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 →

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.

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.