The Citadel Age Begins

Monty Python's "Money" song - video

I thought it was worth doing a quick update to let you know how sales are going, since I've been banging on about this damn PI stockpile for a while now. The short version is...pretty good! I was hoping for all six products to see soaring prices in a buying frenzy reminiscent of feeding time in the shark pool, but that didn't happen. Still, the prices are mostly at, or slightly above, the price points I wanted.

I'm selling Nano-Factories and Sterile Conduits for about 2M isk and Broadcast Nodes for 4.5 - 5M. I haven't really touched my Wetware stock or Integrity Response Drones yet. I've sold, in total, about 1/3rd of the stock I produced for the Citadel launch.  I think prices will hold steady, as the buy orders are pretty healthy for these items, so these levels may be the "new normal". I'll make a nice profit even at these levels, but I'm counting on spikes, the way Broadcast Nodes hit almost 5M yesterday, to sell into.

I also fat-fingered one order and sold 250 Nano Factories for 199K isk, losing 450M isk. Ah well - coulda been worse; I'd considered selling 500 in that order!

The new tax regime CCP has imposed on all NPC stations really hits you when you look at Jump Freighter trading. What was 200M in fees/taxes has become 400M in fees. The buy/sell spread on all four freighters has now moved at least that far apart. I'm actively trying to buy them again, because the spreads are up to 800M now. I'm still buying plex too; I got one for 900M yesterday and will keep picking up one a week, as my dollar/isk-cost-averaging plan suggests.

It will be interesting to see if much trade moves to citadels near Jita. They take at least five days to come online, so the first ones are no doubt cooking right now. Personally I'm not planning to move. Citadels can be attacked and the recovery of your stuff depends on someone putting up another Citadel in the same system, or waiting twenty days for it to go to another NPC station, at which point you have to pay 15% of the value of the goods to get them back. I've got ninety-thousand pounds in my pajamas, I 've got forty thousand French francs in my fridge and I've got 65B ISK of stuff in my Trade container. I'm not keen to pay 9B to get it back.  I don't mind knocking 3% off my profits to keep it guaranteed safe, or even 5% when CCP get around to pushing it up to that level.


After I've sold this pile off I'm going to revamp my PI operation to be less...intense. A friend has a PI wormhole and I'll move my PI alt there to make whatever he can from scratch. All locally sourced, no more 0.01'ing buy orders at Jita for me, at least not for PI materials. I'll do the same on my main too, since his PI skills are high enough that it's worth continuing, albeit at a slower pace.

I'm preparing a few fit ships that are ready to go into various PvE activities, the kind of sites we get in our local area. Besieged Covert facilities, 3, 4 and 5/10 Serpentis DED sites and maybe C1/C2 wormholes.

It Begins!

Trade - PI

Well, I'm excited!

I logged in a few nights ago and some had bought ALL the Broadcast Nodes on the market. They usually sell for ~2.5M each, but this deep-pocketed individual bought the lot and  listed them all at 9.75M. I quickly put a few hundred up for 8.7M and started checking the other P4 products. I assumed other sellers would quickly list theirs too, the question was how far down would the price go? (Note to the deep-pocketed guy; it's hard to corner the market - you can't do it with an item that people create by the thousands every day)

As you can see from the sales below several other P4 items had decent price spikes too and I managed to sell a few.  They have all settled down somewhat today, but my aim/hope of getting 3M each for the "big" P4s and 2M for the "little" P4s seems achievable.

A day or two after writing this part of the blog, the prices spiked again. I sold more Wetwares for 4.9M, Sterile Conduits for 1.9M, Broadcast Nodes for 4.9M and 3.8M. Prices continued to fall; at time of writing they're above their pre-spike prices. Power Cores and Integrity Response Drones haven't spiked at all yet, which is interesting. I've sold about 1000 P4s at most and still have about 13,000 to go -- I'm definitely betting that prices will increase after the Citadel launch.  If I'm wrong about that, well, I'm pretty certain prices won't be lower than they were before so I should be able to at least break even.

The market for P4s is an interesting place. You're betting on interacting human psychology, between sellers who make them and buyers who want to build Citadels and other stuff. Will buyers who want to build Citadels jump in now and buy what they need because they think the price will go up later? Or will they think that sellers will flood the market and push the price down, and be content to wait a while? And will sellers put their goods up for sale now to make a quick sale, or wait for eager hordes of Citadel constructors to beat a path to Jita after April 27th?  And, of course, they're thinking about what other people like themselves are doing too: buyers thinking about other buyers, and sellers thinking about other sellers, and trying to get the best deal by outsmarting everyone else involved.

I have listed a few hundred for sale at quite high prices in each of the products I have. If there's another surprise buying spree, I'll make the sale and be happy with those profits.

Turning to Jump Freighters, Nomad and Rheas have had a good price spread recently and I flipped a couple for 400-600M profit each time. However the gaps have all closed and they're not worth trading at the moment. 

My investment in plex isn't working out at the moment; I have about 35 of them, purchased at regular intervals during the long slide down from 1.2B to just under a billion now. I'll just consider it a long-term bet; when they next spike up I'll sell a few, but I'm going to keep buying.

My total value, cash, escrow and goods is sitting around 180B right now.

Trade - Rat Loot

One consequence of the recent module tiericide is that two of my best trades are dead: I used to buy Faint Epsilons and Phased Muons, which are dropped by our local rats, for about 1.3M-1.5M each. I'd use public contracts to move them into decent sized piles, with other stuff, and ship them to Jita where I'd sell them for 3M or higher, during spikes. Imperial Navy Major Insignia I tags were also really good, buying for about 1M in my home region and selling for over 2M at Jita. I'd throw in low-ball buy orders on meta 4 jammers (BZ-5, Enfeebling etc) and between them I'd get some very good profits.

Tiericide made the modules worth very little, and the price of that tag has dropped a lot. I'll keep looking for something else to trade, but there doesn't seem to be much profit in buying pirate loot in region-wide buy orders and shipping it to Jita any more. I tried doing this for the various Disruption Field Generators that our rats now drop, but the price spread is not great and they're 50 expensive-to-ship cubic meters each, versus of the tiny tags. I'll keep checking, though, especially for opportunities in tags.

Combat

We got into a doozy of a fight last week, teaming up with a GalMil/CalMil fleet to take out two Archons, two Vindicators and a Bhaalgorn. My killboard got 7B of green on it! 

I got an escalation to a 5 of 10 difficult Serpentis site, the Hydroponics Corp. It was too far away for me, so I gave the site to a corpmate of mine. Thus began his six (?) hour saga. It cost him a Stratios and a shitload of travel time, leaving and entering the site, which was 140AU from the gate, as he tried different tactics to handle the final room. Eventually he upgraded to a Dominix and succeeded in clearing the final room. The loot fairy was kind and he made enough to cover the cost of his Stratios, but I think he's swearing off PvE for a while!

Other

I'm building some T1 rigs again; I might as well name them here and see if that affects the market :) Small Particle Dispersion Projectors cost 19K to make and sell for 120K. My old favorite, Small Transverse Bulkheads cost about 150k and sell for 220k, which isn't a huge profit, but they sell fast.

I did quite a bit of Project Discovery - enough to get the SoE combat suit for my two main characters. I'm really glad they added this to the game and I hope the results we give them are considered good. The interface is a bit annoying and the tutorial has some problems, but I believe they're working on revising both those things.

I had loaned 5B isk to a corpmate who wanted to set up a PI operation. He'd borrowed money from other friends before and paid it back, so myself and a few others pitched up to help him out again. He made monthly payments, then paid back the principal after just a couple of months. If you can find someone to help out, and you trust them, do it! And if you want to build up trust from people you intend to scam later, smart small and work up to the big con! :)

Lastly, I was very pleased to get an in-game email from someone telling me that they really like this blog and that the ideas I share here are valuable to them. It's always nice to get confirmation that you're helping people get into Eve.

You Pays Your Money, You Takes Your Chances

It's decision time. Having spent almost all my liquid isk I have to raise a bit of cash to keep the PI materials flowing to feed my PI installations. I have a pretty good supply of them stashed in Fliet, but the pipeline that tops up those supplies is not getting fed like it used to. I've decided to start selling my approximately 10,000 P4 items now; I'm going to sell about a quarter of them. A friend of mine who plays Eve expressed scorn that I was chickening out by not waiting till AFTER the Citadel release to start selling :)

There's another good reason to do this; I've come this far on the assumption that PI prices will spike even higher after the Citadel release, as everyone rushes to build. But there are surely plenty of new industrialists starting to build P4 items now in anticipation of that demand. It's possible that prices will stay stable, or even fall, after the release. I don't think that is likely, but it doesn't hurt to hedge my bets, take some profit and raise some spending money.

And the profits are good! Most P4 items are yielding about 500k - 1M profit per item, if you built from P3s acquired with buy orders.

I used the asset search window to check what items I had stashed away that might be worth selling and was sad to find a few hundred Phased Muon Sensor Dampers and sixty Faint Epsilons. It's a weird feeling to think these once prized meta 4 items are now just a cheap variation of a module, nothing special.

Planetary Interaction Ramps Up

I've spent most of my time since January creating and running a new Planetary Interaction setup. I had sold off my jump freighter collection as prices rose, resulting in an 80B ISK wallet balance, with a similar amount in material between my two characters. Time to invest! I bought a plex or two each week, to average out my cost, more jump freighters (as prices became favorable) and datacores.

I'm going to start with the introspective passage I was going to write at the end of this post, because its probably more interesting than the details of "blah blah I'm getting rich", which follow. Why am I doing this? Why does making money in Eve feel, to me, like winning? 

I read something in a reddit discussion that rang true: having money makes you more like you were. Couple this with an observation I heard delonewolf make: you will probably play Eve in a way that matches your real life personality.  Add a dab of Jakob's observation of the five stages of Eve  (I'm a textbook stage three) and I think it summarizes how I see myself fitting in New Eden.

In real life I'm careful with finances. I look for opportunities to optimize spending and make the most of what I have. I'm good at deferring gratification and can make the most of what I have access to already.  I like helping others do the same thing!

In Eve this translates to looking for bargains, trying to turn money into more money and making the most of the ships I already have and can already fly instead of trying to get into more and more hulls. In all that, I try to maximize my return for a minimal amount of risk.

I also enjoy writing guides like this blog and wiki entries for our corp so that other players can, if they choose, do what I did with a helping hand to get past the difficult parts. I know this will help keep players in the game, and not quit because of space-poverty.

And as I achieve the goals I set for myself, my net worth feels like the scoreboard and I enjoy looking for ways to repeat that hit.

I think I've reached the limit on what I can do with the time I have to play. I don't want more characters or accounts, and keeping two PI setups running and attending a couple of fleets a week is a pretty good play style for now. I do intend, one day, to learn how to PvP though :) I'm training Advanced Weapon Upgrades V on my main!

How I Invested

With the announcement of the Citadel expansion prices and availability of top-tier PI items started to shift around. This was because Citadels require a lot of tier 4 PI items to build. I have built tier 4 items straight from tier 3 items for a while, but it was getting more and more difficult to acquire those materials, and my factories were spending a lot of time idle.

I came with a new plan (google doc here describing it), aimed at making the tier 3 Gel-Matrix Biopaste and Cryoprotecant Solution. Those two feed into two different tier 4 items, plus other items I manufacture.  I would extract and build what I could in Fliet, and build my tier 4s from those materials, plus other tier 1,2 and 3 bought in Jita. It took a while to get the balance right but the flow of materials is enough to keep the factories humming, with a fairly healthy buffer of supplies sitting in station. With the April 27th release date now announced I have about 10k tier 4 items ready to sell and plenty of items to run through the factories to keep producing more. There have been some very encouraging price spikes already!

I couldn't have done it without the excellent Jump Freighter service provided by Aideron! And our friendly neighbors helped defend or recapture POCOs when we lost them to our less friendly neighbors. I'm usually attentive when transporting goods to the POCOs, but I did get too engrossed one night and lose an Epithal on a PI alt that I created. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I finally used my third character slot on my account! I gave him 2-3 weeks of training and set him up on five planets, extracting on four worlds and assembling two tier 3 items on a fifth.

I've stopped producing Tech 1 rigs; the sell prices are all close to manufacturing cost and those juicy profits of six months ago are gone. It was a good run, though, and I still have my researched BPOs to fall back on; I'll check prices occasionally, but there's not enough meat on the bone right now.

Interface Complaint

If CCP want more people to do PI, to feed Citadel construction, the PI interface needs to be less clicky. Volumes have been written on this topic, I hope CCP will find some dev time for it. Remove the spinning building graphic, have an auto-routing button, have a simple "error report" that identifies duplicate outgoing routes and missing routes from factories that aren't sending their outputs anywhere. Otherwise it feels like you're being punished for overlooking a step, something CCP should try and avoid where its easily detectable. Templates for setting up common layouts would be nice. Being able to drag and drop an existing layout to a new location would be great. Charge me a fee equal to tearing it down and setting it up, just don't make me do all that clicking again, please!

If they don't do that, it's possible Citadel construction will suffer due to a lack of materials.

Other Stuff

A guy in Jita offered to contract me some items that I thought were about to be merged with much cheaper, more plentiful modules in the March patch. I rejected his offer and got two long emails back saying it wasn't a scam and that I'd misidentified the items he was offering. It was exhausting to think about and I haven't read them carefully yet.

Speaking of which, my very enjoyable and profitable trade in Faint Epsilon and Phased Muon meta 4 items has come to halt with the last round of tiericide. I sold most of my stock before that happened, but still had a substantial amount in storage. Oh well. I'm no longer buying loot in my home region at the moment.

I got my Jita alt's Sisters of Eve standings up to the point where she can do level 4 missions, but needs more training to fly a battleship well. It was a good experience, nice change of scene, going to the level 3 agents and running missions for a couple of days. I made a new friend too, in the process, finding a guy who was willing to share SoE LP when I was at the bottom of level 3 agents.

I had a few nice one on one fights with a neutral in system. She said I was the first person to honor a 1v1 fight request, which surprises me! She won 2 fights (her rocket kestrel vs my blaster atron) and I won one, when my Tristan's drones caught her Condor as she changed direction.

I'm enjoying doing Project Discovery, though I wish there were some lower level rewards. I mapped Shift+Alt+D to launch the window so I can bring it up quickly in a quiet moment during a fleet. The two videos from Spaceships Involved really helped get my head around this!

For fun I'm taking an Atron to the Abandoned Mining Colony in our home and killing a rat battle cruiser every 15 minutes for a sec status boost and the occasional good loot drop.

Here's the fit I use for that; it's quite a tight fit so you may need to downsize things for it to work for you. I get about 190 dps cold and over 4k EHP. I didn't EFT this, it just grew in stages. It can kill Serpentis clone soldiers!

Here's a tip for the start of a fight; you should know how far a pulse of your MWD will take you. For me this goes about 30-35 km. If I need to cross 20km quickly and want to slip into orbit cleanly at the end, I pulse the MWD and set my speed to about one-half. As the cycle finishes I max out my speed again (with MWD off, of course!) and start shooting.

[Atron, Ratting Atron]
Micro Auxiliary Power Core II
Damage Control II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Medium Shield Extender II
5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive
Fleeting Compact Stasis Webifier

Light Ion Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II
Light Ion Blaster II

Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Hybrid Burst Aerator I



Void S x1000

Trading the Citadel announcement

Citadel Profits

I've signed up at evetrademaster so I can see my assets/transactions through a web site, you should do the same!

It's been a while, huh? The last two months have been almost entirely about trading and Planetary Interaction. The announcement of the coming Citadel expansion caused a nice spike in P4 PI prices, because CCP revealed what materials are needed to build these gargantuan space fortresses and it included a huge amount of P4 items. The spike lasted at least two weeks, and I was in the happy position of having a lot of P3 materials piled up -- I'd been acquiring them but hadn't been in a hurry to build them into P4s.

I pushed the P3s into the factories ASAP and built and sold them all! I have an Epithal in Jita that makes the trip to my factory planet nearby and, although I was carrying nearly a billion ISK of stuff sometimes, I never lost a ship, thanks to the cloak+mwd trick and insta-dock/undock bookmarks.

The prices of the Jump Freighters that I'd been buying (I think I had 9 or 10 in the hangar) ALL went up too, and I sold almost all of them, making 250-400M on each one.

Additionally, I've continued building several T1 rigs. I keep looking for more/different rigs to build, but I keep finding that the same small stable of products is the best. If you're looking to do T1 manufacturing, its worth building a spreadsheet, automated if you can manage that, and find them for yourself. You can easily buy the needed materials with buy orders; that stuff just floods in so quickly.  Look for rigs that sell at least 10M ISK worth of stuff per day; I've found that some items look good, but sell so slowly that its not worth it.

I was able to sell most of my datacore stockpile too, some nice profits there. I buy five types whose prices swing from under 100K to about 120-130K, sometimes hitting 150K+.

Going Forward

At my last post in October I had about 100B in cash/assets/escrow; that's now up to 145B! 45% increase in two months is a figure I'm very happy with. I had over 50B cash at one point, but I've invested that in plex (buying one a week now), and more Jump Freighters (7) and datacores; I'm down to about 20B cash plus 10B in escrow.

The PI activity is slowing down as it's become harder to acquire the input materials with buy orders. Both my characters have five planets set up, most of which do nothing now that I've cleared out my input materials. I've considered switching my setups to include some extraction so the planets will be productive, but the task is pretty daunting and I keep putting it off.

I've begun a couple of new activities: trading tags between regions (very nice, if you find the right combination!) and making Ascendancy implants. I had picked up an Ascendancy implant BPC from a Serpentis ghost site and did the math on building it. It turned out to be worth doing, so I expanded the spreadsheet to examine the profits on all levels of the Ascendancy range. I found a sweet spot, bought the BPCs from the contract market at Jita, changed one of my factories to build the P3 inputs needed and I now create one of those implants per day. I think I could expand this, as they sell pretty quickly.

I occasionally undock, run plexes, shoot dudes with my corpmates too.

My First Solo Kill!

from flickr user Stephanie Sicore

Fighting For Fliet

We have been defending Fliet from a quite determined push by the Caldari, wherein they got over 50% system control, mostly achieved during the AU/Russia prime time. It took us two to three days to get it back down to stable. During the effort I build ships for the corp, contacted galmil to ask for help (thanks Thanatos Marathon!) and joined in plexing fleets.

It was an odd fight in some ways. The actual Caldari militia pilots largely disappeared by the second day, leaving a pirate corp called Mad Pixel Collective to harass us as we deplexed. Had the Calmil left a couple of frigate pilots in system they could have actual plexed too, making our job a lot harder, but I'm glad they didn't. We tried to make the pirates lose interest by using cheap ships, mostly with warp core stabs in the lows, and running away, and I think that might have worked.

It was close to the end of this battle that I got my first kill, and its a doozy. I killed a Confessor (80M Tech 3 destroyer) in my Algos (13M, T1 beast, no links, implants or drugs)! The killmail shows another pilot on the kill, a corpmate of mine, but that was damage from an earlier fight. This fight was definitely just me and Iga Angel.  I had gone to a small plex and Iga landed right behind me. I assumed he would follow me in so I dropped my 2 Hammerhead II and 3 Hobgoblin II drones, pre-overheated and activated All The Things and as soon as he landed he was hit with my blasters, web, scram and neutralizer. I also had 400M armor, damage control II and a small armor repairer; a pretty standard solo Algos fit.

I started taking a lot of damage fast, as expected. I was orbiting him at 1500m. My friends were reshipping and my hope was to to stay alive long enough for them to arrive. To my surprise, though, once I got through his shields he dropped fast. My friends were surprised when I yelled "I'm winning! He's going down!" as I saw his structure going faster than mine, and he soon exploded. I'm very, very happy with that!

We talked about his fit on comms for a few minutes, concluding he was set up for kiting and just hadn't been able to get away from me in time because my scram shut off his MWD, and he'd perhaps forgotten to switch to defensive mode. I pulled 12.6M in loot from his hull, which is what my ship was worth; a nice symmetry there in this David and Goliath fight.

I really, really, really wish I had the video running for this fight, but it'll have to be a pleasant memory instead.

Trading

I had a huge score when someone, either drunk or with very specific needs, went on a Jump Freighter buying spree. I sold 4 JFs to them for a total of 28B ISK. The sales history for the four types of JFs show 15 of each sold that day, which must have been this guy.  I still have five left to sell, but this is a very nice start to my new investment plan of regularly buying plex instead of jump freighters. There's a principle called dollar cost averaging, investing gradually over time to "smooth out" lumps in the prices. I've started a bit heavily and bought 8 plex, but I plan to buy 3 or 4 a month.

If you have the order slots available it's worth leaving items up for sale at a fairly high price. You never know when a huge sale like this will come along. I've had some other items surprise me in the past.

I've sold most of the datacores that I'd accrued, as each flavor had a price spike that I was able to take advantage of. The latest was Gallentean Starship, which went to 150K for several days. If you're lucky you can shift maybe 5000 during a spike, so if you want to try this, maybe start with a 2-3 thousand. You can often buy them for about 100K at Jita.

Asset Rich, ISK poor

From flickr user NoHodamon

Hi everyone, I'm back! I wasn't doing enough of interest to warrant posting, but that's changed and Ima start posting again. I have a long video of a fun and busy 3 days of Eve I played a few weeks ago. It's edited but needs a voiceover.

Trading

I seem to have found a small flaw in my trading plans: I'm doing a lot of "buy low" but opportunities to "sell high" are few and far between. As the price of Jump Freighters drifted downwards I acquired them for 6.3B or less. I assumed that the price of each would drift back up to around 7B, as they have all done regularly over the past six months.

Sadly no.  The prices just continued to drop (except on the Rhea, which I wasn't able to acquire)...and I now own eight white elephants. 4 Nomads, 3 Ark and an Anshar, which I picked up last night for just 6.1B.  When I checked the fuzzworks manufacturing calculator it says these ships cost 9-10B to make....how are they selling for 6B?!

My liquid cash is less than 300M, but I have an enormous amount of goods that I could sell: Eve estimates the JFs are worth 51B, my trade hangar stands at 19B...that's the bulk of it.

I got into this predicament by having a high resistance to selling something for a low price...I'd rather hold it and wait for the price to go back up. This was ok when I had more ISK to invest than I could easily spend, but that time is past.  I spent my last chunk of ISK on some cheap PI material and now I'm in danger of missing other bargains if I keep my stock. I now need to be aggressive in selling off what I have, starting with the items that will sell fastest and still make a profit.

I'm hoping that Fozziesov will spark something in the market that pushes the JF prices back up, and quickly. Changes in the Caldari-Gallente faction warfare system might help push datacores back up to 125-150k, where I'd see a tidy profit.

Update on 7/20/2015 - Good news! I sold my Anshar for 6.37B, amid fierce competition. In addition the price of several datacores spiked to 150K and higher and I was able to sell several thousand of them. The wallet is now fat and happy at almost 10B, the trade hanger is around 16B and I plexed my account.  I also asked a question about the cost of building jump freighters. The answer was about 7.3 - 7.4B ISK, which leads to the question "why are they almost always sold for far less than that?"

Exploration

I've dipped a toe into wormhole exploration, looking for relic sites - no luck yet, but I have completed Archaeology V and thus I'm able to use a tech II relic analyzer. This should make relic site running a lot easier. My plan is to get a clone out to deep nullsec, via wormholes, and see what I can find out there.  I've run a few low-sec combat sites with corp mates and the rewards can be great, plus you get to socialize which is always a reward in itself.

Life Speeds Up

Life Speeds Up...then it goes away

Faction Warfare Missions

I've had a productive couple of weeks lately and I think there's enough material to tell a story or two. I have been out with friends and run Level 4 faction warfare missions, earning about 360K lp in two sessions, totalling about 5 hours. The second set of missions we run seemed to be cursed from the start: my friend undocked his Proteus and the Eve server crashed. When he logged back in he found himself on the station undock, but luckily nobody had attacked him. We set off on our route and suffered two more disconnects. Most of the first missions were mine and we happily blasted through them, noting how quiet the systems were. "I've probably jinxed it now!" said my buddy.

Yes. Yes he had.

When we warped to his mission in Asakai he found a Succubus on the gate, waiting for him. He got scrammed...I landed just behind him and jumped into the mission. I wondered if he could use the acceleration gate too, but it seemed that being scrammed prevented him jumping in with me. I pressed ahead, getting into the field of rats, wondering if I should bounce out and go help my friend.

As in many engagements, the question arises, "whose friends will get here first?"...presumably our attacker had allies coming and we had nobody...but wait! Who just jumped into system?! X Gallentius, a well-known Galmil FC. I quickly convo'd him and asked if he could help. He said yes and we waited...my friend's armor was going down and a Pilgrim had landed to help the Succubus. He was being neuted too, and it was starting to look bleak.  Still no sign of our blue buddies landing.

Into structure and a couple of galmil began to arrive, but it was too late. The Proteus turned to wreckage, but the Succubus and his friend were scrammed and destroyed. The gal-bros were kind enough to send some ISK to my friend to help pay for his next ship.

My luck held and I completed my sixth and final mission on my own and headed back home, where we turned in our missions and collected our reward.

Jita Trading and PI

My Jita alt has added some Planetary Interaction skills so I could take advantage of a low-ish tax rate on a good set of POCOs I found near Jita. I did a little math and found a setup that I think will work. I screwed up my first batch and sold them for one-tenth the cost I was looking for, but I'll make that back shortly. I'm using the Customs Code Expertise to lower that tax rate even further. I'm sticking with the same setup I have in Fliet, buying level 3 PI materials and producing level 4s. I could have tried going from level 2 to level 4 but that's frankly more logistics that I care to deal with. Three-to-four will make me about 80-100K profit per unit produced, which I'm perfectly happy with.

The jump freighters I bought are on the verge of returning to higher prices so I can finally sell them. It was an interesting experiment, but too slow to be worth it. I'm going to return to the quick flip, even if the profits are lower.  Some of the other items I've been stockpiling have just had a nice price spike so I'm trying to offload them now.  I've also written a piece of software that will be capable of watching that information for me, when I get around to writing that part of it.

Final February Profit Report

Meh. Not so hot. With all my knees-bent, running-about-advancing behaviour I didn't do much trade at all. Eve Mentat says I made 1.8B ISK profit. 650M in Jump freighters, 470M in rigs, 300M in datacores and the rest spread across other categories. My financial picture is bit muddied by increased item swapping between characters, but its small scale enough not to chase up...just a quiet month for trading.

Jump Freighter prices have been less profitable, but they're cheaper, on average, than they were in the last couple of months. So I'm trying something new; I'm buying them for 6.3 to 6.4B and waiting for the sell price to drift up towards 7B, which they all do over time. It's a bit riskier since my isk is tied up for longer, but I think that low price is a good point to get in. At the moment I own 4 (I sold two of the ones I bought earlier this month, but bought more.) And there's still 13B of stuff sitting in the hanger. A lot of the apparel I bought has dropped in value, so I'm waiting for spikes to get rid of it...that's not a great idea, actually. If I sold it for what I could get for it now, I'd be able to buy another couple of jump freighters.

But I had fun running chained distribution missions to increase my Caldari standings. My broker fees at Jita went from 0.54% to 0.34%. When I buy and sell a 6.5B Jump Freighter, that's 100M instead of 130M...I'm still paying 0.9% taxes, which I can't reduce without a 13 day train to Accounting V.

I also bought some new ships for my main to pootle around in. A blaster fit Proteus, for running level 4 faction warfare missions, and Asteros for running relic and combat sites. I took my first short dip in a wormhole in a Helios and survived a gate camp, and learned how to use the cloak/mwd trick. Oh, and I helped in the final push to recapture Heydieles for the Gallente.

January 2015 Profit Report - 9.3B

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

1. Jump Freighter $4,081,628,255.16 
2. Advanced Commodities $1,785,510,360.20 
3. Rig Armor $442,954,331.40 
4. Miscellaneous $368,094,098.98 
5. Capacitor Booster $330,191,965.23 
6. Rig Hybrid Weapon $274,777,660.61 
7. Mining Upgrade $246,659,592.89 
8. Outer $232,421,766.74 
9. Remote Armor Repairer $225,203,779.80 
10. Tattoos $221,325,396.59 
11. Datacores $192,406,120.04 
12. Hybrid Charge $131,253,168.81 
13. ECM $129,453,489.49 
14. 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.

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 :)

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.
--

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.

--

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.

A really good month of station trading

Piling up the ISKies

Before reading my post, if you haven't seen the new "This Is Eve" trailer, watch it now! I'll wait.

My fortunes shifted in a pleasant direction over the last month or so. I had been saving up my datacores and Planetary Interaction (PI) output, waiting for price spikes....and they all came at once. And other stuff spiked too. In a few short weeks my cash balance went to 12B ISK.

Looking for something to do with it, I trained up another level of Retail, allowing me 53 simultaneous orders. I looked through all the apparel items, including a lot of new stuff recently added to the game, with good profit margin and put up my offers. I also tried my hand at Jump Freighter trading! I'm currently training Retail V, so I can unlock the Wholesale skill and get another 64 order slots in a pretty short amount of time.

Here are some of the trades I did.

It's worth keeping in mind that I did most of the following without undocking -- this is all at Jita, on a character with about 500K skill points in trading.

My best trade was a tattoo that I bought for 800M and sold three days later for 1.9B! It took about 2-3 weeks to actually acquire it, though. Next up, a Rhea and Ark jump freighter, netting 780M and 490M profit each (not including taxes/fees around 150M each). It takes 6-7B to acquire these, so it's definitely not a starter item. During a price spike on Gallentean Starship Engineering datacores I sold 5000 of them for 200K each; a nice 1B ISK sale for around 440M ISK profit.

I pulled in 1.4B profit on my level 4 PI products, all of which were going through price spikes. I'd bought the P3 inputs for them a long time ago, when the prices were lower, so it was pretty easy to sell them in a strong market. The P3 and P4 prices have stayed high, so I'm not sure where this will go next. Remember, the PI stuff I do only works because my main's corp, Aideron Robotics, has 0% tax on its POCOs.

There were a couple of really satisfying sales too. I have a pile of 60 cheap tshirts that I bought for about 500K each, several months ago. I've been waiting for something interesting to happen and it finally did. The sellers all dried up! There was only one guy offering a single shirt, asking 2B for it. I joined the party at 1.5 billion with all sixty shirts...hey, you never know when Chribba might go drunk shopping! We drifted lower on price and I was able to sell one for 340M.

Small Remote Armor Repair IIs made a surprising price swing. They cost about 800K to make and usually sell around 1M each. But they soared to 4M and I had a good amount to sell, making about 500M profit. I'm acquiring more, waiting for the next swing.

There was also 425M profit in trading faction navy ammo, which has surprisingly frequent price swings. I highly recommend this for new traders.

In summary, Eve Mentat says I've made 6.5B profit on my station trader this month (10.5B profit in two months), and I have around 7B JUST in apparel sitting in the hanger. There's another 4B of assorted stuff, waiting for price spikes, to be sold too.

My PI efforts have ground to almost a halt over the past couple of weeks; we have unfriendly guests making life interesting in Fliet :).  I need to have corpmates escort me to/from the POCOs to deliver/pickup from the factories, but I don't have much chance to play Eve at home at the moment, and co-ordinate that activity, there's lots of RL stuff going on.

How Much Should Things Cost?

My homework involves finding out what the base price is for more items. Manufactured items are easy: you ask a blueprint calculator how much it costs to build. Items sold in the game's store are easy too: you check the price of Aurum and convert; i.e many Cybernetic Arms cost 1500 AUR, which is 250-300M ISK.

But there are many items which are not manufactured or bought in the store, including some apparel. I need to find out where they come from and what the "natural cost" would be.

Why? Because one of my rules of thumb is to look for stuff selling below its manufacturing/acquisition cost. That number usually acts as a price floor, especially on manufactured goods. It's not always true, though, especially in apparel. Most of the items available in the game store sell for less than the "real" cost.

Making a killing on Meta 4 mining laser upgrades

From flickr user Psycho Al

I had a lot of fun doing these trades, and it's going to be more fun to share it!

I've mentioned this item, the mighty Aeode Mining Laser Upgrade, a few times in the past, but I got recently got lucky and acquired three of them, for 500M each just as the sellers market dried up. So I was holding three valuable items and nobody else was selling. What should I do?

Jack up the price!

The sales history showed it had never sold for more than 800M, not in the past six months anyway. I decided to try for a 1B isk sale, after taxes. I needed to sell for a little more than 1B to pay the sales tax and broker fees, so here's my first listing. I put two separate orders up to give the illusion that two different sellers were doing this. Notice the orders are a few hours apart to add to this impression.

Partial success! Another seller appears, reinforcing this as the new price for this item.

I don't have a screenshot of my next step, but here's what happened. The other seller made his sale, leaving me with 2 orders still up and still no competition from other sellers.  I decided to raise the stakes and raise ONE of my order's price to 1.5B. That would make the 1B isk item look cheap by comparison.

And it works! I make my first 1B+ sale, netting about 500M profit.

 The buyer immediately relists for 1.5B. If he had checked the sales history he'd have seen the item has never sold that high, and only just start selling at 1B in the last couple of days. He should have smelled a rat.  I list another Aeode that I'd picked up from my buy order at the new 1.5B mark, just in case someone actually is willing to pay that much.

It doesn't happen, sadly, but in the next few days as more sellers enter the market and the price drops back to 1B, I get a pleasant suprise.

A buyer pays me 1B isk for this item, then sells it back to my buy order 1 minute later! 500M profit and I still own the item, ready to sell it again!

Since the events shown here the price has drifted back down to about 590M on the sell, while the buy is still at 500M. What worries me most is that with the ongoing module tiericide that CCP is doing, this module may disappear or get nerfed, so I'm selling my remaining stock.

But this was a fun, fun few days of station trading!

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.

My Best Trading Day Ever

And I didn't have to get past Hassan either...

My trading alt had a really good day, selling a couple of big ticket items that I'd been trying to shift for a while. She'd sold an Aoede Mining Laser Upgrade for 692M (bought two days prior for 470M) yesterday afternoon, so I was feeling pretty pleased with that already. But she topped that with a tattoo just a few hours later for 850M (bought 10 days prior for 450M). And a few hours after that, I unloaded a Phanca cybernetic arm for a shade under 1B ISK, having bought it seven days before for 652M.  It's worth buying and holding these big ticket items, if you have a big cash buffer already, because when they have price swings, they are HUGE and can give you a lot of profit in a very short time. Total gain here, by the way, is 970M ISK. Maybe people were selling these in order to buy one of the new cybernetic arms that came out with Hyperion?

I've also found there's a decent profit to be had buying blueprints from around Jita and selling them at the station. People will pay, say 1M isk to avoid going six jumps to buy the same BPO for 125K ISK. And BPOs from other regions have even bigger markups.

On my main, I'm continuing to build ship hulls and rigs for the corp new derp fit. The Gallente militia just took complete control of the warzone so I think we'll do defensive plexing and/or FW missions to rake in the LP.

Twenty Kills

Not Exploding

I've had a run of luck lately and last night I racked up my twentieth killmail (August 10-20th) in a row without losing a ship. Perhaps this means I'm excellent at Eve?! No? More likely I err on the side of running away, or fly ships that are too small to be primaried, or I'm name-tanked. Either way, it's a pleasant milestone to hit and I was flying everything from Derptrons to a Vexor Navy Issue.

Somewhere in there I popped a capsule worth 243M.  He was a neutral, unfortunately, so it cost me quite a security status hit - I'm -3.3 now. I locked him during a fleet engagement and didn't notice he was a capsule until I pointed him and got off one cycle of guns (Light Neutron Blasters I). He was still alive when I dropped my point but someone else finished him off. I don't have any reason to go to highsec any more, except to attend to my factory in a small highsec island, but I still don't want to be able to be engaged freely by anyone that sees me, so I need to avoid crossing the -5 line. But neutral pods are soooo tasty!

Update 9/1/2014 -- His killright on me has been made available for 50M ISK.

Bargain Shopping

I took a look through the collection of cheap contracts (under 5M ISK) available at Jita and had a fun time discovering a few bargains.  Check out the "multiple items" contracts, you may find someone clearing out their hangar and pick up, say, a large collection of fully-researched frigate BPCs for 1.5M. A few days later I sold just one of the dozens I bought for 1M by itself, almost paying for the whole transaction.  This isn't any earth-shattering new gameplay, of course, but it scratches an itch of getting something for next to nothing :)

Trading With Stockpiles

Too much cash, not enough flow. 

In an earlier post about station trading I recommended that traders sell their acquired goods as soon as possible, so they'll make a profit right away and be able to put that money into something else. I still think this is good advice, but I've recently hit upon a different "mode" of station trading: trading from stockpiles.

My trading alt has too much money! I know, I know, nice problem to have :)  She was sitting on 3B ISK recently and my usual cash-burner, acquiring expensive Cybernetic Arms (500-700M a piece) and tattoos (100M to 600M each) wasn't working...my buy orders weren't getting filled. She also had about 4B ISK worth of stuff in her hangar: datacores, tattoos (the Prototype/Wreckage style) and some level 4 PI products. My PI production was on hold at the time, so I wasn't spending a lot on level 3 PI products for my factory planets, which is something that usually eats up a lot of money.

I could have been selling her items, but I reasoned that it wasn't worth it. All I would get is cash; cash that I couldn't spend on anything worthwhile.  I looked around for new stuff to invest in but didn't find anything expensive enough to make a dent in the cash pile. So, what to do?

I decided to wait. Specifically, I'm waiting for price spikes

Price spikes come along surprisingly frequently. Small Remote Armor Repair IIs, for example swung between 1M and 2M several times over just a few days. I bought a bunch at 1M, sold a lot of it at 2M...but it's currently at 800K, so I have to wait and see which way the swings will go next. There were opportunities to sell at lower prices, or to panic and get out when the price dropped, but patience has paid off.

The price of the Gallente Datacores I own is strongly influenced by the Faction Warfare standing of the militia. They're at Tier 4 now, so the flood of those datacores has finally started to push the price down. The price had stayed surprisingly high while we were in Tier 3 and I managed to sell a lot of datacores around the 150K each mark, or higher. Patience paid off here too, though it was a long wait for these to go up from the 100K or so I paid for each of them to the 150K I sold them for.  I'm going to look for opportunities to buy the Caldari Quantum datacores - they have spiked to over 200K a few times.

The last example is Vaccines, which I bought in vast quanties for about 40K each before Crius. I sold a lot of it off before the new Industry system came out, waiting to see what effects it would have on PI. But I still had a good amount left at Jita, about 12,000 units. The price dropped below 40K and I held on to my stock. Sellers started to dwindle and the cost of Sterile Conduits, the P4 item that Vaccines are used in, surged by about 50%, from 600K to 900K. The few people selling Vaccines got cleaned out...and in steps me, Johnny-On-The-Spot. I put one-third of my stock up for sale at 60K and it's selling steadily. I'll wait and see what happens next, but I think I can raise my price to 70K and still find buyers.

Edit: Update from 8/18/2014: I had a stockpile of Balmer tracking disrutors, obtained cheaply on buy orders. The Jita sell price has been hovering around 800K for a while, but I waited, and yesterday it spiked to 1.4M. I've sold a dozen or so, and am trying to get the rest out while the price is high.

The vaccines price dropped to 57K and I've decided to use them in the manner they were intended; making Sterile Conduits, which are holding their price in the high 800K range. Their usual range is 600K.

I also saw a price spike in meta 4 damps (Phased Muon) and sold my stock into that spike. I went a bit early, though, and the price rose even higher. Never mind, it was still a very nice of 1M on each item.

Moral of the story: be prepared to change your investment rules if you think you can make more money in a different way.

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A nice industrial thing happened yesterday. Our corp needed to quickly acquire some rigs, and it so happens that I'm set up to make a lot of rigs. The market price on these items was pretty high and I was able to quickly tell the boss that we could make them a lot cheaper...80% below market price! Pro-tip: a lot of rigs are sold at crazy markups; you should get in on that! I got the BPOs (that was my alt's first trip to my main's station) to my main character's factory and started 5 lines running. It's nice to be able to help your corp in new ways.