Day 20: 30 Day Market Challenge

Results: Banner day!  New record for margin, at 108m.  That was nice.  One cool thing about have more liquid isk is the ability to go in a buy up orders that are trying to push down the overall margin.  You sacrifice some margin on a few items to keep your margin on the bulk of your goods.  This gets you more isk.  Win. Based on my success so far, and my lack of desire to spend any more time updating the same orders, I have begun training additional trade alts.  The more observant readers of my blog may have noted that I currently run three accounts, roughly defined as Combat, Industrialist, and Trader/Corp/Blarg.  This means I have 9 slots, and three can be up and running at any given time.  The obvious next step to enhance profits is to have eyes, and orders, stationed in or near every trade hub so I can capitalize on arbitrage. For those who are unfamiliar, trading has a few flavors.  Station trading is what I have been mainly involved in up till now.  This consists of setting high buy orders and selling to low sell orders in the same station.  But this approach is Continue Reading →

Day 19: 30 Day Market Challenge

Results: I got bored again today.  Instead of station trading much I went out and collected a bunch of items on 5-jump buy orders.  First, I am never doing that again.  Not my play style.  Second, I got to see a lot of stations I had never noticed before.  That was fun, but not something to repeat in this context. I also closed out a lot of orders, hence the lack of buy orders when I ran these numbers.  Trying to decide if I want to stay where I am or engage in more options afield.  Remote buy orders are something I need to look into in order to get more large margin modules to take to the trade hub. Finally, I think I am getting close to PLEX time to keep the account going.  I have a few more days, and I’d like to get up around 700m before trading in a large portion.  Having a big pool of isk allows for more freedom to manipulate orders into my favor, and I don;t want to drop back down to 50m in total cash at this point.

Day 17 & 18: 30 Day Market Challenge

Results: It’s another double day.  Weekends are a pain in the butt to keep updated, so I didn’t really bother to try this weekend. I also bent the rules (or broke them).  I’ve started reprocessing some items that are essentially printing isk.  I moved a large order of modules to another hub to not lose out on some 20m in profit.  I have also deployed long term buy orders across many stations that I will pick up once a month or so.  None of these things required any extra skills training though.  I am in the process of getting a throwaway Badger going, as I will need some hauling capacity later.  Finally, I am also reselling skills, because apparently people are too lazy to fly one jump.  I’ll take their money gladly. The biggest change in the last few days is I have gotten out of the Tech II market almost completely.  It’s rather hard to compete with players throwing around billions in orders, whereas the the lower volume in some of the meta mods is a bit more manageable and bulk buying power is a bit less annoying. I’ve also spent a bit more time trolling orders looking for Continue Reading →

Day 15: 30 Day Market Challenge (With Charts and Stuff)

Results: Started out slow, picked up, and then someone decided to crash a few items.  I still profited, but I lost out on 30m of potential profits.  It would have been fun to clear 400m today, but oh well.  I also missed out on the US TZ evenings, which is always a nice time to make some quick flips as people come home to unload and stock up. Now for some more info on my character. Trade Skills: Accounting 3 Broker Relations 4 Marketing 2 Retail 4 Trade 4 And now, Charts!  I have been tracking all of this using the wonderful program Excel.  I love Excel.  It does maths and makes charts.  My main book tracks the stats I give in results everyday, and lets me “keep score” against myself.  Two graphics I use are shown below, and to reiterate, I track: Ending Isk (Sell Orders + Buy Orders + Cash) Sell Orders Buy Orders Cash Liquid Isk (Cash + Buy Orders) PLEXline (PLEX Sell Order / 30 Days * Current Day) PLEX Goal (Plex Order) Margin Overall Results Daily Margin The PLEXline is the lowest value of a PLEX that I can buy in the region I am Continue Reading →

Day 14: 30 Day Market Challenge

Results: Late update, but I had a large presentation today and Wednesdays are always slow for me given my schedule. Anyhow, the only big news is that I royally borked an order by typing the wrong digit into a sell order and losing about 10m in potential profit as I sold to barely over my buy orders.  If you missed it, I culled some knowledge into the post immediately preceding this one in order to try and actually teach people a few things that I have learned in the last two weeks. Tomorrow I plan on putting up some pretty charts that show some fun stats about my adventures.  Lines!  Colors! Invented terms! Also, anyone notice that PLEX prices seem to be creeping down?  That’s good news for me.  I am trying to go all PLEX in Eve Online, so I will embrace the falling price trend.

Miscellaneous Market Tips

I’ve given a lot of results, but not too much advice in my 30 Day Market challenge.  Here are some musings on Eve market trading: Do not accidentally list a large quantity of items at a buy order price instead of the sell order price.  Mistakes like that can cost millions.  In my case about 10m in one go. Check all the figures on the orders when you are playing the .01 game.  Players like to list orders at one decimal higher, and then change the dollar amount too.  Then you get to wait another five minutes. Sometimes you should just let that one or two item order sell or fill if it is too far away from your price. Watch for people setting sell orders to catch the next buy order bump.  You can grab inventory cheap that way without losing your buy order. In the price history, there is no indication as to the nature of the orders that moved.  They could all have been buy, or all sell.  I’m looking at you, rigs. Sometimes it makes sense to flip inventory as you get it, sometimes not.  Decide when you set each order if you are going for Continue Reading →

Day 13: 30 Day Market Challenge

Results: I broke $300,000,000!  Hooray!  I was really hoping to get past the 300m mark today, and I did it.  And boy did the market get busy today.  Patch brings more people to the game I guess.  A few notes on the day: You can’t see it, but I dropped about 8m on skills today, so the real total would have been 309m, but such is life. Faction modules are on the market.  I put in some dummy orders to maybe catch some people unawares.  We’ll see if that ever pans out. At my current rate, I should be able to afford a PLEX, but I imagine we are in for some market volatility soon ™, so that remains to be seen. The net change percent was low today, compared to yesterday, but the actual change was my third best day.   I’m also running out of order slots, with Retail 3.  That is going to be upgraded once I finish some Accounting training to lower the loss to Sales Tax.  Yes, it’s fractions of a percent, but as my volume of isk traded goes up, those percents make a difference at corner cases for margin.  At some point I Continue Reading →

Velocity of Money

A commenter asked me why I keep insisting that the velocity of money is important, so I want to talk about that a little bit.  Examples and numbers will be involved! According to the vast knowledge of Wikipedia: “The velocity of money (also called velocity of circulation) is the average frequency with which a unit of money is spent on new goods and services produced domestically in a specific period of time.” The main concept behind the velocity of money is that an order that takes 6 hours to complete at a relatively low margin can be far better, in terms of net profit, than an order that takes 24 hours to complete at a high margin.  This is because you can repeat the 6 hour order 4 times in 24 hours and end up with a higher net income than the high margin item. Below is a table that illustrates how velocity of isk can work in a completely theoretical manner.  The setup is:  Widget A can be bought for $100,000, sells for $150,000, and each item sells in 1 hour. Widget B can be bought for $1,000,000, sells for $2,000,000, and each item sells in 6 hours. The Continue Reading →

Day 12: 30 Day Market Challenge

Results: So that’s a good day.  My best overall margin so far.  Nothing special happened, except I left Jita and went to another major hub.  Rhymes with  a car.  I’m still using a similar mix of boring ship modules as my bread and butter.  There are less orders, so the .01 isk game is a little less intense.  On the flip side, people will raise prices or lower them in much larger amount, so that’s fun.  An entrepreneurial note, watch the sell orders that are  a few isk above the buy orders.  They can help when you want some stock, or they can be a sign to get out if the quantity is higher than you can snap up and turn around. I’m glad the day went well, because I was starting to get a bit weary of the Jita trade scene, and a nice day makes the whole trade enterprise more fun.  I may have some fun charts coming, If I can be arsed to censor the data down.  Maybe I’ll post it on Day 15 as the “Half Marathon” post.