Results: Not trading = not making any money! I also realized some loss winding down Jita as I prepare to move to another trade hub. Trying to get one last set of items to move. Tomorrow shall be a new day in a new hub, onward!
Results: Not too much to say today. I am going to be gone over the weekend (Days 10 and 11), and I have been trading in Jita so far. My plan, given the whole “Jita Burns” event on the 24th, is to let my orders wind down while I am gone and move shop when I get back. I suspect business will not be good once the camp hits, and I plan to be out of the way. In order to stay true to my plan, I am going to move only myself when I go. Since I will be missing this weekend, it seems fair to move when my orders have essentially stopped, and just transfer my pool of isk. Due to all of this, I expect a loss come next post due to losing some broker’s fees.
Results: Getting back on track. I made good on my promise of more, smaller trades. This is my third best day so far. To answer a question in previous comments, I’ll elaborate on my strategies a little bit. I’m not going to tell which items I am working in, but the general approach I am using. I tend to look for items that have at least 20% margin. The only things I break this rule for are some items that have very high turnover (500+ per day) and that will net me in the 1 mil range on turnover. There are a few reasons for this: High margins tend to burst after a short window, as someone undercuts to try and move items or, I assume, manipulate the market to their advantage. Turnover, as listed in game, does not tell you if those are buy or sell orders. Nothing is fun like buying 50 items and realizing that the movement is all on the Buy Order side of the equation. Many of the large price, large spread orders seem to have robots updating the buy orders. I can’t say these are bots, but I am sorely tempted to get a Continue Reading →
Results: Late post, but I pulled the numbers at the same time as every other day. I can lose money on the market! How I did this is simple. I bought too many (~50) items at a price that gave a total margin of about 36 million. Someone came in and placed 200+ at a price that halved that margin, so my sell orders fell by 18 mil. I managed to recoup about 3 mil during my limited time today. Lesson 1: Reported sell values are not how much you actually have in the bank! The underlying problem was that I assumed that buy and sell orders will only move in small increments. But sometimes someone comes in and crashes the sell price or inflates the buy price. Smaller inventory and smaller batches can help you avoid this if you cannot do the same, or are looking for short term profits as opposed to longer term investments. Lesson 2: Don’t count on prices being stable. I also pruned my buy orders (lost broker’s fees), consolidated inventory in to sell orders (new broker’s fees), and reallocated my buy orders to items that have lower margins but move a little faster. In Continue Reading →
Results: Back on track, although a few things are still staying more tied up than I would like. A few nice margin orders that should reap good rewards should I get them, and a few items that are of such low value that I am letting the orders just run in case the markets swings back in my favor. I am rapidly reaching the point where simply doing market triage on margins and updating orders is becoming far more time consuming. The isk per real time I spend in the game is not quite what I would get from, say, missioning over the same period. One hour with 1 or two mineral checks is not equivalent to one hour of blasting through L4s on my combat character. With current mineral prices, I am also better off just semi-afk mining when I am at home. That is to say, my velocity of money has hit a bit of a (personal) ceiling, in that to increase it anymore, I would need to devote more time, and have orders move quicker due to other players. This brings up an interesting quandry: Due to my self imposed rules, is it acceptable for me to Continue Reading →
Results: I was very inactive today, and you can tell. A few lessons: Just because you can buy more expensive items does not mean you should. Large margins on smaller items are often better than huge margins on big items. The number of items traded only tells you part of the story. I went on a big buy order spree and my velocity of money has slowed. I am learning that velocity of isk is more important than margins in a lot of ways. You can’t flip things unless they are churning, and less churn means less total profit from quantity sold. Tomorrow will be a return to more smaller items as opposed to less big items. That’s all for today.
Results: Good day, inventory is almost nil, orders moved around nicely later in the day. I had to unload some items due to annoying price swings, so I spun the wheels in place a few times, but overall things are looking good and my range of modules is starting to spread out a bit. We’ll see if I can keep this level up. So far I have been roughly doubling my isk, after the first day. As a side note, at this point I am beating Beamer $94 mil to $6.6 mil. I wish he was around so we could compare notes… (Update: Beamer started with $473.47 isk, so that last comment may not have been fair.)
Results: Doing ok, since I didn’t pay much attention today as compared to previous. Apparently a bit of patience is a virtue. Still working on balancing margins and quantity. I also am starting to notice weird behaviors and trying to figure them out. For example when a high margin exists and then a player puts up a sell for a few isk over the highest buy order. Obviously this is not because that .01 isk matters… Some sort of manipulation I do not understand. I’m also learning the value of not overbuying one item when the margin looks nice. That can backfire, although I have not lost money yet.
Results for Day 2: There you have it. Results are little less than I wanted, as I have a lot of inventory as of writing time. I’ve been going for low quantity, fast turn over, but that slowed down in the afternoon. The .01 iskers are killing me this afternoon… I got into some nice margins items, but the competition is fierce, and I have not been able to .01 isk it as much as yesterday. Also, a bit of a side note due to financial considerations: if between my current accounts and this experiment I cannot PLEX the market account, I will have 26 days on the market account, so this may be a 28 Day Challenge depending on how well it works.
The results of my first day of the 30 Day Challenge: Not bad for my first foray out. I bought two skills, Trade and Broker Relations. As far as modules, I am using a strategy of looking at volume and the margin between buy and sell orders in one station. The most challenging part of today’s work was playing the .01 isk game. Some items are much more heavily contested, and also have nice margins. Those are for days when I have lots of time to look at the markets. The biggest question is how to scale up from margins of 10k or a few 100k to something that is more profitable! A few more days to manage the income, and then I think I’ll ahve to start looking at that question.