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 weak to those that have more power (read isk) than you, as they can manipulate markets and leave you with a pile of suddenly worthless inventory.  Arbitrage is another method of trading, where you scout price disparities between regions and buy in one place, haul the goods to another place, and sell for profit.

My tentative plan is to have eyes in Jita, Amarr, Rens and Dodixie, and perhaps train up a suitable hauler who can run between these, moving goods to the best location to sell in.  At my current pace, one account in one station can pay for itself and have excess isk at the end of the month.  I may be able to get two PLEXes if the pace keeps going.  Four characters will have less profit per account due to time, but I imagine it will still manage to pay for multiple accounts.

This plan will take some time to implement, however.  Skills must be trained, and the isk must flow!