put up a buy order for 200 rigs at 75K -- well below the cost of making them.

A wild large order appears, right where I want it.

Then the whale arrives.  Somebody lists over 4500 rigs at 138,599 ISK.  That's a huge order and if it doesn't move, that will lock the market down for a long time. Perhaps the drop in price worries them and they just want to get their stock sold...it's still a 30% profit, after all. zKillboard reports the average price of the rig, not surprisingly, as 138K.

Trying to keep the market low

Interestingly, this is only happening at Jita. The Rens/Hek/Dodixie markets are staying at 300-400K. I'm surprised that no enterprising space trucker hasn't bought our Jita stock and flown it to the other hubs yet.

I think that's what victory in market PvP looks like, though it is much easier to drive the price of an item down than up.

September 3rd
We don't need the price of this item to stay low any more, so I'm going to stop pushing it down. I'm curious to see if it will go back up again. If I stop undercutting that huge order (now around 2800 units) he may feel its safe to raise his price, which should drag the market back up again.

September 9th
After a few days of not forcing the price down, it has returned to the 500-550K mark. My hopes of getting rich quickly have faded, however, since the rig is selling quite slowly. C'mon people, hull-tanks! HULL TANKS!

September 19th 
Competition on this item has been fierce and the price got pushed down rather quickly. We're at 229K, but since Sept 9th I've sold 795 of them at Jita for a total of 318.9M, yielding a profit of 239M. I'm continuing to sell these to corp-mates in Fliet on contracts for 110K each, in sets of 30.

September 29th
In the last week the price has kept swinging between 225 and 550K. It started with a surprise overnight buyout that cleared out all the available stock under 500K, leaving me with a smile and a steady stream of high profit sales. But the price has been gradually pushed down to a mere 220K. That's still a 100% profit, though, which I'm happy to take any day, especially when I can so easily obtain the ingredients to build the item at Jita. The extra cost for building there is only about 10K per item.

October 9th
The price has stayed low and seems like to stay there. You can continue to track the price here, if you're interested.